May 7, 2012
I met DJ Butler not too long ago, when he dropped into my inbox. A mutual friend had suggested we hook up, and let me tell you, I owe that mutual friend! DJ’s pulp series is FUN, FUN, FUN. The fourth installment of his rock band fighting evil came out right around the time King Trevor did, and I was busy with my own release and getting this place back up and running. Poor DJ had to wait all this time for his feature.
That means that once you’ve read this, you need to head over to Amazon and get yourself ALL the titles in the series. Yes, I’m serious. No, doing so won’t break the bank. (Especially because, for you freebie hunters, there are some this week only!)
Read on and see what song inspired this fourth episode, Devil Sent the Rain.
That’s an easy one: “Sympathy for the Devil.” I actually was going to use that title (all the Rock Band Fights Evil books steal their titles from blues, folk or rock songs), until I saw that it had already been done. Many, many times.
I choose “Sympathy for the Devil” for three reasons. First, I think we can all agree it’s a bitching song. And Rock Band Fights Evil is nothing if not bitching.
Second, the song is a devil’s eye retelling of the history of the human race. It’s epic in scope, involving great human wars and famous atrocities (the World Wars, the killing of Christ and the Kennedys) in a tale in which it’s not always easy to tell the cop from the criminal, the sinner from the saint. This is also true of Rock Band Fights Evil, which is a sort of rock ‘n’ roll telling of the apocalypse, revolving around a not-entirely-unsympathetic figure of Azazel, greatest of the Princes of Hell.
Third — and this is why I wanted to use the title for one of the books in the first place — the action in the early books is driven by sympathetic magic. (For anything who is now raising a puzzled eyebrow, the basic idea of sympathetic magic is that two things that are once together are always together, so you can take magical action on a part of something to cause an effect on the whole thing.) Azazel, imprisoned in the wastes of Dudael for centuries under a bath of holy water, lost a fragment of his hoof. The band, a gaggle of variously-damned men, grab the hoof fragment in book one and race towards Hell against the powers that want to snatch the hoof from them, because they want to use it in an act of sympathetic magic — think voodoo doll principles — to force Azazel to undamn them.
Hey, look, I think I’ve just given you my book blurb, too. Ha! Rock on!
(Sadly, it looks like the Stones have yanked all the video of this off the Internet. Shoot.)
[Note from Susan: I found one! Click that link above!]
Rock Band #1 is Hellhound on My Trail
Rock Band #2 is Snake Handlin’ Man
Rock Band #3 is Crow Jane
Rock Band #4 is Devil Sent the Rain
One final note: Be sure if you do nothing else, you check out the cover art for these books. They’re every bit as awesome and entertaining as the books themselves and I HATE that covers this slick have to be reduced to greyscale!
