The Scare Salon

Because the premise involved music, a deal with the devil (sort of), and tangentially the Satanic Panic era, it seemed right up my alley, so I snapped it up. And while I will say that this book absolutely rules as all his books do, I connected with it slightly less than I did some of his other ones; don’t take that as too harsh a criticism, though, because I still adored this book and would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who likes Hendrix’s stuff, and especially anyone who is also really into heavy metal.

I’ve probably mentioned it before, but Grady Hendrix is fantastic at writing compelling female lead characters, and this novel is no exception. Our protagonist is Kris Pulaski, a working-class metal guitarist who once seemed poised on the edge of stardom when her band, Dürt Würk, was slated to open for Slayer in the 1990s.

But then, it all went horribly wrong. Nowadays, Kris is in her forties, still stuck in the dead-end, meth-addled town where she grew up, and still living in her parents’ disintegrating house in a neighborhood that has slowly gone to seed. She still drives her dad’s twenty-year-old car, is drowning in debt, and works night shifts at a crappy Best Western hotel, where she deals with one particular resident who enjoys constantly berating her while peeing all over the front desk. She hasn’t picked up a guitar or written a song in years.

By contrast, her former bandmate, singer Terry Hunt, is one of the most successful musicians the world has ever seen. Fronting a band called Koffin and operating under the guise of a figure called The Blind King, Terry has more wealth and power than Kris can even imagine. Kris has been bitter about Terry’s success for a long while, not least of which because she believes Terry ditched the band back in the day and stole all her music; but her fury is compounded a hundredfold at the beginning of the story, when she sees billboards everywhere and hears numerous radio ads plugging Koffin’s farewell tour, which promises to be the musical event of the century.

Because her miserable life is going nowhere, Kris decides that she’s going to get to the bottom of what happened with her former band, and how she ended up in her dire predicament. See, back in the 1990s, shortly after the Slayer gig, Terry and Dürt Würk’s manager presented all the band members—which then comprised Kris, Tuck, Bill, and Scottie Rocket—with seemingly lucrative contracts. Problem was, the contracts were essentially asking the members of Dürt Würk to give up all rights to the band and their music to Terry, for a hefty fee paid to each of them. While the guys seemed pissed off but grudgingly open to the terms, Kris was livid, accusing Terry of selling out and betraying them, and refusing to play along with his scheme.

But from that fateful occasion, known to all the band members as Contract Night, Kris has quite a large gap in her memory after she stormed out of the house. She can’t recall what exactly happened that night, and neither can the other guys, but Kris suspects that whatever occurred, it was the beginning of the downward spiral that sucked her and her bandmates down, and also the start of Terry’s meteoric rise to megastardom, parallel events that Kris is certain are somehow linked.

After the premise of the story is established, We Sold Our Souls becomes something of a road-trip tale, as Kris abandons her old existence and attempts to reconnect with her former bandmates, trying to convince them to come with her to confront Terry at his final show in Las Vegas about whatever it was that took place on Contract Night. Because the other guys from Dürt Würk see her as a hated troublemaker who refused to go along with the sellout, she has an upward climb when she tries to contact them again, and what’s worse, as events unfold, it starts to become very clear that something supernatural, evil, far-reaching, and far beyond human understanding is behind the entire ugly affair.

Along the way, Kris has to tap back into her creative energy to battle the overwhelming forces she encounters, and of particular significance in that regard is a concept album called Troglodyte that she wrote back in the day, which Terry and their manager wouldn’t allow the band to release, for reasons which are eventually unveiled.

As a sideline, there’s also another minor character named Melanie, a Koffin fan who is trying to get across the country to see the Vegas show. She only turns up near the beginning and toward the end, but she serves as something of a mirror to Kris’s character, another young woman trying to make her way in the male-dominated metal scene, but more as an appreciator, whereas Kris is a creator who had her best ideas ripped off and undermined by a dude who only wanted money and fame and didn’t care who he fucked over to get it.

Like all of Grady Hendrix’s books, this is a blast, just a fun, gory ride from beginning to end. It’s also genuinely heartfelt, and will resonate hard with anyone of any musical subgenre who ever felt like their music of choice saved their lives and pulled them through difficult times. It’s also a subtle exploration of the struggles of poverty, and how easy it is to parcel out tiny portions of your soul just to obtain a few luxuries here and there, until one day you find that your entire soul—your passion, your dream, your reason for living—is completely gone, and you realize that you don’t even care all that much anymore. It’s a heavy concept, to be sure, but Hendrix always comes at things with such a light touch that his themes never feel intrusive or shoehorned in, and are simply rumbling under the surface for anyone who wants to pick up on them.

In short, We Sold Our Souls has pretty much anything you could ask for in a horror novel: it’s entertaining, it’s epic, it’s gross, it’s funny, it’s badass, it has great characters you really care about, and it has a real, earnest, beating heart at the center of it that makes the stakes of the story seem that much more earth-shattering. Metal fans in particular will probably love it, but anyone who enjoys fast-paced horror with sinister Satanic forces as the antagonists should dig it as well.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.