Rough Beast - by Adrian Van Young (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

When Percy LeBlanc, the lead singer and guitarist of up-and-coming New Orleans black metal band, Bethlehem, is brutally murdered after a disastrous performance on the last stretch of an even more disastrous tour, their unassuming wallflower of a bass player is arrested. Sammy Singerman is subsequently freed, with only circumstantial evidence to connect him to the crime, but he won't let the unquiet dead rest. Taking on the role of both detective and avenging angel, Sammy goes hell-for-leather to find Percy's killer, plumbing Bethlehem's history of trauma for answers before the killer finds him too.

A provocative subversion of the real-life saga of murder and criminal one-upmanship which plagued Scandinavia's own metal scene in the early 1990s, at once reminiscent of Elizabeth Hand's Cass Neary novels and Grace Krilanovich's The Orange Eats Creeps, Rough Beast is a drug-soaked sewer ride straight into the grimy underbelly of the Big Easy, where nothing is sacred and nothing stays buried.

Review Quotes

At the start of Martin Scorsese's concert documentary The Last Waltz, a title card reads, "This film should be played loud!" That line came to mind as I read Adrian Van Young's latest barnburner of a novel, Rough Beast. An insider's take on the black metal music scene and a love letter to the city of New Orleans, this big-chorded, big-hearted murder mystery is the perfect fix for anyone still strung-out from Sam Lipsyte's No One Left to Come Looking for You. Van Young has crafted that rarest of things, a literary page-turner, the kind with the guts to have a plot and the soul to sheathe its characters in flesh, bone, and blood. Rough Beast isn't music. It's an entire sound, and that's a ringing endorsement. Turn this mother up! --Snowden Wright, author of American Pop and The Queen City Detective Agency

Like his namesake Percy Bysshe Shelley, Rough Beast's Percy is a well-born, restless and tragic figure, reimagined as a doomed exemplar of the NOLA black metal scene. It's spot on, and frankly kind of hot. Van Young's controlled, finely rendered narrative is part murder mystery, part Velvet Goldmine-style genre valentine shot through with longing and loss. Rough Beast radiates lavish danger and mystique suitable to its New Orleans setting--and, in keeping with the spirit of the Romantics, is unabashed in its intensity, vulnerability, and heart. --Grace Krilanovich, author of The Orange Eats Creeps

Black metal, neo-noir, and black humor mixed together into something shockingly bright and compelling. Van Young takes some of music's most diabolical history and transforms it into a purely American mystery novel (and a killer playlist too). --Jordan Harper, Edgar-winning author of She Rides Shotgun and Everybody Knows

Rough Beast pulls the reader into a sub-cultural experience that will challenge how they view the world, the sometimes parasocial music industry, and friendship. Darkness surrounds the characters who navigate the underbelly of New Orleans's underground music scenes, illuminating the trials, tribulations, but also the ambition and creativity that despite a tragedy, demonstrates how friendship, chosen family and most importantly, love, guides these characters through a violent, life-changing experience. Van Young accurately depicts what the underground metal scene is about: Stunning artistic creativity that is often blurred through drugs, social class, sexuality, race, and emotional dysfunctions, but is coupled with the character's fierce determination to always stay true to oneself. The characters, despite sometimes being unlikeable and contradictory, are delicately portrayed by Van Young, making them jump from the page and leaving a lasting impression. Whether the reader has experienced the musical or cultural aspects of black metal or not, Rough Beast takes them into an intriguing journey that they will never forget. --Laina Dawes, author of What Are You Doing Here Anyway: A Black Woman's Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal

New Orleans is a beautifully cruel city--or should I say cruelly beautiful? A subtropic, psychotropic, atypical place with a mystery behind every cypress tree and music creeping from every sewer. Add some occult rock 'n roll and a bit of murder, and Rough Beast melts in your hands with paranoid humidity. --Mike "IX" Williams, singer of EyeHateGod and author of Cancer as a Social Activity

Rough Beast is a howling homage to the extreme music of New Orleans, where the term "blackened sludge" applies to both the homegrown metal scene and to the muck pushed through the pumps that keep the city from drowning in its own filth. Adrian Van Young's riffs on music are nothing short of sublime, but make no mistake: Rough Beast is a five-star sewer ride... --Jim Ruland, author of Mightier Than the Sword and Corporate Rock Sucks

About the Author

Adrian Van Young is the author of four books of fiction--most recently, a novel, Rough Beast. His short fiction, essays and criticism have been published in Conjunctions, Guernica, BOMB, Granta, and McSweeney's, among many others. He lives in New Orleans with his family, where he teaches intermittently, but is mostly a professional freelance editor. Read more at: adrianvanyoung.com.