In this hard-rocking supernatural thriller, the washed-up guitarist of a '90s heavy metal band embarks on an epic road-trip across America and deep into the web of a sinister conspiracy.
Grady Hendrix’s latest extravaganza of horror is wild and fun, genuinely terrifying in places, and also somehow heartfelt. It’s like The Stand and Our Band Could Be Your Life had the best baby (Our Stand Could Be Your Life?) and somebody slapped a Viking helmet on it and taught it to shred a guitar ... Hendrix digs into the subgenre and along the way gives us bits of knowledge about a lot of different types of metal ... We Sold Our Souls is an inversion of the typical rock story ... Hendrix shows us all the compromises people made for that success. He gives us a very interesting portrait of a modern artist, and interrogates the ways our current society makes it impossible to create art. And then, in a great, horrific way, he peels back the curtain and finds that sinister forces might be working against those artists ... This is, make no mistake, a horror novel. There is a chapter that was so intense I had to put the book down for a while ... Hendrix’s descriptions are so evocative some of it showed up in my nightmares ... Under the horror and the working-class realism, the touchstone is that all the real characters in this novel, all the people you genuinely care about? Music is their heartbeat ... this book is about music and found family just as much as its about an eldritch horror lurking beneath the facade of modern American life. And it rocks.
[We Sold Our Souls is] about Black Iron Mountain and soul-sucking corpse beasties. It’s rad ... We Sold Our Souls provides a convoluted but intelligible journey through the back-and-forth of life in poor America ... As with most horror novels, the monsters and moments of fear and revulsion in We Sold Our Souls are both affective, provoking emotional responses, and also deeply allegorical.
Hendrix...brings his quirky sense of humor to an energetic Faustian tale ... This is a fast-paced ride, firmly rooted in the pulp horror tradition, but with thought-provoking social criticism and a sense of fear that rises from the terrifying implication that we are all willing to sell our souls on the cheap. Hendrix’s darkest novel yet will leave readers begging for an encore.
