Around 2011 or so, I drove out to Fort Worth, Texas from my home in Dallas, about a forty-minute drive, to catch the “Finnish Metal Tour” that was coming through. The bands were Ensiferum (“Sword Bearing” in Latin or something to that effect), Finntroll (figureheads of the troll metal subgenre), Barren Earth, and Rotten Sound, who dutifully fulfilled their promise (in a good way—they’re grindcore, which is supposed to sound like shit).
The appointed theater for the show had gone under construction and the promoters were forced to find a new venue. The substitute spot was—and I swear to you this is true—a sheet metal-clad biker bar honkytonk. Rolling up to the place, I felt like the Gecko brothers must have on their approach to the seedy strip club in From Dusk Till Dawn.
I stepped inside. To my left was the bar and just past that, a pool table with torn felt. Across the peeling vinyl flooring to the right was a plywood stage. A greasy haze hung just below the ceiling. It smelled of smoke and liquor and possibilities. I breathed it in. It was going to be a night for the ages.
The two openers, Barren Earth and Rotten Sound, did their thing, and by the time Ensiferum took the stage, the audience was packed in tight around me, stinking of beer, armed with ciggies, and ready to rock. Ensiferum launched into their set, belting out Viking songs about going into battle, being in battle, and returning from battle. Legendary. I’d been to metal shows before, but not to a Viking metal show, and what happened near the end, something I’ve seen many times since with Ensiferum and their ilk, cast the evening in new light.
A large swath of the audience sat down on the floor two-by-two in one long row. I don’t remember which song it was, but they all began to mime the act of rowing their imaginary Viking longboat to the rhythm of the music. I stood there, arms crossed and dumbfounded, as I marveled at the joy and complete lack of self-consciousness displayed by my fellow metalheads.
Finntroll came next. Predictably, their folk music-tinged metal centered on trolls. Or so I suppose—the lyrics were in Swedish. To give you an idea, just imagine happening upon a whimsical carnival in a snowy forest, with a giant bonfire at its center, with every sort of magical creature dancing a ring around it. You can’t hear yourself think, because the music is turned all the way up to goblin, which if you haven’t heard it, is loud.
Something like that happened before my very eyes. Without any prompting from the band, strangers throughout the audience linked arms and spun in circles like they were pregaming the renaissance faire. They even rolled one of the old regulars in a wheelchair into the throng and spun him around as he coolly smoked a menthol heater and pumped his fist.
Crowds of different stripes swirled together, the metalheads, the bikers, the everyday drunks, and the dorks who drove across town by themselves (me), reveling in merriment to a song about summoning an ancient sorcerer to smite humankind from the face of the Earth. Can you beat that? Well, you can try.
To me, the inspiring thing about metal music is that so many of these bands get together for a creative pursuit regardless of audience size or commercial prospects. They are about the pursuit of creation, putting their time, effort, and resources into spinning out musical tales of Vikings, or trolls, or goblins (Nekrogoblikon), or protecting a sacred text from an evil Rat Reaperess (Castle Rat), making friends with zombies (Destrage), falconing (Falconer), obscure UK folklore (Green Lung), sawing off of one’s own leg (Pig Destroyer), the horrors of outer space (Vektor), portal travel (Witch Ripper), digging in the mines with your fellow dwarves (Windrose), slugs (Slugdge), or just experimenting with a little metal-jazz fusion in a port-a-potty (Clown Core). They create for the love of creation.
That night, something was planted in me. A realization, an awakening about creative pursuits that I’ve held close ever since. To that point, I’d never thought deeply about art for art’s sake. Sure, I’d heard it, but I hadn’t internalized it to the point of really understanding it. This was something you put on a poster like that kitten hanging beneath the words “Hang in There.”
About four years later, I began writing. I knew nothing about it, not where the comma goes in dialogue tags or how to structure a story. But as I embarked on that journey of creation, I began thinking about that night. About those bands who’d come from across the world to play teeny venues that were certainly in violation of the applicable fire codes just to share what they’d created. At that time, I doubt they made any money after the touring expenses. This was about the love of creation, and of sharing it, about communion. I learned that when creativity is shared, it’s like magic, a cloud of interstellar dust giving birth to a star. At that concert, spacetime was spilled beer and the stardust was cigarette smoke, but still.
As I write from within the sidelined shadows where the horror genre lurks, I am reminded of the four hours I spent in that busted-ass, stinking shack. The people, the music. The communion. I think about the exploration we do as writers of horror, the audacity needed to push the boundaries of our art, and the trust we have that readers somewhere will commune with it, that the joining of our words with their imagination will birth tiny stars giving new understanding to the human condition, or change perspectives through blunt force. Doesn’t mean we always succeed, but like the avian-fronted metal band Hatebeak singing about brain transplants (“Put Your Brains into a Parakeet”), we tried. The center lane of the horror genre is broad, and I believe that is because our readers trust that we are sincere in our use of creation to explore who we are and what we are.
In keeping with the ebullient spirit of unbounded creation I felt watching those bands, I recently published a book called Daytide. What is it? Tough to say. Turpentine-drunk angels living on a planet covered in pine trees playing dress up as their favorite human entertainers, while an ambitious Priest assumes a by-any-means-necessary approach to saving the world from a psychological pandemic.
So, what is it? It’s metal, I know that. It’s horror too, with a strain of fantasy DNA. But mostly, it’s writing something audacious and not knowing if six people or six thousand will ever read it. It’s the freedom of the genre to experiment, paired with the grace of genre readers who say, “let me try that.”
Creation.
Communion.
And that’s why I love horror.
