Review: Rock Gods & Messy Monsters by Diane Hatz

Aliens have hatched a rockstar. Brain extractions, falling body parts, and blood-vessel explosions have become the norm. It’s the 1990s.

Think: A fever dream Velvet Goldmine plus Dark Mirror plus Videodrome if reimagined by Julia Ducournau, Poppy Z Brite, and Mary Harron.

That sort of does it.

It’s difficult to really pin down Rock Gods. You could take it at face value and chalk it down as pure abstract surrealism. You could also decode comma and quotation mark for deeply written philosophical wisdom.

I think it’s a little bit of both.

Throughout, Alex is surrounded by ridiculous and grotesque absurdity turned up full volume. It’s a daily expectation that she wipe down her boss’s office from his routine bloody explosions. Just like making sure he has a Twinkie ready with his morning coffee, and delivering memos to the rest of the cabal.

The guy from A&R carries around a stuffed ferret. The head of marketing is always losing and reattaching body parts (there’s a funny quip in there somewhere but I’ll save that for later). She has to (literally) remove her brain before clocking in.

Oh, yeah. Aliens made a rock star.

I think everyone who’s put up with an excessive amount of bullshit under the guise of “paying their dues,” or felt it was necessary to put up with an excessive amount of bullshit to even have a shot at what they want will see themselves in Alex.

She desperately wants to move up in the music industry, but has been told - and believes - the way to get there is to start at the bottom. Just get her foot in the door. Work as a secretary for one of the higher ups and eventually it’ll lead somewhere.

Alex tells herself this over and over. She allows herself to be humiliated, abused, and nearly destroyed for that faint hope of being the secretary of someone a little higher up, and then someone a little higher up from that, until finally a someone sees her true potential and gives her a shot.

But she has to be patient. There’s a way things are done and you have to go through the right channels. You have to suffer before you can succeed. Meanwhile, the ones enforcing that mantra are doing whatever the fuck they want in the top floor conference room - which usually includes creating more and more fanciful titles for themselves and discussing how much of a pay increase they can get away with.

It’s a book about the music industry, about the business world, about being human (or not, as the case may be), and about watching all of your expectations and assumptions fall apart in front of you. And maybe realizing that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

As fun and comedic as Rock Stars can be - and it is definitely both of those things throughout - it’s also a deeply tragic cautionary tale.

We’ve all been Alex at some point. Some of us may be Alex right now. We all probably know an Alex. Maybe we even have an Alex working for us as an overwhelmed secretary with unrealized ambitions that we can’t see for what they are.

Rock Gods is a sharp, witty, horrifying, and reflective must read. Be careful if you have a weak stomach, though: It’s probably the goriest non-horror novel I’ve ever read.