The Devil's Music-Volume 3-When You're A Stranger

by Julia Madeleine

Sadie, the shape-shifting time travelling daughter of the Devil, has come calling on her next rock and roll God to join her collection in The 27 Club. It’s Paris 1971 and Sadie is after a special poet, writer, filmmaker, and lead singer in one of the greatest rock bands the world has ever seen, whose contract with her has expired. Jimmy isn’t like the others, his death wish is a guarantee he won’t put up a fight. But it might not be as easy to collect the soul of this bad boy as Sadie expects when Jimmy’s girlfriend tries to thwart her plans to take Mr. Mojo Risin’ back with her to hell.

Julia Madeleine’s third installment of ‘The Devil’s Music’ is her best yet. Sadie, the devil’s daughter, once more weighed down by her darkly passionate pursuit of rock’s kings and queens, those young vibrant and melancholic musical geniuses strung out on the very edge of premature death, waiting to be immortalized as they swan dive into hell’s bottomless reaches, perpetual and eternal glory awaiting them at her fingertips.

This time it’s Jim Morrison, the most peculiar of all of Sadie’s contracts, a young man in love with death, willing to go any time, weary of living, and terribly burdened by the endless iconographic platitudes heaped upon him at such an early age.

Madeleine once again demonstrates her ability to make us care, to make it feel sorrowfully authentic, despite its fantastical backdrop of Faustian intrigue, which makes it all the more involving. Her writing is as crisp and clear as always, tinged with an undercurrent of evocative sadness, and most remarkably of all, she takes a single scene and elegantly nuisances it with such finely tuned detail, that we forget we are reading but a brief snapshot of somebody’s life passing before our eyes.

Madeleine invites us to share in the beautiful tragedy, the momentary flicker of dark romance, making Sadie more than just a cipher or plot device, but a fully-rounded person charged with the most inexcusable, yet understandable set of duties bestowed on her through the heritage of her as a figure born of dark literature and mythical lineage.

Madeleine’s series is a must read, poetically inclined to bring out a tear from the most emotionally sturdy of readers, Sadie is a complex and at times, deliberately unfathomable character whose empathy we should not seek, but because of Madeleine’s writing, we cannot but be swept along as she continues collecting souls.

– Frank Duffy, author of Mountains of Smoke and Between These Pages, These Places

9 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 5, 2012

About the author

Julia Madeleine is a Canadian thriller writer, artist, and entrepreneur from the Toronto area who co-owns a tattoo studio. She is the mother of one awesome twenty-year-old daughter, also a tattoo artist.

The majority of Julia's story ideas come from dreams and the occasional nightmare; character's conjured from her dark imagination that wake her from sleep and force her to write about them in the night. Julia enjoys writing short stories of mayhem and suspense which can be found published around the net, one of which was nominated for a Derringer Award in 2011. Visit Julia's websites for more information on her writing and art: http://www.juliamadeleine.com http://www.malefictattoos.com