This book is Benjamin Percy’s masterpiece. It’s the best work of fiction from him that I’ve read, and I’ve read them all at this point. Things that stood out to me the most were the principal themes of family and duty to that family colliding with the law, lawlessness, and a sense of justice that is personal that comes into direct conflict with the government conception of law, order, and justice and this sets fire to a place that is barely being held together. It’s a naturalist novel.
It’s peppered with beautiful descriptions of the natural world. It represents the ingredients of a naturalist novel in how a main character’s sheltered, hereditary, or everyday existence comes into direct conflict with the outside world. In the Ninth Metal, this is brought on by the conflict between two families: The Frontiers and Gundersons and their prodigal sons: John Frontier and Hawkin Gunderson. Both of them come into direct conflict from the prologue to page 288. They are the personal antagonists of the two main characters.
The naturalist or external antagonist for the Frontiers is Black Dog mining in Northfield, Minnesota. For the Gundersons, it’s the Department of Defense. Both are fighting over control of the mining of omnimetal that was brought here by a comet and grants powers to John and Hawkin.
So this is an X-Men story. Mother Gunderson and her followers are Magneto’s brotherhood and their religious/cult-like overtones worshipping the omnimetal (their chanting of “Metal is” recalls “Darkseid is.”), and the Frontiers are Xavier’s students. Hawkin Gunderson is Magneto, imprisoned by the Department of Defense (or the Nazis, if you’re going to follow my Magneto origin story through line). John Frontier is Wolverine who has a familial Stoic duty, which very nearly brings about his undoing.
It’s very much a local vs. outsiders story because locals almost always lose in a naturalist novel. Not this time, though, but that’s straying dangerously into spoilers.
What made this book so good for my journey as a writer these last two years. But it comes with a dilemma: I don’t know where Percy ends, and I begin. We don’t have the same ideas for stories, but we deal in similar themes: family, social sciences, and the slightest bit of the fantastic set in a world we live in now. It’s like we have similar voices, we’re of the same generation—he’s only a year and a half older than me. To be successful in the ways that I want to be and have come up short because of one thing: I did not submit my work, and Percy did, allowing him to grow where I have been playing at the same four books more or less the last fifteen years.
But I’m not going to play that anymore. Here’s what solidified why I have a book like this one in me, but here’s where it landed for me that Percy and I think along the same wavelengths.
Over the years in his cell, Hawkin had a lot of time to think, and one of the ways he occupied himself was by pretending. Comic books owned his imagination. He had always liked Batman, best of all the superheroes. It was more than his haunting mask and the militaristic Batmobile and the gadgets he kept in his utility belt and the way he crouched like a gargoyle on Gotham’s skyscrapers with his leathery cape fluttering in the wind. It was the villains. The villains who made up his rogues’ gallery were the best of any series. Because they weren’t merely masked and spandex weirdoes to punch and kick and throw Batarangs at. They meant something. They really mattered emotionally. If Batman was order, then the Joker was chaos. Mr. Freeze represented Bruce Wayne’s emotional coldness. Ra’s al Ghul was the father figure wanted desperately but had to reject for his sinister ways. Two-Face captured the constant battle between Wayne and the Dark Knight. What you eventually came to understand, if you read enough comic books, was that Batman was a unification of his worst enemies. ..
–Ninth Metal, pg. 280
…
Dr. Gunn is the Joker and Scarecrow and Mr. Freeze and Penguin and Ra’s al Ghul and all the rest of them. And this is Hawkin’s Crime Alley, where Thomas and Martha Wayne fell in a rain of bullets and blood and pearls. It was a moment of fusion, convergence. Here is the villain and here is the place and here is the core wound that Hawkin might conquer if he is going to come into his power as a hero. That’s the way the rules work.
David Press 