What do you think?
Rate this book
Backmask
Inspired by pop music history and written in the style of 60s horror pulp, BACKMASK is the fake history of a conspiracy theory surrounding the Satanic agenda to control children's minds.
Nicholas Hush, 1960s record producer, has a vision for the future of pop music. After a series of prophetic dreams, he wants to combine occult imagery with upcoming trends to create a new, groundbreaking look. His secretary, Valerie Chill, is tasked with finding consultants and funding while he crafts the perfect album. Quickly their project becomes entangled in other, larger machinations, and two teenage pop acts become responsible for international intrigue, brainwashing, and an occult massacre. Taking inspiration from the lives of Joe Meek, Phil Spector, and Timothy Leary, BACKMASK is a speculative look at how hidden messages got into pop music.
Nicholas Hush, 1960s record producer, has a vision for the future of pop music. After a series of prophetic dreams, he wants to combine occult imagery with upcoming trends to create a new, groundbreaking look. His secretary, Valerie Chill, is tasked with finding consultants and funding while he crafts the perfect album. Quickly their project becomes entangled in other, larger machinations, and two teenage pop acts become responsible for international intrigue, brainwashing, and an occult massacre. Taking inspiration from the lives of Joe Meek, Phil Spector, and Timothy Leary, BACKMASK is a speculative look at how hidden messages got into pop music.
- GenresHorror
390 pages, Paperback
Published June 13, 2023
2 people are currently reading
101 people want to read
About the author
O.F. Cieri
3 books29 followersO F Cieri is based in New York. She has written three books; Lord of Thundertown, Lockdown Laureate, and Backmask.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
Read
June 23, 2024OF Cieri’s novel (from my Malarkey Book Club subscription) is a sort of alternative history of the early-60s music industry in NYC, though the time period and the setting are never explicitly stated. It’s the story of one (very flawed) man experimenting with electronic sounds through two “boy bands” and of his young female assistant, who is both caring and (necessarily) distant. Both are homosexuals and they’ve experienced (legal) arrests based on the way they dress and the bars they frequent, which to me was the most chilling element of the story. And that’s counting the government agencies and the spiritual/esoteric groups who get involved. Those entities' interest is in manipulation, through subliminal messages in music and its trappings, and/or through drug use, specifically the newly created LSD. They're exploiting so-called Satanic messaging, and hell does break loose.
February 7, 2026
I purchased this book directly from the author, while attending VOIDCON. All views and opinions are my own.
“ Why must I be forever compared to the universe?”
Backmask by O.F.Cieri
“All through my life I’ve had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world...and no one would tell me what it was.
“No”, said the old man “that’s just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.”
The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
-
New York City is a real geographic location. Go ahead and look it up, I’ll wait… It’s a sprawling metropolitan place, dense with people, history, horrors and hope, small in geographic scale compared to some urban centers, yet grand and looming in its presence. It’s full, it’s messy, and if you ask the people who live there, it never ceases to reveal beauty woven amongst the day to day ugliness.
The reality of New York, or any city, is never clean cut, or easy to convey through a digestible, palatable, fast absorbing format. What is force fed us is less a city, or a place, but a flat two dimensional backdrop, a sanitized chrome infused, neoliberal wad of mush, that managing to be the epicenter of the fantastic and the terrible. Law & Order to Super Heroes to the trials and tribulations of the entitled classes.
Valerie Chills New York, is a beautiful amalgamation, of these seemingly diametrically opposed categories. Born of historic 1960s New York, and so too, that place that only has its address in that realm of imagination and magic. It scratches a special itch I have, books set in or written in the middle of the last century, urban, with mystery strangeness, grit and realism. A very specific cocktail, but you can’t argue with a recipe for a good story. O.F. Cieri seemed to understand exactly what I was driving at, when she pitched this book to me, while we chatted at VOIDCON. “Black Metal and the High Strangeness of Occult Horror, but with the setting and sensibilities of the tv show “Mad Men”. It was one hell of a pitch, and was absolutely true.
As Chill navigates the mystery, madness and anxieties of Backmask, one would fully expect her to pass Henry Chinaski, Tokey Wedge, Kilgore Trout or even, young beat reporter Karl Kolchak. For beyond Chill herself, Ciere has populated her story with characters that are truly characters. Even the calmest, most mundane moments in this book quickly lead into a interactions that will force you set the book down, due to laughter, or pause to let the prose soak in, as you begin to get an inkling to the things going on. Whether she likes it or not, Chill is drawn into playing her part in the transformation of the popular culture in a decade that is just beginning to awake to the morning of the magicians, to see the world with its third eye peeled open.
