About Heavy Metal
Winner of the 2016 Autumn House Fiction Prize, selected by William Lychack
A real gut-punch of a novel, Heavy Metal sings with energy and beauty and honest abandon about grief and hope and trying to find one’s balance in an unsteady world. At a certain point, the young narrator shoots a bottle out of the sky. “The glass explodes like a bottle rocket,” as he tells it, “the shards glinting in the firelight underneath the gray-lit sky.” The same can be said for this novel and family, both of which explode “like a bottle rocket, the shards glinting in the firelight underneath the gray-lit sky.”
—William Lychack, author of The Architect of Flowers and The Wasp Eater
Learn More at Autumn House Press
“Andrew Bourelle's first novel grabs you by the throat from the first sentence and drags you deep into a vividly imagined world.”
— Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will and Await Your Reply
“Heavy Metal is a brilliant debut novel, at once an incisive, complex character study of damaged youth and a ferociously exciting page-turner.”
— Christopher Coake, author of We're in Trouble and You Came Back
“As suspenseful as it is intelligent and as cinematic as it is lyrical, Bourelle's first novel is a landmark achievement and, once started, impossible to put down.”
— Daniel Mueller, author of How Animals Mate and Nights I Dreamed of Hubert Humphrey