Heavy metal and Satan go together like peanut butter and
jelly, except way more evil. Since the devil is so entwined with the genre’s
demonic DNA, it makes sense that the common Faustian trope of someone selling
their soul would do so against the backdrop of tight leather pants,
pyrotechnics, and more shiny spikes than anyone needs. However, Grady Hendrix’s
latest, We Sold Our Souls, goes
beyond the band that comes to regret their decision to sell their soul. This
story has less navel gazing from the female protagonist Kris Pulaski and more darkly
Tolkein-esque questing as she tries to get her soul back.
Kris, once a guitar player for the band Dürt Würk, finds
herself 47 and working at a Best Western night desk where no one listens to
her, a blow to her ego considering she once played to many a crowd. She wonders
what has happened to her life, particularly when her old bandmate Terry is the
lead singer for supergroup Koffin. On the eve of Koffin’s farewell tour, Kris
decides to track down her former bandmates and search for answers, leading her
on a quest to rediscover what may have been taken from her (or did she give it
away?).
Hendrix, like author Christopher Moore, is good at
intermingling humor with horror, but Hendrix’s style can always take his
characters and situations they are in shades darker. Whereas Moore’s fiction
involving demons and vampires feel like, no matter what happens, the entire
cast will come out smiling and bow to the audience at the end, Hendrix always
reminds the readers that it can, and usually does, get much worse before it
gets better and that everyone might not make the end credits. Kris Pulaski does
not have an easy life, but things for her get significantly more difficult once
she tries to confront her former bandmate now corporate-contrived rock idol
Terry. In truth, Kris’s struggles, Kris’s character, keeps this story from
becoming another Faustian tale of middle-aged regret and lets it become a
concise yet epic quest for a soul as well as one’s art. And make no mistake,
whether it’s a literal soul or a metaphorical search for identity and purpose,
Kris goes to great lengths to find hers.
Not only must Kris deal with demonic entities and shadowy
human agents, but as a woman in a male-dominated industry, she is fighting
everyone’s preconceived notions of her. From never quite making it to what she
feels is her full potential to taking flack from hotel guests, Kris’s path to
middle age has become one large downward spiral that she can never pull herself
out of. Men throughout the book patronize her, and even her old bandmates, who
were once as close as family, are of no help. Kris is always pushing against a
patriarchy that is always trying to keep her complacent, even an
Illuminati-level threat that deploys UPS men as foot soldiers. Kris pushes back
with the only weapon she has: her music. Her music is what she believes in,
even when she doesn’t always believe in herself, and is the one thing that, no
matter what the forces working against her do, cannot be taken from her. Frodo
had a sword named Sting on his quest, but Kris has a song called “Troglodyte,”
which serves as both guide and weapon which makes men and not human things very
afraid.
Women might relate to Kris being belittled, talked down to,
and even seen as less than what she is, but Kris is also defiant and she
channels that defiance into a sonic tsunami born from a hypothetical situation
where Joan Jett sings about the #Metoo era. There is a climax where Kris
discovers who she is and what she is capable of, and when she gets there, after
seeing all that she has been through, readers will be able to feel her triumph.
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