Rough Beast

When Percy LeBlanc, the lead singer and guitarist of up-and-coming New Orleans black metal band, Bethlehem, is brutally murdered after a disastrous performance on the last stretch of an even more disastrous tour, their unassuming wallflower of a bass player is arrested. Sammy Singerman is subsequently freed, with only circumstantial evidence to connect him to the crime, but he won' t let the unquiet dead rest. Taking on the role of both detective and avenging angel, Sammy goes hell-for-leather to find Percy' s killer, plumbing Bethlehem' s history of trauma for answers before the killer finds him too.


A provocative subversion of the real-life saga of murder and criminal one-upmanship which plagued Scandinavia' s own metal scene in the early 1990s, at once reminiscent of Elizabeth Hand' s Cass Neary novels and Grace Krilanovich' s The Orange Eats Creeps, Rough Beast is a drug-soaked sewer ride straight into the grimy underbelly of the Big Easy, where nothing is sacred and nothing stays buried.