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Gone to the Wolves
Gone to the Wolves: A Novel | John Wray
4 posts | 2 read | 1 reading | 4 to read
The award-winning author John Wray dives deep into the wild, risky world of heavy metal in the 1980s and '90s. Kip, Leslie, and Kira are outlierseven in the metal scene they love. In arch-conservative Gulf Coast Florida in the late 1980s, just listening to metal can get you arrested, but for the three of them the risk is well worth it, because metal is what leads them to one another. Different as they are, Kip, Leslie, and Kira form a family of sorts that proves far safer, and more loving, than the families they come from. Together, they make the pilgrimage from Florida's swamp country to the fabled Sunset Strip in Hollywood. But in time, the delicate equilibrium they've found begins to crumble. Leslie moves home to live with his elderly parents; Kip struggles to find his footing in the sordid world of LA music journalism; and Kira, the most troubled of the three, finds herself drawn to ever darker and more extreme strains of metal. On a trip to northern Europe for her twenty-second birthday, in the middle of a show, she simply vanishes. Two years later, the truth about her disappearance reunites Kip with Leslie, who in order to bring Kira home alive must make greater sacrifices than they could ever have imagined. In his most absorbing and ambitious novel yet, John Wray dives deep into the wild, funhouse world of heavy metal and death cults in the 1980s and '90s. Gone to the Wolves lays bare the intensity, tumult, and thrill of friendship in adolescencea time when music can often feel like life or death.
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blurb
vivastory
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Gone To The Wolves follows three friends who bond over music, specifically underground heavy metal music. Leslie, Kira & Kip first meet as teens in Venice, FL, in the mid 80s towards the end of high school. However the story follows them to LA & then to Scandinavia (specifically Norway). I heard an interview with Wray talking about the book where he said that he built the narrative so that the journey of the characters mirrors that of (CONT)

vivastory the history of heavy metal itself: from the youthful energy & devotion at the beginning to the theatrics when it was becoming more mainstream & then when it diverged into offshoots such as Norwegian Black metal & the problems this caused. I had a few narrative issues with this book, but this was an undeniable page-turner. Although the first concert I attended was Megadeth, I'm not really a fan of metal & you don't have to be to enjoy Wray's book. 4d
Reggie I was excited because I thought this was gonna be a heavy metal werewolves book. But alas…. Lol 3d
Branwen The cover alone is just phenomenal! 8h
vivastory @Reggie Lol that sounds like a book that would be in the Rewind Or Die series. I'd 100% read that 6h
vivastory @Branwen I love it. I'm glad to see that they are keeping the same design (but with different colors) for the paperback release 6h
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blurb
vivastory
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“What does mesomorphic mean?“ she asked him.
It seemed like a word Kip should have known-the version of himself that Kira liked, at least, which was the version he was constantly trying to be,,...
“Cool name for a band,“ he got out finally.
#weirdwords @cbee

CBee 😂😂😂😂 1w
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quote
AnnRaz
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“He looked both carefully assembled and suicidally unkempt.”

quote
AnnRaz
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“Something irreversible had happened and he didn‘t understand it. He felt numb with foreboding. He didn‘t understand it but he knew that it was real.”