Metallic Realms

Michel (The Body Scout) spins a riveting tale of a sci-fi writing group and its obsessive hanger-on, Michael Lincoln. Borrowing the arch tone and annotated book-within-a-book form of Pale Fire, the novel consists of a collection of stories written by the group and edited by Michael with extensive notes and digressive passages about the writers’ interrelationships and Michael’s own tenuous connection to them. The group, called the Orb 4, includes Taras K. Castle, a talented author with whom Michael grew up in Vermont, and who shares an apartment with Michael in Brooklyn; their other roommate, Castel Ocampo, a queer and nonbinary writer who uses the pen name Merlin; Jane Noh Johnson, whose “dual nature” explains her enrollment in an MFA program where she churns out “dreary literary realism” when she’s not writing exciting “escapades” for the group; and Darya Azali, the group’s “loud and proud geek.” Michel has a knack for exploring the characters’ complex relationships, as Michael’s delusional view of himself and the world around him careens toward its breaking point while the Orb 4’s stories bleed into the writers’ real lives (Jane writes of a thinly veiled Michael as “the awkward, merely tolerated friend who misunderstands social cues”). This captivates. Agent: Angeline Rodriguez, WME. (May)