Metalheads take on the world in John Wray’s new novel
It’s a miracle anyone survives adolescence. Those who do, do so despite their best efforts to self- destruct. This is one way to read John Wray’s new novel, “Gone to the Wolves.”
Wray’s interest in adolescence suffuses two of his earlier novels. “Lowboy” ( 2009) tracks 24 hours in the life of a schizophrenic New York City teenager off his meds. “Godsend” ( 2018) follows an 18- year- old California girl who disguises herself as a man to fight with the Taliban.
The main character of “Gone to the Wolves” is Kip Norvald, a senior in high school, class of 1988, newly transferred from Tallahassee to sleepy Venice, Fla., on the central Gulf Coast, to live with his grandmother. His father is in prison for beating up his mother, and his mother sends Kip and his grandma occasional letters asking for money but is otherwise unfindable. Kip has inherited his father’s fits of rage and sometimes enters a mind state he calls the “White Room” — as when he smashes his fist through a Coke machine to scare off a white weed dealer who’s threatening a Black student from hi s new school.
The student is Kip’s first friend in his new town, Leslie Vogler, who is four times the outcast in Venice: Black, adopted ( by white parents), bisexual and a fan of the Finnish glam metal band Hanoi Rocks. He introduces Kip to Florida’s nascent death metal scene, and another way to read this book is as a raucous and obsessive appreciation of that scene and its history.
Wray clearly takes pleasure in research, but it doesn’t bog down the story, which stays fixed on its characters and their attraction to this genre of music powered by brutal riffs and garbage- disposal screams, at a place and time that would prove momentous. “Bands from Los Angeles, from New York, from Oakland, from Copenhagen were moving to Tampa, to Sarasota, even to Venice. It made no sense but it was beautiful,” Wray writes. “Gulf Coast Florida was suddenly the center of the world.”
The bands played in roller rinks and the parking lots of youth centers, bands that today are canonical to the genre: Cannibal Corpse, Obituary, Deicide and Death, whose lead singer’s mom goes to Leslie’s church. “He was being offered the same purifying fear, the same catharsis, the same revelation midnight slasher movies gave,” Kip realizes when he hears the opening riffs of Death’s “Denial of Life,” “that everything wasn’t going to be all right. Not now and not ever. And that made perfect sense to him.”
At a show, Kip meets Kira Beth Carson, who lives with her violent father in a trailer park near “the Grids,” miles of abandoned Mcmansions left to rot in the sun and rain. Her white hot “death wish” burns brighter than anyone’s, and of course Kip falls hopelessly in love with her. Kira is ever on the hunt for what is “true,” “but what Kira Carson considered ‘ true,’ Kip quickly came to understand, was pretty much as brutal as it got.”
After high school, the three relocate to Los Angeles at the height of hair metal. Kira works at the Rainbow Room, where members of Motorhead and Motley Crue drink themselves into oblivion, and Kip works for a screen printer whose obsession is metal’s great “schism,” between the “Cult of Dionysus,” who worship “at the altar of sex, drugs and melody,” and the “Cult of Set,” who are “devotees of chaos.”
“Van Halen, Faster Pussycat, Ratt, W. A. S. P., Poison, Whitesnake, Twisted Sister, the Crue — Dionysians all,” Wray writes. “Slayer, Death Angel, Deicide, Megadeth, Anthrax — team chaos, as their names made abundantly clear.” The former bands belie a lack of seriousness Kip finds offensive to metal’s true sensibility, which is to destroy sensibility itself.
Inspired by his contempt for Kira’s boyfriend’s terrible “pay- to- play” band, the name of which changes almost weekly, and whose glitter canon puts them squarely in the Dionysian camp, Kip begins writing reviews for a zine published by the print shop’s owner, and soon for other magazines, including Kerrang! Leslie, for his part, finds himself more reviled and alienated than ever, and soon loses so much to the hedonism and misanthropy of the Los Angeles scene that he disavows metal altogether, and the trio disbands.
Another way to read Wray’s novel is through the lens of death metal’s socalled dark ages, particularly in the third act, when the friends end up in Norway in the early 1990s. It’s a time of suicides, beatings, burglaries, church burnings and murders. If in Florida and Los Angeles the fairy tale was in perpetual sunshine, then in Norway the fairy tale is in a winter forest where wolves come to feast on the flesh of young girls.
This act stars real and notorious members of the bands Burzum, Emperor and Mayhem, who congregate in the Oslo record store Helvete ( Norwegian for “hell”). Oystein Aarseth of Mayhem and Varg Vikernes of Emperor are two leaders of the “Black Metal Inner Circle,” rumored to be a satanic terrorist cult.
Here the urge to self- destruct proves too strong for some; one member of the circle is reported to have burned himself to death inside his car. Continuing a trend she began in Los Angeles, Kira quickly falls in with this band of militant misfits, ever chasing the brutal truth of real life — or at least something even more brutal than her own past. “The farther she traveled from her father’s house, apparently, the less the world oppressed her,” Wray writes.
As terrifying as the novel becomes, it’s also, at its core, a lot of fun. Its characters are kids hurling themselves at the world, escaping their past as much as finding themselves. They are reckless and headstrong but relatable. Each is essentially powerless when the story opens: traumatized, poor, displaced, angry, yet freed by the force of the music they mainline together. “Gone to the Wolves” is an anti- establishment treatise, bildungsroman and extreme love letter to the flame of youth.
“Why metal?” Kip asks at one point. “Why music at all?”
The answer: It “speaks to the young in the speech of the young.”