In Conversation: On No One Goes Alone: A Novel

Benjamin Percy is the author of three story collections; Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction; and five novels – The Unfamiliar Garden, The Dark Net, The Dead Lands: A Novel, Red Moon: A Novel, The Wilding: A Novel, and, most recently, The Ninth Metal (Mariner). He also writes Wolverine and X-Force for Marvel Comics. His fiction and nonfiction have been published in Esquire, where he is a contributing editor; GQ; Time; Men's Journal; The Wall Street Journal; The New York Times; and The Paris Review. In The Ninth Metal, what begins as a celestial marvel becomes a planetary crisis. A meteor shower brings to Earth a new metal – an “omnimetal” that possesses world-changing properties as an energy source and a weapon – to Northfall, Minnesota. Soon, the town’s iron-ore dynastic family finds itself in a cutthroat war for the mineral rights and mining operations, as foreign leaders, competing corporations, and the U.S. government all vie for control. It’s a high-stakes, modern-day gold rush. Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, praised it as “Wildly entertaining and highly original mélange 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.”

Erik Larson’s eight books have been published in nearly 20 countries, and six are New York Times bestsellers: The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz; Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania; In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin; Thunderstruck; The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America – a finalist for the National Book Award – and Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History. No One Goes Alone: A Novel (Random House Audio), his debut in fiction writing, is a ghost story grounded in history. In 1905, researchers led by psychologist William James sail for the Isle of Dorn in the North Atlantic to explore the cause of several mysterious disappearances, most notably a family of four that vanished without a trace after a weeklong holiday there. The idyllic setting they find belies an undercurrent of danger and treachery. Raging storms and unsettling discoveries add to the sense of menace. As increasingly unexplainable events unfold, the now-stranded investigators are unsure whether they can trust their own eyes, their instincts, one another – or even themselves. Created specifically to entertain audio listeners, Larson’s No One Goes Alone is a terrifying tale of suspense underpinned by actual people and events.