Metallic Realms by Lincoln Michel

 

So, on the one hand, I don't have a lot of patience for the distinction between "literary" and "genre" fiction; on the other hand, you can usually tell which direction a given author working in this particular hinterland is coming from, and Michel is clearly coming from "literary"; on the gripping hand, this is something like 330 pages of punching down at fandom in many of its scruffy forms, and I ran out of patience about 200 pages in and switched to power-skimming. Michel demonstrates an impressive ability to shift his authorial voice into several different registers, but he never shakes the sense that he's mocking his characters, laughing at them (not with them). Really good on the prose level, but kinda an insulting nothingburger on every other.