The first novel from David Schow (who would go on to write movies like Critters 4) this rock n'roll splatterpunk orgy got pretty scathing reviews when it came out in 1988, with Kirkus calling it "a stagy, ludicrous muddle" and Publisher's Weekly saying, "Schow demonstrates that he has the raw material to produce a really good thriller, although this one isn't it."
They're not wrong, but what modern readers might object to more than Schow failing to live up to his potential is the wall-to-wall misogyny and the spray-on “tougher than leather” attitude. But if you can stop rolling your eyes long enough to actually read the book, you'll find enough moments where it devolves into a ridiculously over-the-top hoedown that fetishizes rock n'roll silliness harder than the Pope fetishizes pointy hats, and that just about makes it worthwhile.
Meet Lucas Ellington, an advertising exec who's been in the loony bin for the past year getting over his wife's suicide (“motherhood got to be too much for her”) and his daughter's death during a stampede at a Whip Hand concert. Yes, the edgy metal band in this book is named Whip Hand.
Lucas's therapist, Sara Windsor, is worried that it's not healthy for Lucas to quit his job and head for a remote cabin to recuperate and she'd be even less thrilled if she knew that he’s not spending his time looking out over the lake and taking long walks but instead using his Vietnam vet skills to plot the murder of every single member of Whip Hand. When Cass, an abused 23-year-old woman, seeks shelter at Lucas’s cabin, he tends to her wounds, feeds her, lets her rest, then makes love to her, waiting until she says “I love you” a few days later before inexplicably beating her to death with a log.
Turns out it is explicable! He and his dead teenaged daughter, Kristin, were having an incestual affair and when his wife found out they murdered her and made it look like a suicide. His violent campaign against Whip Hand now just seems like an unhinged act of homicidal assholism, rather than the tragic actions of a grieving father, and the book drops into the gutter, hard and fast, where it rolls around for a while, climaxing with a battle between Lucas and Gabriel Stannard, the lead singer of Whip Hand (who wears “radiation-proof wraparound shades”), at Sara Windsor's house. She witnesses the battle naked (well, draped in a bath towel) because of course she does and the two men shoot at each other with all kinds of lovingly described weaponry (“This is a standard Auto Mag...I've had it blued to cut the reflection of the matte finish. Kicks just like Dirty Harry's revolver except this is an auto pistol...the fire rate causes parts of the gun to melt.”) until Stannard, nude, except for a pair of black and orange bikini briefs, whips a back-up piece out of his jock and shoots Lucas dead, getting drilled in the nuts with a bullet in the process, which ruins his singing career and forces him to endure the indignity of becoming an actor.
But let’s talk about Whip Hand. The stampede at the concert that killed Kristen, and 12 other kids, wasn't really their fault, you see, but was instead the fault of greedy promoters who insisted on festival seating instead of reserved seating, which we hear about at great length. Besides, Whip Hand is so upset over the trial and all the bad publicity that they broke up, robbing the world of their genius.
Whip Hand's hit singles include “Love Mutant”, “Riptide”, and “Attack Dog” (“Fangs'll shred ya / teeth'll tear ya / blood and thunder / my attack'll scare ya”) but they're also, oddly enough, popular purveyors of heavy metal covers of old standards like Buddy Holly's "Changing All Those Changes", "War", and "Big Girls Don't Cry".
Here's their line-up:
▪ Gabriel Stannard - lead singer, has an archery range in his basement and a bodyguard named Horus
▪ Brion Hardin - keyboards, now with the band, Electroshock
▪ Jackson Knox - guitarist, now a solo act
▪ Jackal Reichmann - percussion, now with the band 'Gasm
▪ Tim Fozetto - bass, now also with 'Gasm
Although the other way to look at it is:
* Gabriel Stannard - lead singer, shot in the balls
* Brion Hardin - keyboards, stabbed to death in face and his blood is used to paint KILL SATANIST ROCK on the wall of his hotel room
* Jackson Knox - guitarist, blown to shreds by claymore mine placed in his stage monitor
* Jackal Reichmann - percussion, shot by Eldon Quantrill, an evangelical Christian with an M-16 who committed incest with his mother and is killing rock stars because God told him to
* Tim Fozetto - bass, ditto
There are entire chapters devoted to transcripts of radio call-in shows debating regulating rock music (“I hope that nobody out there is crazy enough to believe that killing musicians is ever going to stop the power of rock,”), and there's an entire chapter devoted to a discussion with a record store clerk about his musical theories that reads like something Nick Hornby might have written and then deleted from an early draft of High Fidelity (“You mean there's a line of descension from the Fleetwoods to Whip Hand?”)
The breathless descriptions of guns, gleeful descriptions of violence (“Lucas clamped his left hand over Hardin's mouth and shoved the Randall upward into his chest cavity from behind, driving hard from the renal area, perforating the right kidney, the pancreas, and puncturing a lung. He twisted the knife and ripped it out, stepping back for the follow-through”), and the long pointless debates over lyrics tumble over each other like a pile of hyperactive puppies until they dissolve into one of my favorite passages of psychobabble at the end of the book as Sara Windsor, older now and wiser for her experiences, sits in a pool of light cast by her desk lamp, a legal pad in front of her, trying to make sense of it all:
“Would Lucas have killed her?
Would she have killed?
And if so, what was the difference between them?
Lucas represented what could almost be termed another evolutionary step — Psychopathic Man, possessing the mechanisms to cope with what living has become, to survive in this world. That capacity was present in everyone...they were part of our genetic makeup...Someday, they might mean our survival.”
Let's take those in order. Was she really that different from Lucas? (A: yes) Weren’t they both killers? (A: No.) Wasn’t Lucas just another step up the evolutionary ladder? (No, again.) Is being a psychotic asshole the key to the future survival of the human race? (No.) The idea that anyone should be taking lessons in evolutionary biology from a man who had a sexual relationship with his teenaged daughter, murdered his wife, beat a young woman to death with a log after saving her from an abusive relationship, and then killed three members of a band and shot one of them in the nuts is so ridiculous and over the top that it could almost be a song by Whip Hand. Or maybe even a cut from 'Gasm's live album, Bend n' Spread 'Em:
Gonna drive my skin bus
Gonna drive it on down
Right on down
Into Tuna town.
Long live rock n'roll.