Music is the bones, the essence and heartbeat of this book. While it’s a fantastic and warped re-imagining of that era of music, each reader will find themselves, feeling the need to albums that resonate with the atmosphere that slinks out from between the pages, like a mesmerizing fog.
For myself I was listening to Thelonius Monk, Roy Orbison, Pink Floyd’s “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”, the soundtrack to the film Rabbit Trap.
If you’re curious to hear what the author had in mind, feel free to check out
O.F. Cieri’s BackMask playlist: https://tinyurl.com/3ndvjwhm
Request a copy of BackMask from your local bookstore.
Or, you can order it here: https://asterismbooks.com/product/bac...
“ Why must I be forever compared to the universe?”
Backmask by O.F.Cieri
“All through my life I’ve had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world...and no one would tell me what it was.
“No”, said the old man “that’s just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.”
The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
-
New York City is a real geographic location. Go ahead and look it up, I’ll wait… It’s a sprawling metropolitan place, dense with people, history, horrors and hope, small in geographic scale compared to some urban centers, yet grand and looming in its presence. It’s full, it’s messy, and if you ask the people who live there, it never ceases to reveal beauty woven amongst the day to day ugliness.
The reality of New York, or any city, is never clean cut, or easy to convey through a digestible, palatable, fast absorbing format. What is force fed us is less a city, or a place, but a flat two dimensional backdrop, a sanitized chrome infused, neoliberal wad of mush, that managing to be the epicenter of the fantastic and the terrible. Law & Order to Super Heroes to the trials and tribulations of the entitled classes.
Valerie Chills New York, is a beautiful amalgamation, of these seemingly diametrically opposed categories. Born of historic 1960s New York, and so too, that place that only has its address in that realm of imagination and magic. It scratches a special itch I have, books set in or written in the middle of the last century, urban, with mystery strangeness, grit and realism. A very specific cocktail, but you can’t argue with a recipe for a good story. O.F. Cieri seemed to understand exactly what I was driving at, when she pitched this book to me, while we chatted at VOIDCON. “Black Metal and the High Strangeness of Occult Horror, but with the setting and sensibilities of the tv show “Mad Men”. It was one hell of a pitch, and was absolutely true.
As Chill navigates the mystery, madness and anxieties of Backmask, one would fully expect her to pass Henry Chinaski, Tokey Wedge, Kilgore Trout or even, young beat reporter Karl Kolchak. For beyond Chill herself, Ciere has populated her story with characters that are truly characters. Even the calmest, most mundane moments in this book quickly lead into a interactions that will force you set the book down, due to laughter, or pause to let the prose soak in, as you begin to get an inkling to the things going on. Whether she likes it or not, Chill is drawn into playing her part in the transformation of the popular culture in a decade that is just beginning to awake to the morning of the magicians, to see the world with its third eye peeled open.
Music is the bones, the essence and heartbeat of this book. While it’s a fantastic and warped re-imagining of that era of music, each reader will find themselves, feeling the need to albums that resonate with the atmosphere that slinks out from between the pages, like a mesmerizing fog.
For myself I was listening to Thelonius Monk, Roy Orbison, Pink Floyd’s “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”, the soundtrack to the film Rabbit Trap.
If you’re curious to hear what the author had in mind, feel free to check out
O.F. Cieri’s BackMask playlist: https://tinyurl.com/3ndvjwhm
Request a copy of BackMask from your local bookstore.
Or, you can order it here: https://asterismbooks.com/product/bac...
August 28, 2023
This book is basically a historical(-adjacent) fiction about a music producer teaming up with occultists and the government to brainwash kids by hiding secret messages in pop music during the '60s, and it is really fun. It follows Valerie Hush, the secretary (and sort of observer) of an eccentric "visionary" and his mission to reimagine pop. It's queer, clever, and creative, and if you were ever told that if you play certain rock songs in reverse, you'll hear hidden satanic messages, then this is the book for you!
July 12, 2023
OF Cieri uses characters inspired by historical fact to take us on a wild ride including a weapon-waving record producer, mystical rituals, and the ultimate corruption of The Youth. This is a great read and takes you to completely unexpected - but completely engrossing - places.
October 13, 2025
This book felt like being stuck in a broken elevator outside an event you really want to attend. There's something really interesting and fascinating really close by but you never really get to see it or do more than just kind of vaguely sense it over in that direction.
