The Ninth Metal unfolds primarily in Northfall, a formerly sleepy Minnesota town Percy describes in loving detail ... It’s a busy town, and a busy book. After an intriguing start, The Ninth Metal buries its promise under metric tons of story ... Percy, author of genre thrillers like The Dark Net and Red Moon, is deft at catching attention with sharp lines of dialogue or bursts of action, especially to round out a chapter ... But The Ninth Metal shifts too frequently among its many characters, piling up the love stories and back stories and side stories, making it hard to develop a rooting interest in any ... There are occasional intriguing glimpses of the ninth metal’s otherworldly origins, but they are swept away in the rapid-fire series of violent confrontations that wrap up the various plots.
Percy seems to be paying homage to a very different fictional narrative over the course of this novel—and it’s an unexpected delight ... The Ninth Metal’s crime-fiction bones help keep the more fantastical elements of the narrative grounded ... The sense of something larger happening, of which John and his family are on the fringes, grows steadily over the course of the book; by the end, it’s done a fine job of setting the stage for the larger world Percy is building out.
Percy (Suicide Woods, 2019) is an accomplished superhero comic writer, and that aesthetic is evident from page one. The plot is dynamic, featuring multiple viewpoints as well as corporate malfeasance, spooky cults, and family drama. This sounds complicated, and it is, but all of these moving parts work together due to strong characterization ... The action is vivid without being too graphic, contributing to an overall cinematic feel ... Recommended for fans of Brandon Sanderson’s Reckoners series or Vicious by V. E. Schwab.
Percy (The Dark Net) launches the Comet Cycle series with this wildly entertaining and highly original melange of northern Minnesota lore and slam-bang near-future SF action ... Percy’s dead-on local color, strong central characters, and well-integrated flashbacks into the making of a modern samurai will delight and entertain both comics fans and serious science fiction readers. This is an impressive series starter.
There are constant echoes of history and pop culture as well as SF and mystery tropes, most notably from Watchmen ... The variety of tones and allusions is entertaining but also prevents the novel from ever settling into a deeper social commentary; there’s just so much, all the time. It’s a Western! It’s a revenge play! It’s an environmental critique! Creative, for sure, but also a bit fragmented.
