It’s fun to read an imaginary account of what it might have been like to get into death metal in a shitty Florida suburb in 1987. One of the teen characters is Leslie, a bisexual Black twink who is very much into glam metal (HANOI ROCKS, etc.). This collection of traits and attributes is very far from the cultural imaginary of people into death metal at the time. So death metal truthers out there might say it’s not a realistic depiction of the scene. As masculine as the music is (not to mention the gender of the primary movers in the international network of tape-traders that made it happen), I am sure there are many others besides greasy whites (as represented in the other two main characters) who were drawn to it at the time.
The narrator, Kip, is a domestic abuse survivor who occasionally lapses into violent outbursts whenever he sees a weak person being threatened. That seems a bit more in line with the idea of who might typically like death metal—someone who has experienced trauma and is using extreme music to cope with the world they’ve inherited. He lives with his grandma, too.
Kira is the third main character—a brash tomboy who is constantly in search of sicker sounds and experiences. After a DEICIDE / CANNIBAL CORPSE / DEATH gig, when the others are glowing in the gig’s power on the way home, she punctures their reverie by saying the newly formed DEICIDE isn’t nearly as great as the other fans think they are and that the cartoony gore of CANNIBAL CORPSE is better because they don’t dress up for their gigs and do silly theatrical stuff with blood. She suffers no fools.
This mix of characters is varied enough that you will not find yourself getting confused about anything. The way Kip, the narrator with the chip on his shoulder, transitions from kind of holding death metal at arm’s length to fully embracing it is really a fun experience to join. He has one of my favorite lines in the whole book with “I miss the days of sweatpants and Air Jordans” (p. 130). Those are the cultural signifiers I associate with death metal, even though I know that’s a silly and limiting view of the genre. It’s still a solid epigrammatic take.
Wray is knowledgeable enough to include real bands and releases, but I do like the made up bands and songs as well. He conjures a band named PRIMORDIAL SIN with a song called “Bedrest” in one scene that itself is a slice of fantastical reinvention and memory. It sounds enough like a real band that I was mystified when I couldn’t find them on Metal Archives. I mean there are weirder bands such as EMBALMER who have a song called “The Necro-filing Cabinet,” so he was at least making this imaginary band believable. It’s tricky to pull that off without it seeming too corny or obvious. (Or maybe I’m not as well versed in death metal as I would like to pretend.) I guess I would be curious to know whether someone who has zero familiarity with this scene would have been able to pick out which band in this book doesn’t actually exist.
I’ll say it was fun to follow the journey of these three friends over the years. If it’s not clear from the book’s cover art, they begin with death metal, then venture to LA for the denouement of the glam scene before ending up in Norway on the cusp of the notoriety of the black metal scene centered around Helvete. I learned about this book from the weekly email from a local suburban bookshop a few years back. One of the workers said it was a perfect Father’s Day gift for “any dad over the age of 35 who grew up listening to metal.” If you fit that description, I think it’ll work for you, too. Even if you aren’t an elder millennial or a dad or a metalhead (current or former), there’s plenty to dig into here. You don’t need to know the references to enjoy the narrative.
(This review originally appeared in a slightly shorter version in issue #3 of the zine Anxiety's False Promise, published in March 2024.)
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