The Scream by John Skipp & Craig Spector (1988): Satanic Panic

Novels about rock'n'roll are difficult to pull off. When authors invent artists and their songs and try to write about the music industry from an insider's point of view they're leaving themselves wide open for criticism from a whole different type of critic: the rock'n'roll nerd. Ironically, much of rock'n'roll is about being cool, not nerdy, and if an author can't get that attitude just right, it all comes off as smug and dorky rather than as admirable, aloof, and sexy - suddenly nerds are experts on cool. Splat-pack duo John Skipp and Craig Spector's magnum opus The Scream (Bantam, Feb 1988 - remember buying it on Easter Sunday that year!), about a truly and literally evil rock group, treads this oh-so-dangerous line. But in their intensity, their passion and their commitment to outright horror, S&S overplay their hand. They try a little too hard. The Scream isn't cool; it's loud, outrageous, enthusiastic, earnest, and often quite ugly. And yet, ironically again, that is about the actual definition of rock'n'roll.

Spector, Skipp, cautious passerby

Set against a nicely-drawn '80s backdrop of "moral majority" religious groups' outrage over "satanic" rock music and their attempts to censor it, The Scream offers up a huge cast of characters and relationships. Jake Hamer, a Vietnam vet, is now leader of a popular rock group; Jesse Malloy, girlfriend of Jake's guitarist, desperately trying to get an abortion; Pastor Furniss, the Falwell-esque religious leader out to bring down rock'n'roll; as well as band members and wives and exes and kids and groupies and bodyguards. And then there is the Scream, the mysterious titular band whose album The Critical Mass has kids coast-to-coast mad with rock-star obsession. But there's something more to them than just cocaine and limos and blown-out amps and a stage show that would put Live After Death-era Iron Maiden to shame, something dark and eternal, and a lead guitarist who admires the Marquis de Sade.

2001 hardcover reprint from Stealth Press

The Scream might be a bit overlong in its inter-connecting character arcs, the prose might be informal and sometimes painfully amateurish, but it has energy and drive and bloodshed to spare, and a positively Dantean climax. Not for nothing was this sub-sub-genre of '80s horror dubbed "splatterpunk." Its main characters are treated with some sympathy; its behind-the-scenes nuts-and-bolts have credibility; its Vietnam War flashbacks are effectively intense. In fact, parts of the novel made me think of a mashup between Oliver Stone's Platoon and The Doors, but with George Romero happily stepping in to direct scenes with the Screamers, the zombified, maniacal, and supernatural followers of the Scream:

The Screamer lay in a long skid mark of gore, twitching and flailing. His spinal column had been sheared away between the fourth and sixth vertebrae; his lower half dragged uselessly behind him, connected only by ruined tendrils of muscle and skin. The white fluted ends of his shattered spine jutted out into the cool night air... But the lunatic howl that spewed forth from his lips was somewhere between a laugh and a howl...

Over 20 years later, of course, all this is ripe for hipster humor; something like The Scream can be seen on Adult Swim now in the guise of Dethklok from "Metalocalypse" and their murderous and blood-drenched - yet hilarious - gorefest performances. But in the '80s, man, people were totally terrified by this heavy metal stuff, and I kind of miss that.

And I recommend looking for the first edition paperback because it comes with this totally bitchin' pull-out mini-poster (by Stan Watts) just like rock albums from days of yore. Done by an artist who actually read the book, too.