New Arrival: Review of Grady Hendrix's We Sold Our Souls

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.

Screen to Scream: Grace and Pet Sematary

People might remember W. W. Jacobs’ short story “The Monkey’s Paw” (SPOILERS! for this particular story, if you haven’t already read it). The father uses the monkey’s paw to wish for a large sum of money, then his son dies in a factory accident, which pays off the exact amount the father had asked for. The father, knowing and having been shown that the paw’s wishes bring the worse kind of luck, wishes to have his boy brought back to life. The story implies that the son isn’t anywhere close to what he was in life (End of spoilers!).  Jacobs’ story is often used to talk about how you should never make wishes. EVER. But also consider what the story says about grief, particularly of parents, and what devil’s bargains, paw or no paw, parents would make to end that grief, particularly in today’s Screen to Scream pairing.

Look at the cover of the film Grace and you’ll simply see a blood-spattered baby bottle, which already tells the person who’s thinking of bringing this home that they are tackling some very mature subject matter, particularly for parents. Madeline is a young mother that thinks she is doing everything right by her baby, from eating the right foods to going to a respected midwife, but she loses her unborn child. Madeline insists on carrying the baby to term and Grace is born, alive and seemingly healthy. But there is the issue her particular diet of fresh human blood. So begins the metaphor of the vampiric Grace literally sucking the life out of her mother that offers a dark interpretation of motherhood’s sacrifices. Grace discovers what her daughter is by discovering, through typical parental trial and error, just what her daughter prefers for sustenance. Throughout the movie, apart from a bossy mother-in-law, there is no doubt of Madeline’s devotion to grace. Unfortunately, that devotion, a trait heralded among the best parents, actually becomes a tragic flaw.   

That flaw also exists in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, with some minor differences. Madeline had birthed her child and accepted what it is and to sacrifice Grace would be as painful to Madeline as feeding her. The father in Sematary, Dr. Louis Creed, has pleasant memories of the child he lost. The readers also get to know him. When introduced to what the burial ground beyond the breakfall can do, it is a temptation that tugs at his broken heart and he willingly commits acts such as lying to his family up to burial desecration to try and heal that heart. He has the chance to go on, to try and heal himself, to hold onto his pleasant memories, to grieve, but he cannot bear the grief, which leads him to his bargain with the ground beyond the Pet Sematary and the tragedy that follows.

Both stories deal with subject matter that many of us, parents especially, do not like to think about: the possibility of outliving your children. For some, the scenario is too awful to contemplate, yet these stories have parental loss and grief as a main theme. To actually touch upon those subjects, some would say, should be unthinkable. But horror is often supposed to dramatize and give shape to the horrible, the unthinkable, if only to have the reader appreciate their lives once they close the book or turn off their DVD players. Who knows? Parents, after experiencing both terrifying tales, might appreciate their children more and understand the meaning they give to their lives, particularly if they are forced to contemplate what would happen if that meaning were taken away.  

New Arrival: Review of Paul Tremblay's The Cabin at the End of the World

Apocalyptic fiction is a well-known subgenre that includes but is in no way limited to zombie tales like World War Z. From Stephen King’s The Stand to Josh Malerman’s Bird Box, writers have speculated not only on the many ways the world can end but what humans will do once civilization has wound down. Paul Tremblay, the author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, has created a completely unique take on the apocalypse by adding a healthy dash of home-invasion-narrative in The Cabin at the End of the World.

The story begins with a precocious little girl named Wen catching grasshoppers outside the cabin where she and her two dads are vacationing. She then sees a very large man come up their driveway. After Wen and the man (Leonard) talk awhile, the man’s friends walk up the driveway with their crudely-improvised weapons.  

This conversation and the arrival of Leonard’s friend begin Tremblay’s torture session of a novel. Not tortuous to read, mind you, but reading to see if Wen and her fathers (Eric and Adam) survive and hoping that the three somehow make it through all this okay, even when the reader knows better. The possibility of a happy ending is particularly distant when Leonard gives the family an impossible dilemma that puts the fate of the world at stake. To reveal more about the plot is to risk spoiling moments that add to the story. This story is a bullet train that is barreling toward the end of a track, and each of these little events that come before the climax is just an uptick in speed.

The reader also can’t simply get off this train because we don’t want to. Tremblay portrays both family and captors as people the reader can empathize with, forcing said readers to invest themselves in the outcome. Even as the story gains momentum, Tremblay shows command of descriptors that build this family into three-dimensional people we need to see escape, but Tremblay is an adept torturer. He has demonstrated time and again how to turn the screws on his characters, and subsequently the reader. Just when you think that they get some respite, or think that things possibly couldn’t get any worse, they immediately become worse and the screws are tightened a little bit more. This book is the go-to example for psychological horror. Like a lot of great horror, the supernatural aspects are secondary. Tremblay, as a writer, is simply content to sit back after he builds the set and let his characters torture each other.