Review: We Sold Our Souls

We Sold Our Souls by Grady Hendrix
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My people at the Stanford Bookstore, when we got our latest shipment of ARCs, thought this one would be tailor-made for me. After all, I liked My Best Friend's Exorcism, certainly well enough to try and hand-sell it a lot of the time, right? Well, this latest from Mr. Hendrix deviates a bit from the culture of the 80s and moves into a culture I'm far less well-versed in: metal. Perhaps not being the metalhead I know a lot of my friends to often be - cough KODA cough - I was often struggling to really grok the significance of a lot of the references herein, and just in general having trouble connecting to the characters for the most part. And for being all about the selling of souls and demonic shit, none of that really popped for me - I just felt that it was a little too much about the demon in us all, that it felt a little too metaphorical. Not like MBFE where it was pretty unambigously not a metaphor. Then again, after a while, I did kinda zone out on this one. But that said, though, it delivered pretty well on absolute grodiness - often to a degree more appropriate for punk than metal, methinks, with our protagonist Kris having to watch a hotel guest wander into her lobby naked and piss all over the floor just 'cause. So I'm not going to write this book off, but I'm certainly going to hope that it's the worst Hendrix book I read. (Bear in mind this is only the second one I have.)

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