Some of the writing was really crisp and the ideas interesting but nothing ever gels and it was personally a slog for me to push through and finish the book.
Some of the writing was really crisp and the ideas interesting but nothing ever gels and it was personally a slog for me to push through and finish the book.
October 29, 2024
I really enjoyed this one.
While the stylistic choice for the narrative doesn't generally lend itself to being "scary" whatever that means to horror readers. It is still a very engaging story and worth a go if you think you'll dig the format.
While the stylistic choice for the narrative doesn't generally lend itself to being "scary" whatever that means to horror readers. It is still a very engaging story and worth a go if you think you'll dig the format.
August 19, 2023
Backmask
Valerie Chill works for Hush Productions, which is Nicholas Hush’s record company. One day he has a dream for music, using the latest electronic distortion, to make music that is evil. Or seems evil. Or has magical qualities. He has Chill call up various places, Freemasons, an Institute for Psychic Research etc. The Freemason representative also works for the FBI. He and the Masons are unhappy that the Institute have bought up some Masonic texts.
It's the 1960s in New York. Hush and Chill are both gay. They met as Chill was selling Librium, as she deals drugs on the side and has been prescribed it by her therapist.
Hush’s project gets backing from the government, both the FBI/Mason and, mysteriously, the CIA fund it. He takes two bands, one some white boys from Long Island, the other some black lads from the Caribbean as he thinks ska might be the next thing. They work on their look, the music, the lyrics, the sound. Trying to make something new and evil. Something odd and magical.
Hush, always armed with a gun, becomes increasingly obsessed, has mood swings. Chill finds romance in the person of Sophia Blaine from the Institute. But Blaine isn’t the driving force there, and things start to spiral out of control even as the music starts to pick up. The CIA are trying drug trials and now Chill is finding herself inside Hush’s dream.
A walkthrough New Tork subcultures of the 60s, or a fairground mirror reflection of them, imagining how they might have come together (in different ways to how I seem to recall they actually did). If it’s occasionally confusing and scattershot, then so be it; how much more actual drugs, music and the occult were and are.
Read This: A mindbending exploration of music and (not quite) magical conspiracy in secret corners of 1960s New York
Don’t Read This: Music didn’t happen this way, and probably can’t
Disclosure: I received a review copy from Malarkey Books
Valerie Chill works for Hush Productions, which is Nicholas Hush’s record company. One day he has a dream for music, using the latest electronic distortion, to make music that is evil. Or seems evil. Or has magical qualities. He has Chill call up various places, Freemasons, an Institute for Psychic Research etc. The Freemason representative also works for the FBI. He and the Masons are unhappy that the Institute have bought up some Masonic texts.
It's the 1960s in New York. Hush and Chill are both gay. They met as Chill was selling Librium, as she deals drugs on the side and has been prescribed it by her therapist.
Hush’s project gets backing from the government, both the FBI/Mason and, mysteriously, the CIA fund it. He takes two bands, one some white boys from Long Island, the other some black lads from the Caribbean as he thinks ska might be the next thing. They work on their look, the music, the lyrics, the sound. Trying to make something new and evil. Something odd and magical.
Hush, always armed with a gun, becomes increasingly obsessed, has mood swings. Chill finds romance in the person of Sophia Blaine from the Institute. But Blaine isn’t the driving force there, and things start to spiral out of control even as the music starts to pick up. The CIA are trying drug trials and now Chill is finding herself inside Hush’s dream.
A walkthrough New Tork subcultures of the 60s, or a fairground mirror reflection of them, imagining how they might have come together (in different ways to how I seem to recall they actually did). If it’s occasionally confusing and scattershot, then so be it; how much more actual drugs, music and the occult were and are.
Read This: A mindbending exploration of music and (not quite) magical conspiracy in secret corners of 1960s New York
Don’t Read This: Music didn’t happen this way, and probably can’t
Disclosure: I received a review copy from Malarkey Books
November 22, 2023
Hold onto your vinyl records, folks, because Backmask by O.F. Cieri is a wild ride through the trippy world of 60s pop music and Satanic conspiracies that's gonna make your head spin faster than a record player on turbo mode! If you're into music, mystery, and a bit of occult funk, this book is your backstage pass to a mind-bending show you won't want to miss.
