Rough Beast

Black metal, neo-noir, and black humor mixed together into something shockingly bright and compelling. Van Young takes some of music’s most diabolical history and transforms it into a purely American mystery novel (and a killer playlist too).
—Jordan Harper, Edgar-winning author of She Rides Shotgun and Everybody Knows

Like his namesake Percy Bysshe Shelley, Rough Beast’s Percy is a well-born, restless and tragic figure, reimagined as a doomed exemplar of the NOLA black metal scene. It’s spot on, and frankly kind of hot. Van Young’s controlled, finely rendered narrative is part murder mystery, part Velvet Goldmine-style genre valentine shot through with longing and loss. Rough Beast radiates lavish danger and mystique suitable to its New Orleans setting—and, in keeping with the spirit of the Romantics, is unabashed in its intensity, vulnerability, and heart.
—Grace Krilanovich, author of The Orange Eats Creeps

New Orleans is a beautifully cruel city—or should I say cruelly beautiful? A subtropic, psychotropic, atypical place with a mystery behind every cypress tree and music creeping from every sewer. Add some occult rock ‘n roll and a bit of murder, and Rough Beast melts in your hands with paranoid humidity.
—Mike “IX” Williams, singer of EyeHateGod and author of Cancer as a Social Activity

Rough Beast is a howling homage to the extreme music of New Orleans, where the term “blackened sludge” applies to both the homegrown metal scene and to the muck pushed through the pumps that keep the city from drowning in its own filth. Adrian Van Young’s riffs on music are nothing short of sublime, but make no mistake: Rough Beast is a five-star sewer ride…
—Jim Ruland, author of Mightier Than the Sword and Corporate Rock Sucks

At the start of Martin Scorsese’s concert documentary The Last Waltz, a title card reads, “This film should be played loud!” That line came to mind as I read Adrian Van Young’s latest barnburner of a novel, Rough Beast. An insider’s take on the black metal music scene and a love letter to the city of New Orleans, this big-chorded, big-hearted murder mystery is the perfect fix for anyone still strung-out from Sam Lipsyte’s No One Left to Come Looking for You. Van Young has crafted that rarest of things, a literary page-turner, the kind with the guts to have a plot and the soul to sheathe its characters in flesh, bone, and blood. Rough Beast isn’t music. It’s an entire sound, and that’s a ringing endorsement. Turn this mother up!
—Snowden Wright, author of American Pop and The Queen City Detective Agency

Rough Beast pulls the reader into a sub-cultural experience that will challenge how they view the world, the sometimes parasocial music industry, and friendship. Darkness surrounds the characters who navigate the underbelly of New Orleans’s underground music scenes, illuminating the trials, tribulations, but also the ambition and creativity that despite a tragedy, demonstrates how friendship, chosen family and most importantly, love, guides these characters through a violent, life-changing experience. Van Young accurately depicts what the underground metal scene is about: Stunning artistic creativity that is often blurred through drugs, social class, sexuality, race, and emotional dysfunctions, but is coupled with the character’s fierce determination to always stay true to oneself. The characters, despite sometimes being unlikeable and contradictory, are delicately portrayed by Van Young, making them jump from the page and leaving a lasting impression. Whether the reader has experienced the musical or cultural aspects of black metal or not, Rough Beast takes them into an intriguing journey that they will never forget.
—Laina Dawes, author of What Are You Doing Here Anyway: A Black Woman’s Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal