2012 modern horror. Billy Moon is a goth rock idol, but he's starting
to think his producer Trevor Rail might be the Devil. Isolated in a
rural studio in upstate New York, he knows he's got to make his third
hit record… if it kills him.
The thing that's really wrong with this is its predictability.
For too much of the book, it's a cycle of something weird happening,
and Billy (or Jake, the junior sound engineer who's the other
viewpoint character) wondering whether there ain't some kinda Weird
Shit going down. And then it all starts again, often with mentions of
Robert Johnson.
That's interspersed with recording studio technicalities from the
dying days of tape (the book's set in 1996, and Wynne had worked as an
engineer before writing this), and everyone getting increasingly
off-base. Rail is pushing everybody, Billy in particular, to be on
edge in order to get the sound he wants, but is he orchestrating the
spooky stuff too?
That's answered at about the three-quarters mark, and (alas that it's
so late) that's when the book gets really good and starts to have the
courage of its convictions. There's an obvious debt to Machen here,
but Wynne has thought through the implications and possibilities, and
woven the bits that fit together into a consistent mythology.
Female characters are distinctly lacking both in presence and in
agency, which I suppose may be considered part of the nineties
rock-and-roll mindset of the protagonists, though it's still a pity.
Not a game-changing book, but decently written even if the pace is
slack at times.
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