What follows is a cross-country adventure through conspiracy theories, metalheads, and intense scenes of visceral horror, as Kris sets out to figure out what really happened on contract night.
But seeing billboards for Koffin’s farewell tour lights a fire under Kris to seek out what she and the band deserve. Working a night clerk shift at a Best Western in one dying Rust Belt town at a time, ostracized from her former bandmates because of her actions on the poorly remembered “contract night” all those years ago, Kris lives the life of a nobody. That contract transformed him into the Blind King, headliner of nu metal supergroup Koffin (think KISS meets Slipknot meets Linkin Park), now the world’s most famous band. We Sold Our Souls tells the story of Kris Pulaski in the wake of touring with her 1990s heavy metal band Dürt Würk (after “dirt worker,” a nickname for graveyard diggers), starting 20 years after her best friend, band co-founder, and lead singer Terry Hunter stiffed her, Scottie Rocket (rhythm guitar), Bill (drums), and Tuck (bass) with contracts that gave Terry sole rights to the band’s discography. It’s about Black Iron Mountain and soul-sucking corpse beasties. It addresses the inauthenticity and carefully crafted emotional landscape of “sellout” artists, and the underbelly of a violent America. It explores the experience of the economically oppressed - the crappy jobs folks work just so they can work another day, the dreams forgotten (because who has time for dreams between shifts?), the desire to make art that bares the raw emotion and pain of poverty and the anger with a world that seems not to care. We Sold Our Souls explores heavy metal, its fantasy allegories, and the horrors those allegories reveal. Hendrix’s newest novel, We Sold Our Souls, won’t do much to rescue him from the gimmick writer gloss, but it puts the truth to the Wall Street Journal’s description of the writer as a “national treasure” in their review of his previous novel, My Best Friend’s Exorcism. Through all the horror and tumult, in the humor and the nostalgia animating the psychological growth of his focal characters, Hendrix brings an encyclopedic awareness of the ways capital weighs down the labor force, crushing blue-collar workers in their daily efforts to keep ahead of the poverty line day after day. But calling Hendrix a gimmick writer does a huge disservice to one of contemporary fiction’s most sensitive observers of the horrors that arise around - and sometimes because of - our efforts to grow closer with other humans. He typically pairs a funny topic with a horror veneer (Ikea + evil prison warden ghost: Horrorstör, 1980s teen flick + possession: My Best Friend’s Exorcism), and his books often include a range of engaging paratexts (a mock Ikea catalog, a faux high school yearbook). GLOSS HIS NOVELS from Amazon blurbs and you might call Grady Hendrix a gimmick writer.
0 kommentar(er)
