I recently bumped into a discussion online where I suggested that books are collaborative efforts between writer and reader. The topic was symbolism and my point was that, even if a writer avoids it both consciously and subconsciously, a reader can find it anyway because we bring our very own experiences to everything we read. I mention it now because I quickly compared this book to Mike Bockoven's 'FantasticLand', just built around a band not a theme park, but the general consensus seems to be to compare it to 'Daisy Jones and the Six', just written as horror rather than general fiction. Both are probably fair, but we choose which has meaning for us. There are probably dozens of right answers.

Either way, the framework here is that the author—Craig DiLouie—didn't write this book as much as he collated it through interviews, starting with Lily Lawless, former singer and guitarist for the massively successful pop punk band known as the Shivers. He's the gatherer of information that he presents to us here. The inevitable suggestion is that we can choose to believe it or not and it isn't hard to go either way for over half the book, even though we know from the outset which way puts us into horror territory, which is the label on the spine.

We start at the end twelve years ago. The Shivers have achieved massive success over a sustained period of time but then Lily ends it, partway through a tour. They're over. Shortly afterwards, she walks into a police station and confesses to murder. While there's no body and no weapon, she has determination and ends up locked up for twelve years. Yes, she'll be getting out very soon now, an important reason why she chose to break her silence now and talk to DiLouie, given that she—and the rest of the band: bassist Eric Borkowski; drummer Ramona Perez and keyboard player Malcolm Williams—has kept quiet about everything throughout that period.

This unfolds in sections and starts out relatively routine. There's Lily and Drake and religion, with non-band members talking about the Christian concept of the Antichrist of the title like it's going to have bearing. They decide to form a band and recruit three other members, so their voices join in. Drake's is the only one missing and it remains so throughout. Officially, Drake Morgan, doesn't seem to exist and, while he was the original singer and guitarist for the Shivers who later quit and joined Universal Priest instead, vanished along with the rest of the band after their final gig.

Everything here flows easily. While I haven't read him before, DiLouie is an experienced writer of a long string of books and he's been Stoker-nominated. However hard he slogged away at this, it's apparently effortless. He's also patient, because, while we know from the title and the back cover blurb and the setup that Drake Morgan is the actual Antichrist, we can easily buy into that simply being hyperbole from an enthusiastic PR bod. And we can believe that a long way into the book.

From what I read about it, that may be why 'Daisy Jones and the Six' comes up so often. Everything here rings true, at least generally, about the birth and growth of a band, but that isn't horror. We find ourselves at the Shivers's first gig, at an Irish pub called Flanagan's; their second at the larger and more dedicated Hobo Underground; and their first festival, the Sunburst, hosted at Harmony Farm that's run by hippies. There's a review of the first in a local paper and everything in it, about how the band held the audience in a spell for an hour and many of them left crying, could be hype, pure and simple.

What Lily and her bandmates suggest is that we should take it literally, along with the fact that in the aftermath of the show, those remaining launched into an orgy of decadence. That happens at the gig itself at the Hobo Underground and they can't even finish a single song at Sunburst before the whole place erupts into a riot. By that point, Lily quits, only to find that Drake chooses to give her the band instead and leave himself. Even here, everything about the magic being gone once a frontman leaves could be taken either with or without a supernatural take. Every band who loses an important member goes through this. It doesn't have to be because they have satanic power.

Eventually, of course, there's only one way to take it and that happens in a scene late enough that I'm not going to spoil it, other than to say that it's a heck of an awakening. The last time I saw any book ratchet up an ominous but relatively calm build a dozen notches at once was Philip Fracassi's 'Boys in the Valley' and that scene still resonates with me. This one will too. Let's just say that in a world with an actual Antichrist, there are a lot of religious folk who find themselves called to take him on, which is why seemingly mad clergy rush the Universal Priest stage with antique swords.

At this point, everyone decides to get really serious, including DiLouie himself. If we'd managed to convince ourselves that everything weird here is explainable through PR and sheer hyperbole, it's a horror novel on out regardless.

There's irony in the fact that Drake is such a magnetic character, given that he's the only one who isn't given his own voice. After all, if he's really the Antichrist and we're reading DiLouie's account of something that happened a dozen years ago, then he lost and isn't around to tell his tale. Thus we experience him through the words of others. What surprised me is that he isn't interesting for being the Antichrist, he's interesting because he doesn't really know that he's the Antichrist, not yet at least. He feels like he has a purpose and things are aligning for him, but also that somehow he's remembering more about it the more time passes.

Certainly he isn't the traditional take on the Antichrist and the contributions here from everyone not involved in the music business—we don't just hear from the band but other musicians, as well as managers, DJs, record company execs, venue owners, battle of the band judges, you name it—get downright theological. I wasn't expecting that. By the time we close the final page, we aren't merely imagining the next stage in an eternal cycle of good versus evil but about why God created evil, what free will really means and, goddamn it, the meaning of life. You don't have to get deep, but it's pretty hard not to take yourself there.

While this is generally a success, another sizeable book I knocked out over a day—being sick for a week has done wonders for my reading—there are problems too. It's longer than it has any need to be, for a start. I was never bored but then I'm a music fan. What a new band goes through as it forms and evolves is interesting stuff, completely aside from the horror angle, and DiLouie gives us admirably deep characters to populate the band. However, there's a lot more of it than there needs to be for the story's sake and readers here for the horror instead may well find it tedious.

On the flipside, I wonder what musicians might think of this. Everything rings true to me but from a rather generic standpoint. Genre doesn't seem to have a lot of meaning to these musicians, as if being in a band is more important than the style of music they play. That means that this is shorn of the credibility that another music-based horror novel like 'Suck-U-Bus' delivers. Its authors are clearly fans of the genre. After reading this book, I couldn't tell you if DiLouie even likes pop punk or not. Certainly he isn't a metalhead, even with two namedrops for the Great Kat, as he commits the rookie sin of conflating death metal with black metal.

At the end of the day, I'm just happy to read another rock horror novel, especially one given a new framework for the growing subgenre. I'm intrigued to read more from DiLouie. I'm wondering if a typical DiLouie book is more likely to feature theology than music. ~~ Hal C F Astell