Grady Hendrix has started to get a reputation for taking on crazy premises in his books and—at least for those kindly disposed—making them work. I read We Sold Our Souls a year or two ago and recently decided to reread it. It does hold up pretty well.
Basically, twenty years a metal band with big dreams got into a serious auto accident. Their main songwriter and lead guitarist Kris Pulaski was at the wheel, but there's time missing from that scenario. Her life was ruined, which is true of a couple of her bandmates too. But not the lead singer, Terry, whose lawyers were behind some sinister contracts they signed.
Hendrix has enough discipline as a writer for there to be a clear through-line to the events. But he's bold enough to put some crazy stuff on that line. Eventually it falls into a rhythm.
Basically, twenty years a metal band with big dreams got into a serious auto accident. Their main songwriter and lead guitarist Kris Pulaski was at the wheel, but there's time missing from that scenario. Her life was ruined, which is true of a couple of her bandmates too. But not the lead singer, Terry, whose lawyers were behind some sinister contracts they signed.
Hendrix has enough discipline as a writer for there to be a clear through-line to the events. But he's bold enough to put some crazy stuff on that line. Eventually it falls into a rhythm.
2 comments:
Grady Hendrix is another of those authors whose work I haven't encountered previously and now that I've read the premises of a couple of his novels it's likely I'm one of those not kindly disposed. I'm not saying his plots don't sound clever or that he isn't a good writer. I've never read him so I can't have an opinion and goodness knows it's hard to get noticed as a writer these days. I'm old fashioned enough to prefer authors who labor away in obscurity until it's time to do another book signing. The one about the haunted Ikea store sounds very weird indeed.
Ah well, I don't know if you'd be interested in a short story written by Paul Kingsnorth, an English writer who lives in rural Ireland. For years he was part of the environmentalist movement, but came to believe that the world probably didn’t want to be saved from apocalypse. The story is called The Basilisk.
In honesty it’s not so much a story as it is the exchange of letters between two fictional characters - an uncle who is a professor, and his adult niece, Bridget. It’s about the apocalyptic spiritual meaning of Internet technology - and it’s haunting. It begins like this:
I would not normally write to you in this way. I would not normally write to anyone in this way. I gave up writing letters some years ago after my correspondents mostly stopped replying. When one of my friends sent me a two-line text message in response to a five-page, handwritten letter—to add insult to injury, it even had one of those smiley face things at the end—I knew the game was up. I am not convinced that people know how to write letters anymore, or even to read them. I won’t bore you with the facts about the ongoing measurable decline in our ability to concentrate. You of all people know what the screens are doing to our minds.
btw: I did see what the sinister contracts were about. Creepy..
When I like a book enough to blog about it all that means is that something in the story, the characters, the prose struck me. If I'm lucky it might have taught me something. But that's all. I'm not expecting you to agree, even in theory. Now if, on the other hand, I dislike a book enough to blog about it, woe betide us all. And the haunted Ikea store was quite strange, and packaged like a catalog to boot. It was also very much a first novel.
I liked "Basilisk" a whole bunch. Richard and Bridget are great company to have for 45 minutes or so. I wonder if Kingsnorth intentionally gave them half-rhyming names in order to show their partially hidden similarities. Bridget's musings on whether the human race is bewitched by fairies and whether we deserve it were oddly familiar to me. In my previous long-term job I worked for a while with a very smart woman who said that in the Matrix movies she rooted for Agent Smith because she agreed with him that humanity was basically a virus (ahem.) Although I guess I identify more with Richard, not the least because of the way he admits he has "never had much patience for the stuff of life." And vice versa, maybe.
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