Author august clarke, indie-bestselling & award-nominated writer of The Scapegracers Trilogy is set to make his adult fantasy debut this Fall with Metal From Heaven, a book that’s described as perfect for fans of The Princess Bride and Gideon the Ninth (which, let’s be honest is a pairing I suspect fantasy fans everywhere will be extremely here for). 

Metal From Heaven is set in a world transformed by industrial change and class struggle. One part lesbian revenge quest and one part intricately plotted political fantasy, the story follows charismatic heroine, Marney Honeycutt as she seeks justice against the wealthy mining empire who murdered her family. 

Here’s how the publisher describes the story. 

He who controls ichorite controls the world.

A malleable metal more durable than steel, ichorite is a toxic natural resource fueling national growth, and ambitious industrialist Yann Chauncey helms production of this miraculous ore. Working his foundry is an underclass of destitute workers, struggling to get better wages and proper medical treatment for those exposed to ichorite’s debilitating effects since birth.

One of those luster-touched victims, the child worker Marney Honeycutt, is picketing with her family and best friend when a bloody tragedy unfolds. Chauncey’s strikebreakers open fire.

Only Marney survives.

A decade later, as Yann Chauncey searches for a suitable political marriage for his ward, Marney sees the perfect opportunity for revenge. With the help of radical bandits and their stolen wealth, she must masquerade as an aristocrat to win over the calculating Gossamer Chauncey and kill the man who slaughtered her family and friends. But she is not the only suitor after Lady Gossamer’s hand, leading her to play twisted elitist games of intrigue. And Marney’s luster-touched connection to the mysterious resource and its foundry might put her in grave danger – or save her from it.

“In Metal From Heaven, a child worker survives a strikebreaking massacre, grows into a bandit, and impersonates a dead aristocrat to woo the offending industrialist’s daughter, in the hopes of getting close enough to murder him,” clarke said. “It’s a book about killing and being killed, dyke drama, train robberies, worship and devotion, leather v. latex, psychedelic anguish, lust for blood, best friends, and anarchist utopia. I’d give it to Disco Elysium enjoyers, readers of The Princess Bride, and fans of The Locked Tomb.”

Metal From Heaven won’t hit shelves until October 22, but we’ve got an exclusive first look at the book’s (gorgeous!) cover and first chapter now. 

ONE

Know I adore you. Look out over the glow. The cities sundered, their machines inverted, mountains split and prairies blazing, that long foreseen Hereafter crowning fast. This calamity is a promise made to you. A prayer to you, and to your shadow which has become my second self, tucked behind my eye and growing in tandem with me, pressing outwards through the pupil, the smarter, truer, almost bursting reason for our wrath. Do not doubt me. Just look. Watch us rise as the sun comes up over the beauty. The future stains the bleakness so pink. When my violence subsides, we will have nothing, and be champions. In the chasms wheat spikes and poppies will grow. Rarely is the future so immediate and tangible. Bless our triumph! How small you seem. How small you were. Remember?

That morning. Barely morning, still dark. A redness cast over the factory. I was freshly twelve. That meant I was a worker in earnest. A lustertouched worker, the oldest one so badly affected. Remember all of us, that’s all of us (would-be scabs aside): my parents and my sisters and my uncles and my neighbors and everybody off the floor, my community that loved you, and you, darling you, chanting together in rings around the first and then-only Yann I. Chauncey Ichorite Foundry. I held your hand so tight. You wore the ring I made you and the feeling of its memory shimmered hot pink in my palm. It was proof that I existed. That I am real.

We had stood like this all night and now a gorgeous orange morning fell over Burn Street. Sunlight licked between bruisy limestone smokestacks and telegraphy spires, and the crumbling knuckled colonnades of an empire that’s long gone. Stripes of yellow everywhere. Yann I. Chauncey himself was depicted in a stained glass window above the foundry door. He watched from above in flat candy colors.

The breeze melted on my tongue. Noxious and creamy. Far-off shops roasted cloves, quails, apricots, and wafting off the cobbles came a greasy wet animal petrichor and that citric bright zing of ichorite. Screaming birds unfurled from the eaves.

