Mistcreek Publishing's Anthology 'Rock And Roll Mercenaries' Is A Literary Mosh Pit Of Pulp Fiction

Music, it has been said, is the voice of the Divine. A hyperbolic statement, perhaps, but the inexplicable power possessed by music to inspire and move listeners is undeniable. Who among us has not felt elation hearing our favorite song play on the radio, or experienced the heady adrenaline rush of a rock concert? Music is, quite literally, the soundtrack of our lives; the heartbroken are comforted with it, babies conceived to it, teen rebellion fueled by it. From African tribal chants to backwoods bluegrass jam sessions, multi-million dollar pop star spectacles to streetside hip hop block parties and everything in between, music is an essential, integral, aspect of the collective human experience.

Stories, too, contain unquestionable strength, and one bookseller who recognizes the synergy attained in fusing the written word with the raw soul-stirring vitality of music is Mistcreek Publishing, who arrive with a new multi-author collection called Rock And Roll Mercenaries. Subtitled A Pulp Rock Anthology, it’s 396 pages brimming with two-fisted action and musical mayhem.

Joe Cody is a tough-as-nails ‘Man Against Machine’ in Nathan Dabney’s explosive volume opener, escaping a night club to fight his way through an army of mechanized enforcers to reach his lady love. A band of interstellar soldiers-of-fortune battle their way across a moon inhabited by deadly creatures in order to attend the concert of the galaxy’s greatest metal band in TJ Marquis’ ‘An Unexpected Bonus, or Backstage Tickets to Freakin’ Psycho Trauma’. A burned-out war vet framed for a series of grisly murders must partner with a mysterious woman in order to combat the unearthly entities using a 1950’s rock ‘n roll dance show as a feeding ground ‘On A Hot Summer Night’ by Christopher R. DiNote. The roadie for a heavy metal band moonlights as a secret agent working to liberate human hostages from the reptilian overlords of a future America in Milton Lane’s ‘Viper: Devil’s Due’. ‘Dead Ringer For Love’ by Aaron Van Treeck concerns figures from Norse and Far East mythology dueling for the hand of a woman in a nightclub on a distant colonized moon. The power of a touring band’s music resurrects the spectral inhabitants of a ghost town in JD Cowan’s ‘Spirit Rock’.

When a demonic attack kills two of James Quicksilver’s bandmates mid-show and threatens the girl of his dreams, he joins forces with a wizened master to end the evil in N.R. LaPoint’s raucous romp, ‘Heavy Metal’. A music-loving dragon inside a composite humanoid body must defend a young girl from a vicious interstellar cartel in John A. Pretorious’s energetic ‘Scales On The Heart’. Hawkings Austin’s cypberpunk thriller ‘Red Tales: Serial Killer’ is about about a mercenary bodyguard in samurai armor hired to lead the security detail protecting a rock star in post-nuclear Los Angeles. Hot rods, a hot-headed driver, and a heat-packing priest feature in Erik Waag’s rollicking and rolling ‘Sign Of The Black Lotus’, the compilation-concluding installment about a sinister cult attempting to voodoo the crowd at a Chicago concert venue.

Every page in Rock And Roll Mercenaries explodes with great writing, memorable characters, mind-bending situations and furious action. Rejecting the current climate of downbeat, navel-gazing, nihilistic genre fiction, editor N.R. LaPoint flaunts an old-school Good-Triumphs-Over-Evil attitude, and the selected stories offer a literary mosh pit of fisticuffs, shootouts, sword fights, car chases, intergalactic adventures, androids, aliens, demons and angels. That emphasis on action, however, carries a price: for a book subtitled A Pulp Rock Anthology, Rock And Roll Mercenaries more often than not emphasizes the pulp aspect of its theme to the detriment of the rock part, and some readers may be disappointed to find that several of the included tales display only the most tenuous link to music. Yet of those wordsmiths who wholeheartedly embrace the collection’s dual motif, five are deserving of special praise for their overall excellency.

‘The Supersonic Voyage of the Rock Dinosaurs’ by Drako Billson and Pen Billson is a hypersonic blast of flash fiction fun about a space-going band of heavy metal dinos combating an insectoid alien race. A police officer with magickal roots must quell a mystical riot inspired by a honky-tonk group of fae musicians in Denton Salle’s amusing ‘If You’re Gonna Play in Texas, You’ve Got to Have A Fiddle’. A rebellious lycanthrope teenager uncovers an evil extraterrestrial plot to take over his small town in Jack McLiam’s exciting ‘Bad Attitude’. And a rock n’ roll album cover artist with the ability to traverse space-time through dreams meets his muse in Jacob Calta’s outstanding ‘An Airbrushed Odyssey’.

But the headliner of this pulp music festival is undoubtedly Michael Gallagher’s ‘Worst Live Show Ever’, about a metal band whose meddling with the infernal turns their performance into a literal conflagration between Heaven and Hell. More than any other writer, Gallagher understands and manages to perfectly capture the essence of the metal lifestyle in all its hilarious, contradictory, balls-out glory.

While the execution may be uneven at times, Rock And Roll Mercenaries remains an enjoyable book that will undoubtedly appeal to anyone eager for heavy tunes and heavier action, and as such earns a solid 3.5 (Out of 5) on my Fang Scale. I can’t wait for an encore.