Metropolis

Monte Schulz's sixth prose novel is a dystopian story set in a republic where war and the erosion of moral standards shape daily life. Julian Brehm, a senior at Regency College, has been moving through an ordinary student routine until he meets Nina Rinaldi, a striking young activist who opposes the country's authoritarian government and the war it fights through lies and diversion.

His feelings for Nina, and his commitment to her cause, draw him beneath the city into a sprawling underground, then east by rail toward the front. There he faces lethal danger among the vast number of dead, and what he witnesses forces him to reconsider the Republic and his own place within it.

Julian's experience is meant to mirror the reader's world, with its shifting moral lines, relentless violence, and the tension between apathy and passion or fear and resolve. The book works as a love story that branches in several directions, a large-scale war novel with harrowing detail, a suspenseful mystery built around a moral puzzle, and a coming-of-age story about a young man discovering a world more perilous and more beautiful than he imagined. At its core, it asks what virtue and goodness mean when confronted with monstrous atrocities.