We Sold Our Souls: A Novel

by Grady Hendrix

Overview

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires comes a hard-rocking, spine-tingling horror novel about a washed-up guitarist of a ’90s heavy metal band who embarks on an epic road-trip across America and deep into the web of a sinister conspiracy.

Every morning, Kris Pulaski wakes up in hell. In the 1990s she was lead guitarist of Dürt Würk, a heavy-metal band on the brink of breakout success until lead singer Terry Hunt embarked on a solo career and rocketed to stardom, leaving his bandmates to rot in obscurity.

Now Kris works as night manager of a Best Western; she’s tired, broke, and unhappy. Then one day everything changes—a shocking act of violence turns her life upside down, and she begins to suspect that Terry sabotaged more than just the band. Kris hits the road, hoping to reunite Dürt Würk and confront the man who ruined her life. Her journey will take her from the Pennsylvania rust belt to a celebrity rehab center to a satanic music festival. A furious power ballad about never giving up, We Sold Our Souls is an epic journey into the heart of a conspiracy-crazed, pill-popping, paranoid country that seems to have lost its very soul.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781683693406
Publisher:	Quirk Publishing
Publication date:	06/14/2022
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	52,119
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Grady Hendrix is an award-winning and New York Times best-selling novelist and screenwriter living in New York City. He is the author of Horrorstör, My Best Friend’s Exorcism (which is being adapted into a feature film by Amazon Studios), We Sold Our Souls, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, and The Final Girl Support Group. Grady also authored the Bram Stoker Award–winning nonfiction book Paperbacks from Hell and These Fists Break Bricks: How Kung Fu Movies Swept America and Changed the World.

Read an Excerpt

Kris sat in the basement, hunched over her guitar, trying to play the beginning of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man.” Her mom had signed her up for guitar lessons with a guy her dad knew from the plant, but after six weeks of playing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” on a J.C. Penney acoustic, Kris wanted to scream. So she hid in the park when she was supposed to be at Mr. McNutt’s, pocketed the $50 fee for the two lessons she skipped, combined it with all her savings, and bought a scratched-to-hell Fender Musicmaster and a busted-out Radio Shack amp from Goldie Pawn for $160. Then she told her mom that McNutt had tried to watch her pee, so now instead of going to lessons Kris huddled in the freezing cold basement, failing to play power chords.
     Her wrists were bony and weak. The E, B, and G strings sliced her fingertips open. The Musicmaster bruised her ribs where she leaned over it. She wrapped a claw around the guitar’s neck and pressed her sore index finger on A, her third finger on D, her fourth finger on G, raked her pick down the strings, and suddenly the same sound came out of her amp that had come out of Tony Iommi’s amp. The same chord 100,000 people heard in Philly was right there in the basement with her.
     She played the chord again. It was the only bright thing in the dingy basement with its single 40-watt bulb and dirty windows. If Kris could play enough of these, in the right order, without stopping, she could block out everything: the dirty snow that never melted, closets full of secondhand clothes, overheated classrooms at Independence High, mind-numbing lectures about the Continental Congress and ladylike behavior and the dangers of running with the wrong crowd and what x equals and how to find for y and what the third person plural for cantar is and what Holden Caulfield’s baseball glove symbolizes and what the whale symbolizes and what the green light symbolizes and what everything in the world symbolizes, because apparently nothing is what it seems, and everything is a trick.
     This was too hard. Counting frets, learning the order of the strings, trying to remember which fingers went on which strings in which order, looking from her notebook to the fretboard to her hand, every chord taking an hour to play. Joan Jett didn’t look at her fingers once when she played “Do You Wanna Touch Me.” Tony Iommi watched his hands, but they were moving so fast they were liquid, nothing like Kris’s arthritic start-and-stop. It made her skin itch, it made her face cramp, it made her want to bash her guitar to pieces on the floor.
     The basement was refrigerator cold. She could see her breath. Her hands were cramped into claws. Cold radiated up from the concrete floor and turned the blood inside her feet to slush. Her lower back was stuffed with sand. She couldn’t do this.
     Water gurgled through the pipes as her mom washed dishes upstairs, while her dad’s voice sifted down through the floorboards reciting an endless list of complaints. Wild muffled thumps shook dust from the ceiling as her brothers rolled off the couch, punching each other over what to watch on TV. From the kitchen, her dad yelled, “Don’t make me come in there!” The house was a big black mountain, pressing down on Kris, forcing her head into the dirt.
     Kris put her fingers on the second fret, strummed, and while the string was still vibrating, before she could think, Kris slid her hand down to the fifth fret, flicked the strings twice, then instantly slid her hand to the seventh fret and strummed it twice, and she wasn’t stopping, her wrist ached but she dragged it down to ten, then twelve, racing to keep up with the riff she heard inside her head, the riff she’d listened to on Sabbath’s second album over and over again, the riff she played in her head as she walked to McNutt’s, as she sat in algebra class, as she lay in bed at night. The riff that said they all underestimated her, they didn’t know what she had inside, they didn’t know that she could destroy them all.
     And suddenly, for one moment, “Iron Man” was in the basement. She’d played it to an audience of no one, but it had sounded exactly the same as it did on the album. The music vibrated in every atom of her being. You could cut her open and look at her through a microscope and Kris Pulaski would be “Iron Man” all the way down to her DNA.
     Her left wrist throbbed, her fingertips were raw, her back hurt, the tips of her hair were frozen, and her mom never smiled, and once a week her dad searched her room, and her older brother said he was dropping out of college to join the army, and her little brother stole her underwear when she didn’t lock her bedroom door, and this was too hard, and everyone was going to laugh at her.
     But she could do this.

