The one album Kip, Leslie and Kira can agree on is Metallica’s “ Ride the Lightning,” a monument of thrash that captures the animus of punk and the theatricality of metal without getting too grandiose. The fact that the horror embedded in songs by bands like Morbid Angel, Deicide and Cannibal Corpse doesn’t come close to what’s at the core of Kira’s truth tells us it’s likely more than we - or anyone - should be asked to bear. Wray chooses not to describe the damage at the root of Kira’s trauma. Wray knows his stuff, and he masterfully sets the table, allowing Kira to pursue her own darkness and confront it where it lives. The concept of exorcism is often associated with heavy metal, but ultimately metal is where you go to meet your demons, not purge them. To enter extreme music is to go to a place beyond melody or rhythm or even narrative, a place that leads to the darkness within the listener. Sometimes you enter a piece of music sometimes it enters you. To love music is to be on intimate terms with a magical revolving door. “Chronology is an illusion, if not a deliberate lie,” a character posits in “The Lost Time Accidents,” the fourth offering from novelist John Wray. Its repercussions push the trio to Northern Europe, where Kira finds herself in genuine peril and the novel swerves from a coming-of-age story into a freaky-deaky horror show.īooks Review: In ‘The Lost Time Accidents,’ John Wray balances the logical and the ludicrous Kip embraces Kira’s notion that metal is a tool for excavating truth, and his truth is the White Room, an urge for violence that is part fatal flaw, part transcendental calling. You spend more time on your bangs than you do on your songs.” He ends his diatribe by telling Vince “a storm is coming” - but fails to heed his own warning. This is your conscience speaking.” He proceeds to shred Vince as “an embarrassment to yourself and to your family. In the bathroom of the Rainbow Room, where Kira works, Kip addresses the semi-comatose singer for Mötley Crüe: “Wake up, Vince. That’s one of the more hopeful messages encoded in “Gone to the Wolves”: If you can get through your childhood, you can make it through anything.īy refusing to imbue the shenanigans of the Sunset Strip with the banal glamour of MTV, Wray correctly presents it as a cultural morass even less enlightened than the Youth Center parking lot in Venice, Fla. Kip, Leslie and Kira know how to survive a backwater. Metal is not a cult or an ideological system but a scene, and a scene is always a cultural backwater of the mainstream. Kip’s takedowns of the pay-to-play fame seekers who cavort about the Whisky a Go Go’s stage on weekday nights to half-empty rooms with glitter cannons and paisley scarves, are scabrous enough to give the likes of Lester Bangs and Kickboy Face pause. “He couldn’t shake the feeling,” Wray writes, “that all it would take to bring the whole scene crashing down would be for someone, just one random person, to look around and start laughing.” (Though the band isn’t named, that’s the effect Nirvana had when it broke out in 1991 and sent hair metal back to the underground.) Kip’s musical taste is defined by what he doesn’t like, and as he reinvents himself as a reviewer for a zine called Hair of the Serpent, he discovers plenty to dislike in the druggy lore of the Sunset Strip. She talks about “Hard+Fast,” a new collection of her photos. ![]() ![]() Melanie Nissen was there at the creation of L.A. punk’s house photographer remembers her best shots These rumors are bolstered by Kip’s proclivity for slipping into a violent fugue-like state he calls the White Room whenever he’s threatened or stressed.īooks L.A. His arrival is attended by a raft of rumors about his incarcerated father and drug-addicted mother, as well as his own involuntary stay in a mental health facility. In his latest outing, he has nailed his milieu.Ĭhristopher “Kip” Norvald is the proverbial new kid in town, who moves to Venice, Fla., to live with his grandmother and finish high school. Wray is the acclaimed author of five previous novels, ranging from the voice-driven (“Lowboy”) to the historical (“The Right Hand of Sleep”) and the experimental (“The Lost Time Accidents”). ![]() This is certainly the case for the three main characters in “ Gone to the Wolves,” an outstanding new novel by John Wray set in the world of ’80s heavy metal. Enduring everything from insults to parking lot beat-downs, devotees of extreme music earn their fandom. This is why headbangers and punks are the most loyal fans on the planet. There is a direct relationship between the amount of crap you take for the music you love and the depth of your devotion to it. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.
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