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.

We sold our souls book