66. December – Phil Rickman

In December 1980, a band made up of people with varying psychic abilities and a session drummer started recording an album in a medieval abbey on the Welsh border and it went horribly wrong. What they brought out of the abbey at Ystrad Du was something evil that was already there that waits every seven years to make it’s mark and take what it’s due, essentially, and apparently it’s been doing so since 1175.

We start with the most terrible firey death night of album making and then comes the aftermath when a little stoat of a record executive finding out the record company people didn’t actually burn the tapes like the band thought they did. The band’s been having issues as a result of what happened ever since, except for the session drummer, he’s super famous in the United States now, lucky him. But once those tapes are baked back into playing shape…even the place that bakes the tapes feels the effects.

This is a long book, 587 pages, but all of it is interesting. It’s not as spooky as Wylding Hall, the other creepy recording band story I’ve read and I did except to be more unnerved. However, it’s a solid good read and apparently Phil Rickman uses the same bandmate characters in multiple other novels and this definitely didn’t turn me away from reading those brick sized tomes either.

Ozymandias doesn’t like it when music executives lie to him.