Needless to say, I acquire a lot of books, whether they're sent for review, whether I buy them from local authors I happen to meet or whether they're part of a collection built over a lifetime, but it's a rare title that arrives with presentation as stylish as this one. It's a horror novel, written by two local authors, about a heavy metal band on tour. Not only is the cover presented like the flyer to a gig, complete with promoter and special guest shoutouts, but it comes with a Suck-U-Bus beer mat and an honest to goodness ticket for their gig at the Steele Jar here in town back in 2007, part of a Backseat Tour 2006. The design elements here are priceless and I suddenly wish I'd attended.

Now, given who Suck-U-Bus are and what their gimmick happens to be, anyone reading this having devoured this novel already will immediately question why I wish I'd been there. That's because it isn't just a band, as per their own hype. Sure, they perform actual sets with actual songs and they seem to be highly talented, but they also allegedly entered into a pact with a succubus for mutual benefit. At the beginning of each set, the three Mothers who constitute the band venture into the audience and scrawl an X in what appears to be blood on the forehead of their choice of victim. At the end of the show when the lights go up, those three targets get to go backstage with the band and feed the inevitable rumours about what happens on their tour bus.

Given that the Mothers are indeed female and enticing in black long sleeved Victorian gowns and dark veils, this gimmick works a treat for their largely male audience and with female fans too. In particular, Danny Hummer, a quintessential twenty-something male metal fan, simply aches to be chosen and indeed he is, at the local Steele Jar show. Fortunately, he has the forethought to bring his sister Lisa along to the gig too, so that, when things start to go wrong, we have our story in her trying to figure out where he is and what's happened to him.

I'd usually call out how stereotypical Danny Hummer is at this point as a negative, but I won't because it's a fair stereotype. I've known plenty of Danny Hummers. In fact, I've even been Danny Hummer, near enough, even if I was never so desperate that I'd follow a band around from town to town across an entire tour just to see if I might get laid. Danny hints at that to Lisa even before he gets chosen in Phoenix and his world changes because of it. What I'll call out instead is how solidly grounded this is in the metal community. Sure, there are a bunch of Danny Hummers for real, but they're not the only metal fans, in our reality or in Suck-U-Bus's.

What's more, Mendes and Noir know their stuff and that grounds this book wonderfully. Possibly the worst aspects to growing up is learning about things, whether for work or for fun, to the point that you become experts in them, only to discover that the people covering those fields in fiction don't have a clue. I've bumped into Mendes often enough at gigs and, if Noir is the fan of My Dying Bride that seems fair to extrapolate, then she has even better taste than he does. This matters to me, because it's my subject and they handle it properly, from the opening conversations between Danny and Lisa, two metalheads with different tastes in subgenres.

I can happily read about scientists conducting lab experiments on rats, back stage organisation of a Florida theme park or the effects of colonisation on the folk religions of 19^th-century Sri Lanka, as indeed I have in recent months, and buy into everything for no better reason than it sounds like the authors know what they're talking about. However, when I read fiction that trawls in corporate IT, self-publishing or heavy metal, to cite just three examples, I'm frequently disappointed due to knowing absolutely that what's happening is complete and utter bollocks. This is not. I'd know.

What I don't know is how the two authors divvied up writing responsibilities. What I can say is that the story is told from Lisa's perspective as she puts her life on hold to follow Suck-U-Bus on tour to try to find her brother Danny. Even before she leaves Phoenix, there's a dead body, as Lisa tracks down a young lady who was chosen by the Mothers alongside Danny and finds her dead in what I'd suggest is a quintessential Mendes scene, given how easily it could be transplanted into one of his 'City' novels. However, Lisa isn't just a token female lead, she seems entirely believable, even if, of course, I have absolutely no idea what it means to be female. I might venture to guess that this is primarily Noir's writing but with plenty of input from Mendes.

Of course, other characters get trawled into the story and the bodies mount up, making us wonder whether the authorities would have figured out the connection between them before Lisa points it out to them in no uncertain terms. As Suck-U-Bus's tour schedule quickly takes them across state lines, from Arizona to New Mexico and up to Colorado, I can see how that could be complicated but I also couldn't help but recall Rob Halford's comments after the Judas Priest subliminal message trial, which was really as imaginative as this novel, about how it would be a crazy band who would kill off their own audience. Suck-U-Bus's business plan really wasn't incredibly well thought out, as inherently cool it might seem in fiction.

My favourite character was, as I'm sure it would be for most readers, the lady who's only known as Corpse Paint for the longest time. Suck-U-Bus do not play black metal but she shows up to gigs in a carefully applied corpse paint design anyway to warn each selected audience member of the risks inherent in going backstage with the band. Of course, nobody actually pays heed to her, but when things start to happen, they remember her offer to help and reach out. In some ways, the biggest success of this book is how Corpse Paint grows as a character.

I liked this a lot, but it's a short novel at a hundred and sixty pages, so it's there and gone roughly as quickly as a band breezing into town, lighting up the stage of the Steele Jar—presumably a nod to the Mason Jar, but that was before my time in Phoenix—and breezing on out again. However, it seems entirely possible that Mendes and Noir could spin up a sequel, given how the end this one, and I'd be very happy to get in line to buy tickets; whatever the reasons I might have for doing so. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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