In the 1990s, heavy metal band Dürt Würk was poised for breakout success - but then lead singer Terry Hunt embarked on a solo career and rocketed to stardom as Koffin, leaving his fellow bandmates to rot in rural Pennsylvania. The ending of the book left me in actual tears, and is as emotionally resonant as anything I’ve read lately, with a cinematic view that also closes in on just two people, reconnecting in a way that brings it all home.A girl with a guitar never has to apologize for anything.― Grady Hendrix, We Sold Our Souls About His trademark sense of humor keeps everything from getting too dark, and the usual epistolary details (in this case, transcriptions of radio and television appearances) provide a Greek chorus for details which otherwise might’ve had to be shoe-horned in. There are so many things that this book gets right in addition to titling chapters after classic metal albums, Hendrix uses real bands for inspiration and ends up crafting songs that seem like they could exist, and people whom you feel like you might’ve once met. The use of flashbacks creates a real sense of how the wheel keeps turning, and ties the whole plot into a reflection of the story told on the album which is so integral to We Sold Our Souls. There are scars here, both psychic and physical, and the story wastes no time in getting going. this book is about music and found family just as much as its about an eldritch horror lurking beneath the facade of modern American life. Under the horror and the working-class realism, the touchstone is that all the real characters in this novel, all the people you genuinely care about? Music is their heartbeat. Hendrix’s descriptions are so evocative some of it showed up in my nightmares. There is a chapter that was so intense I had to put the book down for a while. This is, make no mistake, a horror novel. And then, in a great, horrific way, he peels back the curtain and finds that sinister forces might be working against those artists.

He gives us a very interesting portrait of a modern artist, and interrogates the ways our current society makes it impossible to create art. Hendrix shows us all the compromises people made for that success. We Sold Our Souls is an inversion of the typical rock story. Hendrix digs into the subgenre and along the way gives us bits of knowledge about a lot of different types of metal. It’s like The Stand and Our Band Could Be Your Life had the best baby (Our Stand Could Be Your Life?) and somebody slapped a Viking helmet on it and taught it to shred a guitar. Grady Hendrix’s latest extravaganza of horror is wild and fun, genuinely terrifying in places, and also somehow heartfelt.

Grady hendrix we sold our souls