My family and I are Tullians. Dawns for us are holy. You were Flox Drustish and I wasn’t sure what was holy for you. I hoped it was this.

For our health and dignity, we held vigil on this doorstep. Until our concerns were acted upon we’d let nobody enter. Ichorite would go unsplit and unsmelted. It’d molder raw in its fudgy sludge in the big crates in the foyer, and left unrefined as such, stock’d go unallocated, shipments would stall, and materials demanded by various stuff-making processes all across Ignavia would fail to arrive, so that every monied hand might share the stress. The whole twitching market machine, of which we were the nascent heart, wrenched still. No grime under our nails. No fits out of me.

Cooperation, now! Hereafter, Hereafter!

We sang discordantly, but we were smiling. It was brisk out, and the heat of our breath made mist above our heads. The song was for morale. It keeps us breathing together, collectivized our lungs, made us bellows. In unison we were louder than one man alone could ever be. Them in unison, that is. I couldn’t remember the words. Despite my centrality, I had somehow neglected to learn my part, so I just mouthed the air and stomped along and let you be louder. I pretended to be certain. Dumb kid. I had my family to do proud and you to look after. You must know how precious you are.

Usually speaking, Burn Street was swollen with carts and day workers at this hour, sometimes enforcers on lurchers, and laborers in boots and boilers and long wool coats, plus those girls you and I adored so much, the painted ones working in big cinched silk dresses who leaned down from the balconies where they smoked slim cigars, flicking their ashes. Seeing, then, the bustling reverends and magistrates, children running, otters and boars and cats, flower sellers and meat barkers, who carried long hooked sticks from which eels and sausage links hung with pepper and garlic garlands, and beggars crying for alms. Everyone rushing, rushing, all the world, yet that morning, nobody was on Burn Street but us. We sang to nothing and no one. Dust floated in the air. Vacant. Funny.

When we’d practiced, we’d imagined this part happening before a gathered crowd.

You bounced on your toes and got paler. Tensed your jaw so tight I thought your freckles might pop off. Told you you’d be nervous. I swayed against you so that you’d sway against me. This was an alright kind of hypocrite to be, I reasoned. A useful kind. You pressed your nose into my arm.

My oldest sister Edna approached the crowd that wasn’t there. I watched the breeze ruffle the wisps on her nape. Blonder than mine. She never could put her bonnet on right. Edna raised her hands, palms flat, fingers stretched, and the singing cut on cue. She tossed out her chin. “We address Yann Industry Chauncey as the staff who made him. It was you who found ichorite and devised the means of refining it, knowledge which has already refaced Ignavia, and soon’ll change the whole world over. We applaud this, but knowledge not acted upon is nothing. We are the work. Our hands on the splitting belts, in the skimming, in the furnace—our hands are the engine that will cast tomorrow in luster. In the fifteen years of this foundry’s operation, not once have you, Yann Chauncey, worked this floor. You have not seen what becomes of us. When pressed by the papers, you’ve denied knowledge of the lustertouched. You thus neglect us. This must change.”

Hand on my shoulder. My father’s, I knew his callouses. I fought the urge to lean against them, ducked forward. I wasn’t a baby anymore.

In my ear, you whispered: “Marney.”

Edna tipped back her head. “We work ceaselessly, through ail and injury, from bleed ‘til bleed. I will never fish all the splinters from under my nails. I will wear these burns forever. My mother has been sweating here from the day you opened your doors. She carried my baby sister to term on the luster line, a line my sister’s now old enough to work herself. I split your ore for you. I’m expectant. I’m afraid. We hardly know the properties of the material we work but we know—we know—that something is happening to us. Children borne of us suffer maladies of the mind. Hallucinations, vertigo, an acute sensitivity to touch such that handling any ichorite at all, even breathing furnace fumes, torments the afflicted. My baby sister succumbs daily to such fits. And still, she works your line! We know this factory whelps sickness. You must act upon this knowledge. We have demands for you to act upon before we walk that floor again. Until such a time you will see no profit, may dawn and dusk bear witness. Yann Chauncey, hear us. On one another we depend.

“Our first concern: we seek safer conditions, slimmer hours.”

Harsher, higher: “Marney.”

