OK, first things first--for full disclosure, the author is a friend of mine on Twitter, so I'll admit this review may be biased. However, I didn't get the book for free, I saw it on Itch and bought it. Thus, I think this review will be reasonably objective.

To begin, a brief word on the format of the book. From what I understand, it was originally written on Twitter, that is to say, as a series of extremely compact, sub-250 word tweets. The author turned the tweets into a book by keeping that formatting--every paragraph is under 250 words, just as they originally appeared! While it's an original conceit, I don't think I like it that much. The Twitter format is a necessity, but not a good thing in and of itself, and maintaining it for a .pdf file (as I downloaded the book) or even an ebook file means that it can be a little hard to read, especially when page breaks make extra "paragraphs" out of paragraphs that were already tiny. I'm also unsure of how it was edited--there do seem to be minor spelling errors scattered across the text.

However, aside from that, the story itself is really good! It starts off with a bang and then, after little bit of stage-setting, roars away. The action scenes are really, really goo, and as a big fan of the Dragon's Heaven anime, I can definitely say that this story captures the spirit of that OVA. Without giving away too much, just as in Dragon's Heaven, the human protagonists find an ancient, sentient robot weapon buried under a lot of junk. However, unlike in Dragon's Heaven, there's a lot more challenge in excavating the mech (the titular Metal), and much of the conflict driving the story stems from the problems they encounter (and not just from other humans) as they attempt to do so. This provides a hook for a compelling plot that, combined with the conflicts between the three human protagonists, kept me hooked for the whole day it took me to finish the novel!

So yeah, I took a star off due to the formatting rubbing me the wrong way, but with that aside, Screaming Metal was still a fantastic read, easily worth the recommended price (1 dollar was the default, and what I paid). Definitely check this one out!