Review: Lucifer Sam

Lucifer Sam by Leo Darke
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Review:

I raced through LUCIFER SAM in one session. Like a passenger on a runaway bullet train hearing a soundtrack of Death Metal, I could not pause and I certainly could not stop. LUCIFER SAM stole my breath, and once the novel truly started, there was no slowing down. Author Leo Darke went to the extremes of imagination (and metal) to bring this story home, and a powerfully impacting story it is.

Totally steeped in heavy metal and punk, LUCIFER SAM postulates behind-the-scenes scenarios of two bands, Cat of Nine Tails and Lucifer Sam. Cat recorded a popular first album, developed a fan base, then put their scrappy Cockney lead vocalist out to pasture. Unfortunately for Ray Starling, whose gritty rage powered that first album, Cat's leader and the other two members had different directions in mind. They went to a sort of middle-of-the-road cozy metal and reached "biggest band on the planet" status, while Ray spiraled into alcohol, depression, promiscuity, desperation, and frequent pub fights.

Lucifer Sam is another four-person metal band, led by Kirk. They're not making it big, scarcely even making it, and a lot of cracks in the surface hardly conceal the tensions and guilt underneath. Leader Kirk's girlfriend Rose is a long-time aficionado of Cat of Nine Tails, and ecstatic along with their enormous fan base when the band, missing over the Indian Ocean for six months, inexplicably returns. "Inexplicably" is the key word here, as is "impossible." But if this is a miracle, it came from the Devil himself. Cat of Nine Tails is NOT who or what they were before they disappeared. They went looking for a new musical direction, and they found it: or rather, Something found them. Now they are the portal to inescapable evil and apocalypse.

Rated 18+ for extreme violence, language, sexual scenes.


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