Meet Nicholas Hush, the record producer with a vision crazier than a six-foot rabbit. He's all about merging occult vibes with the latest music trends, and it's a recipe for a rock 'n' roll rollercoaster. His trusty secretary, Valerie Chill, gets thrown into the mix, and before you know it, you've got teen pop sensations tangled up in international intrigue and some seriously spooky brainwashing shenanigans. Inspired by real legends like Joe Meek and Timothy Leary, Backmask is a far-out, genre-blending masterpiece that'll have you grooving to its beat while questioning everything you thought you knew about pop music history. Get ready to take a walk on the wild side! 🎵🕺🔮
Meet Nicholas Hush, the record producer with a vision crazier than a six-foot rabbit. He's all about merging occult vibes with the latest music trends, and it's a recipe for a rock 'n' roll rollercoaster. His trusty secretary, Valerie Chill, gets thrown into the mix, and before you know it, you've got teen pop sensations tangled up in international intrigue and some seriously spooky brainwashing shenanigans. Inspired by real legends like Joe Meek and Timothy Leary, Backmask is a far-out, genre-blending masterpiece that'll have you grooving to its beat while questioning everything you thought you knew about pop music history. Get ready to take a walk on the wild side! 🎵🕺🔮
November 23, 2023
A mesmerizing blend of horror and literary fiction that draws inspiration from pop music history and 60s horror pulp. The novel delves into the intriguing conspiracy theory of a Satanic agenda aimed at controlling children's minds through occult imagery in pop music. At its core, the story revolves around Nicholas Hush, a 1960s record producer with a visionary approach to pop music.
As the narrative unfolds, readers are introduced to a captivating world of prophetic dreams, occult intrigue, and teenage pop acts unwittingly caught in a web of international conspiracies. Cieri masterfully weaves together elements from the lives of iconic figures like Joe Meek, Phil Spector, and Timothy Leary to create a speculative and thought-provoking exploration of how hidden messages found their way into pop music. Backmask is a great read for those who appreciate the fusion of history, horror, and literary finesse, offering a unique and engaging storytelling experience.
As the narrative unfolds, readers are introduced to a captivating world of prophetic dreams, occult intrigue, and teenage pop acts unwittingly caught in a web of international conspiracies. Cieri masterfully weaves together elements from the lives of iconic figures like Joe Meek, Phil Spector, and Timothy Leary to create a speculative and thought-provoking exploration of how hidden messages found their way into pop music. Backmask is a great read for those who appreciate the fusion of history, horror, and literary finesse, offering a unique and engaging storytelling experience.
January 25, 2024
Thanks to NetGalley for approving this for me to read -- it archived so fast I had to wait until I got hold of another copy to finish reading it. And I really wanted to read it because of the unique plot, which was even wilder than I thought.
However, wild plot or not, my favorite part of the book was Chill and how she reacted to things. Tough, smart, resilient, and perceptive, Chill knows who she is but is still involved with shady people in shady situations. Like her boss Hush, who is quite abusive but who Chill seems to have a handle on in the beginning, until he becomes unstable because of, probably, drugs.
This book is about drugs and music, and even with the third person perspective, I felt disoriented a lot of the time as I tried to figure out what was really happening. I love unreliable narrators, and this atmosphere made the book a lot of fun to read.
This book also felt nostalgic, and I kept thinking of the culture from the 80s. Definitely an unusual story.
However, wild plot or not, my favorite part of the book was Chill and how she reacted to things. Tough, smart, resilient, and perceptive, Chill knows who she is but is still involved with shady people in shady situations. Like her boss Hush, who is quite abusive but who Chill seems to have a handle on in the beginning, until he becomes unstable because of, probably, drugs.
This book is about drugs and music, and even with the third person perspective, I felt disoriented a lot of the time as I tried to figure out what was really happening. I love unreliable narrators, and this atmosphere made the book a lot of fun to read.
This book also felt nostalgic, and I kept thinking of the culture from the 80s. Definitely an unusual story.
October 4, 2023
O.F. Cieri's prose is effortless and the world she builds is rich with detail and empathy. The title hints at what's coming, but the eventual arrival of its significance is well-earned nonetheless. What if the "Satanic Panic" was not entirely without merit? How far reaching are the consequences of a marketing gimmick? Is it necessary to care? I was a little disappointed with the ending at first, but upon further reflection I realized I just didn't want it to end! Rich, engrossing, grounded, and fun. What more can one ask?
November 21, 2023
Not really what I had expected and kind of upset about that. Thought I was getting into pseudo non fiction and got a novel instead. I don't know if that was the intention but I remember it being advertised that way. But just ended up being disappointed.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews