James Nicoll Reviews

August Clarke’s 2024 Metal From Heaven is a stand-alone secondary universe industrial fantasy.

Ichorite is a marvelously useful material, the production of which has given Yann Chauncey and his family a considerable fortune. Ichorite is toxic; its fit-prone victims are known as the lustertouched. When Yann’s workers demand that Yann acknowledge the issue and do something to mitigate it, Yann does the only reasonable thing an oligarch in his position could do. He orders the protesters slaughtered.

The massacre is almost complete. Yann’s hired killers miss lustertouched Marney Honeycutt, an oversight that will have significant repercussions later.

Read more ➤

The Feast Makers is the third and final volume in the Scapegracers modern fantasy trilogy. The Scapegracers trilogy is by August Clarke, writing as H. A. Clarke.

Sideways Pike and the rest of West High’s Scapegracer coven have successfully vanquished their enemies and retrieved Sideways’ soul. Now the soon-to-graduate high schoolers need to consider what they are going to do with the rest of their lives… which, thanks to the consequences of their actions in the previous two books, might be very short.

Read more ➤

2022’s The Scratch Daughters is the second of H. A. Clarke’s Scapegracers series. 

Armed with a rudimentary but effective command of magic and a severe intolerance for male misbehavior, the Scapegracers — Daisy, Yates, Jing, and series protagonist Sidewise Pike — encourage the men of rustic Sycamore County to master their worst impulses. If the men behave outrageously enough to attract the coven’s attention, they will find themselves cursed.

Given the dismal quality of men in their backwoods community, the teens would no doubt have enough to occupy them until they can graduate and escape Sycamore County. There is however a pressing matter that demands their immediate attention: Sideways’ missing soul. 

Or rather, her stolen soul.

Read more ➤

2020’s The Scapegracers is the first volume in H. A. Clarke’s projected Scapegracers series. 

Offered forty dollars to spice up a pre-Halloween party with magic, social outcast Eloise ​“Sideways” Pike takes what turns out to be the first step towards forming her own coven. Sideways’ magic is no sleight of hand. It is very real. 

Real magic always has consequences.

Read more ➤