I stole my eyes off Edna’s back. I wasn’t close with Edna. It felt unfair to muddle this moment of her talking about me with unrelated chatter—then, I saw how your face looked wrong. You were sharper than me, cleverer, and whenever something occurred to you that’d occurred to nobody else it played around your eyes. Little muscles flexing, tensing. You’d figured something out.

You gnawed your bottom lip and I vaguely recalled moments spent crouching under the staircase with you between skimming shifts, knees against knees in the dark, you telling stories about the Drustlands that I pretended to believe while I rubbed the hurt from your wrists. You’d kissed me once under those stairs. We hadn’t talked about it since.

You yanked my elbow and pressed your cheek against mine, pushed my face skyward, made us stare at the same spot. “Up on the roof!”

“Our second concern: a robust inquiry into the health of the lustertouched,” Edna said.

I squinted against the light. The sun crowned behind the gables. I blinked and green-pink splotches smudged the backs of my eyelids. Second glance, still nothing. There was a chimney and a weather vane. I was unsure of what it was you wanted me to see.

“There’s a man up there,” you insisted.

I opened my mouth to negate you before I saw that you were right.

A man knelt on the roof with his back against the chimney. I’d missed him before, because the jacket he wore was a not dissimilar burgundy to the bricks behind him. Burgundy trousers, too, with wide blue stripes down either leg. So, an enforcer. I watched the enforcer watch us. Deftly, he loaded his gun.

“Our third condition is this—”

You bolted.

Edna hit the pavement with a crack.

My father threw himself down and he gathered up Edna, hid her with his shoulders, but her head lolled back like a doll’s and I saw the gap between her eyes. Ranks broke. My family and everybody ran around and through me. I buffeted between people who sprang apart, tore down the alleys and the length of Burn Street while my brain boiled between my ears. I spun and I couldn’t see you. My uncle or maybe one of his friends took my wrist and dragged me left, shouted instructions at me that I could not make out, said Marney, Marney. I lost traction. I fell out of his grasp and my body struck the ground and the wind clapped out of my lungs. My ribs closed on my chest like a fist. I sucked in. I couldn’t get full. I crawled backwards on my elbows but got nowhere, the pavement was slippery and my shirt was drenched and hot and clung to me.

People tripped over me. Dirt caked under my nails. I propped myself up on my hands, and under my hands I felt—string. Hair. Long wet clumps of it. The heel of my hand ground long wet hair into the pavement, a half-unraveled tawny braid. My thumb pressed an inch below an ear. Little mole on the lobe. Poesy. I was crawling over Poesy’s hair. Poesy, my middle sister. Her bonnet had come off. It rocked beside her, pleated ribbon ruined, the yellow straw brim smeared red. She’d always been the prettiest of us. I could see her teeth through a hole in her cheek. It had torn her tongue. I saw the inside of her tongue.

I jerked away from her and skittered back, flipped on my chest, hands flat, tried to get my feet underneath me. I couldn’t tell gunshots apart. They echoed in my head and ate each other. I pushed up, I whipped my head around, I couldn’t see you anywhere. I needed to find you. They killed my sisters. Where did you go?

Weight collapsed across my hips. My pelvis knocked the pavement and I heaved but could not scream. I wriggled. I kicked but it was pointless. Whoever had died on me had pinned me to the street.

Everyone was down. My limp neighbors, tangled, slack. The smell smothered me. It was everywhere, the muck and blood and ichorite, scalding sour bright ichorite. My mangled friends all glowed with it. It shimmered at the new edges of their bodies. I saw double. Venomous pink doubled everything, blurred everything. Edges waved. The sunlight that glistened on the blood from my family’s bodies stung my eyes. The convulsions in my limbs started, slight but inescapable. The feeling unfurled: the first stages of a fit.

All of this was for us lustertouched. This whole demonstration was for the sake of my health.

I sank my nails into the meat of my hand, squeezed my fists so tight I thought my knuckles might stab through my skin. Stickier, chalkier, more impulsive than thought: come come come come come.

Time to make it worse.

