Book Review: The Armageddon Chord by Jeremy Wagner

The Armageddon Chord by debut novelist Jeremy Walker is a dark work with a fresh twist on the battle of good vs. evil.

A heavy metal musician himself, it doesn't seem much of a stretch for Wagner to cast the world's best guitarist as his protagonist, Kirk Vaisto. After Egyptologist Helmut Hartkopff discovers an unplayed piece of music that is over 3,000 years old, his benefactor Festus Baustone III hires Vaisto to play it. The catch: this music is supposed to have been written by the devil and will call forth his minions when played.

Vaisto plays the music after it has been transcribed by Hartkopff. The music fills his mind with such evil images that the "God of Guitar" doesn't want to perform it live. Human evil pressures Vaisto to play the work. The performance is the dream and nightmare of any heavy metal fan or musician. The final battle pitching the legions of the devil against the armies of Heaven is expected but rendered with new imagery and a pulse-pounding pace representative of a rock concert.

I encourage fans of heavy metal and dark fiction to check out this new writer. He has an interesting future.

The Armageddon Chord

I want to give a shout out to a writer in my agent's stable. Jeremy Wagner is the first of Dawn Dowdle's clients to receive a review in Publishers Weekly. In the July 25, 2011 issue, The Armageddon Chord received the following review:

Death metal guitarist Wagner (of bands Broken Hope and Lupara) debuts with a highly entertaining, albeit predictable, blend of heavy metal and hardcore horror. Festus Baustone III, a morally bankrupt billionaire secretly suffering from terminal cancer, hires archeologists to uncover musical hieroglyphs that,if correctly translated, could ignite apocalypse.The dying tycoon then sets out to find a guitarist who can literally "raise Hell on Earth and wipe the world clean." Kirk Vaisto is just finishing up his latest solo album when his agent manipulates him into taking Baustone's offer, and soon the virtuoso rock guitarist finds himself at the center of a conspiracy with the spiritual future of humankind at stake. Electrified by breakneck pacing, a cast of over-the-top characters (a deformed Nazi Egypologist, a self-obsessed frontman, a stigmatic priest, etc.) and memorable lines like "The power of the riff compels you," this triller neatly exploits the considerable shared fanbase of apocalyptic fiction and Apocalyptica.

The book comes out in late August. Hint. Hint.

Way to go, Jeremy. Way to go, Dawn.