Editorial Reviews

Nominated for the 2018 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel 
A 2019 Locus Award finalist for Best Horror Novel
An NPR Pop Culture Happy Hour Pick
An io9 2018 Fall Preview Pick
A 2018 Goodreads Choice Award Finalist

“A good, creepy, music-tinged thriller.”—CNET

“The quintessential horror-metal novel for our times.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Kickass, horrifying, and smart as hell. It certainly earns my two horns up.”—Dread Central

“An addictive read for the metalhead and horror hound alike.”—Bloody Disgusting 

“Hendrix is an indie horror legend, and We Sold Our Souls is one of his best.”—Book Riot

“Wild and fun, genuinely terrifying in places, and also somehow heartfelt.”—Tor.com

“Hendrix’s horror chops are nigh-unassailable at this point.”—B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy blog

“A fast-paced ride, firmly rooted in the pulp horror tradition…Hendrix’s darkest novel yet will leave readers begging for an encore.”—Booklist, starred review

“Enthralling and intense...The plot goes 0 to 100 real quick, and once it does, you won’t want to put the book down.”—Sean Curry, UC San Diego Bookstore bookseller, in the San Diego Union-Tribune

“If you see me in the wild and I'm reading a book that was written by Grady Hendrix, interrupt me at your own peril.”—Sarah Gailey, Hugo-Award winning author of Magic for Liars

More praise for Grady Hendrix:
“National treasure Grady Hendrix follows his classic account of a haunted IKEA-like furniture showroom, Horrorstor (2014), with a nostalgia-soaked ghost story, My Best Friend’s Exorcism.”—The Wall Street Journal, on My Best Friend’s Exorcism

“Pure, demented delight.”—The New York Times Book Review, on Paperbacks from Hell

“Horrorstör delivers a crisp terror-tale...[and] Hendrix strikes a nice balance between comedy and horror.”—The Washington Post, on Horrorstör

“Terrific... Sharply written... [My Best Friend’s Exorcism] makes a convincing case for [Hendrix’s] powers as a sharp observer of human behavior.”—The A.V. Club, on My Best Friend’s Exorcism

“A true appreciation of the genre.”—Los Angeles Times, on Paperbacks from Hell

“Campy. Heartfelt. Horrifying.”—Minnesota Public Radio, on My Best Friend’s Exorcism

“An inventive, hilarious haunted house tale.”—Bustle, on Horrorstör
 
“Clever, heartfelt, and get-under-your-skin unnerving.”—Fangoria, on My Best Friend’s Exorcism

From the Publisher

08/01/2018
When Isabelle's daughter wakes her up because she cannot find the bathroom outside their caravan, Isabelle thinks someone has played a horrible trick on them and the other three families camping nearby. But the campground has suddenly vanished, and family is parked on green grass that stretches as far as they can see. The sky is bright blue, but there's no sun. In fact, there is nothing at all to show them where they are: no trees, no buildings, no animals, no civilization. Most electric devices do not work, and the radios only play 1960s pop singer Peter Himmelstrand. As the story unfolds, the four families work together to discover where they are and if a way out is possible. Dark fears and desires and past events the characters have tried to bury are coming to light under the bright sunless sky, and there may be no way to survive it. VERDICT Swedish sensation Lundqvist's (Let the Right One In) twisting journey into the dark corners of the mind is true psychological horror. It will keep entranced and shocked readers guessing until the very end.—Kristi Chadwick, Massachusetts Lib. Syst., Northampton

Library Journal