A girl heaved herself up from underneath my mother. She pushed aside my mother’s body, clawed over a knot of thighs and wrists and hauled herself upright. Only one standing. She clutched her head in her hands and gaped like she was howling. I saw her eye between her fingers. Animal eye. Live mouse in a spring trap, pupil whirling, whirling. She staggered. Tripped, caught herself, swayed onward.

Bullet casings wormed out from under my friends.

The girl ragged a cough. She cleared her voice.

Over the spill, scraping and smearing, the bullet casings swarmed around my hands. They nudged against my knuckles like iridescent minnows. Pure ichorite, not a cut alloy. We made these. We’d picked and spliced and burned these, we’d cut them and beaten them with lead. Other people’s anguishes on the line seized in the roof of my mouth. Mallet strikes on rhythm. Slimed metal kneaded into molds. Sweat and bleeding, that pounding sound, someone laughing, it tearing the lining of their throat. Someone’s thumb catches the machinery’s edge. Their nail lifts. Their nail is mine. Gluey blood strings and big bright pain. Hallucinations, Edna had said. Hand-me-down memories. Oh, Edna. Is this my fault?

The girl sang, “Unalone toward dawn we go, toward the glory of new morning.”

An enforcer shot her belly, and when she did not fall, her head.

Bile in my mouth and my brain but I swallowed it. I closed my hands around the casings. They melted in my palms and I kneaded them, sculpted the mercurial ooze, thought sharp sharp sharp sharp sharp. The trembling got worse. My body shook apart under whoever’s body was on top of me. I could not see. The world gushed greasy pink and vicious, and I wanted—my father. I wanted my father. I wanted my pa. The lustertouched fit came over me in waves. My blood was sparks and needles. I tasted that citric sour taste and stolen feelings oomphed through my body and I was gone.

It was bright blue daytime now.

I did not move for a long time. I looked at the stained glass Yann I. Chauncey above us. My shirt was drying. The bodies above me went cold. Flies glittered around my head. Scintillating flies who changed colors when I blinked and left shiny streaks in the wake of their flight, pulsing zigzags. You always said you thought it must be pretty, how it gets when I’m like this. Mid-fit the world’s a bubbling gem. It occurred to me that you had probably been shot.

Enforcers came down from the rooftops. Three of them. Just three. Two wore their rifles slung across their backs and the third, the man you saw, the one who killed Edna, kept his in hand. They squelched along the tangle’s edge. Nudged someone over with a kick.

“Fuck, Baird. They’re kids.”

“Old enough to make property is old enough to break it.” That one—Baird—propped his weapon against his shoulder. “Chauncey wants a count, and a clean curbside by sundown. Even he can’t afford to keep Burn Street cordoned off longer than that. Get them in a line, mark them off, and I’ll see about the wagons.” Baird clicked his heels, then peeled off.

The other two mimicked Baird. One rubbed her nose. The other went for somebody’s ankles.

Think think think think think. I couldn’t move, couldn’t wriggle out from under whoever crushed me. I couldn’t let them see me. If they saw me, they would kill me. I squeezed my hunk of ichorite and candy colors bubbled at the corners of my eyesight, warbled and acidic. I recalled unbidden kneading hot split ore on the skimming belts, wringing out the gooey luster from the fleshy clumps of dross. The pain of it. I gripped my knife. I tried to look dead. I could play dead. We were all playing dead.

The weight dragged off me. Smeared me against the pavement along with it before it was gone. Blood flow crashed back down my legs and vomit fluttered up my throat.

The enforcer walked beside my head. She stopped there. Her heels were a breath from my nose.

I slashed my new knife through the backs of her calves.

The cut sprayed my cheeks.

The enforcer screamed. She toppled and her rifle went off, cracked a window in the foundry.

I scrambled back. Stuck the knife in my waistband between brace buttons and clambered over bodies, bodies, bodies. I stumbled upright. I bounced on my toes. Where do I go? Where can I go? Pink whirling sizzling lights that were not real pulsed around my head. The other enforcer saw me. He pointed at me. I ran.

I ran down an alley away from Burn Street.

I left everybody behind me. I abandoned you, dead girl.

I swore this, I meant it.

Yann Chauncey, I will take your life.

Metal From Heaven will be released on October 22, but you can pre-order it right now.

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Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB