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Saint the Terrifying
A West Oakland punk acquires a new name and new calling. In chasing down a gang of thieves, Saint turns his gritty urban saga into the stuff of legend.
Saint the Terrifying is the story of a punk. An ex-con, Saint was raised in the wilds of Norway, where his father brought him up in the old traditions and taught him the way of the Viking. Now Saint finds himself emersed in the Oakland music scene. On stage, he wears a pair of antlers that have been painted with yellow reflective paint, calling to mind bolts of lightning. Off stage, he’s hunting down criminals no one else cares to find, and falling in love with the singer of his band, Trick Wilma.
Bay Area author Joshua Mohr taps the troubled vein of class warfare and gentrification in the Bay Area to tell an ambitious tale of love and retribution. Saint’s role as hardboiled detective is informed by Mohr’s deft interweaving of recent history, including Oakland’s Ghost Ship warehouse fire—a tragedy that Mohr revisits in a bold act of reclamation. As Saint uncovers the crew who’ve been stealing the gear around town, the truth threatens to unravel Saint’s world, leading to a heartbreaking showdown. Propelled by a broken Baroque of punk language, Saint the Terrifying examines tensions between community and individual identity, social activism and vigilantism, while taking the reader on a roller coaster ride of hard-boiled twists and hardcore music. A badass’s badass, Saint’s the protagonist that begs the What if Johnny Rotten had a baby with The Rock?
(Saint the Terrifying is Book One of the Saint a three-novel epic structured like an Icelandic Viking saga—except this Viking just so happens to live in the 21st century and play in a punk band. The 1000-page project will release as paperback originals over the course of consecutive seasons; and true to the Viking tradition, hits its crescendo at the gates of hell.)
Saint the Terrifying is the story of a punk. An ex-con, Saint was raised in the wilds of Norway, where his father brought him up in the old traditions and taught him the way of the Viking. Now Saint finds himself emersed in the Oakland music scene. On stage, he wears a pair of antlers that have been painted with yellow reflective paint, calling to mind bolts of lightning. Off stage, he’s hunting down criminals no one else cares to find, and falling in love with the singer of his band, Trick Wilma.
Bay Area author Joshua Mohr taps the troubled vein of class warfare and gentrification in the Bay Area to tell an ambitious tale of love and retribution. Saint’s role as hardboiled detective is informed by Mohr’s deft interweaving of recent history, including Oakland’s Ghost Ship warehouse fire—a tragedy that Mohr revisits in a bold act of reclamation. As Saint uncovers the crew who’ve been stealing the gear around town, the truth threatens to unravel Saint’s world, leading to a heartbreaking showdown. Propelled by a broken Baroque of punk language, Saint the Terrifying examines tensions between community and individual identity, social activism and vigilantism, while taking the reader on a roller coaster ride of hard-boiled twists and hardcore music. A badass’s badass, Saint’s the protagonist that begs the What if Johnny Rotten had a baby with The Rock?
(Saint the Terrifying is Book One of the Saint a three-novel epic structured like an Icelandic Viking saga—except this Viking just so happens to live in the 21st century and play in a punk band. The 1000-page project will release as paperback originals over the course of consecutive seasons; and true to the Viking tradition, hits its crescendo at the gates of hell.)
231 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 29, 2024
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201 people want to read
About the author
Joshua Mohr
16 books358 followersJOSHUA MOHR is the author of five novels, including “Damascus,” which The New York Times called “Beat-poet cool.” He’s also written “Fight Song” and “Some Things that Meant the World to Me,” one of O Magazine’s Top 10 reads of 2009 and a San Francisco Chronicle best-seller, as well as “Termite Parade,” an Editors’ Choice on The New York Times Best Seller List. His novel “All This Life” was recently published by Counterpoint/Soft Skull.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
June 16, 2024
Oh hell yaaass! This book is pure fire. It's an immediate favorite indie read, and ranks right up there with Termite Parade as my favorite Mohr novel. And I'm already jonesing for the next book in the trilogy.
I love the way he writes his lead characters. They are complete pieces of shit yet they have so much heart that you just can't help rooting for them and and they just keep redeeming themselves and there's a part of you that wishes you knew them in real life. Like, these guys and gals are where it's at. They live on the edge and aren't afraid to bruise their knuckles or bloody their fists or gnaw off a fucking finger. They'd do anything to protect their own. And they are all just so perfectly badass.
Mohr hits a homerun with this one. It's all gritty LA punk scene, drugs and eyepatches, machetes and glowing reindeers, Viking bloodlines, and hallucinations in a Whole Foods. And it breaks the 4th wall the entire time which is just... mwaaaah! Chef's kiss!
This is a book you have to experience. Go pre-order it. You won't want to miss it. And if you've never read a Mohr before, now's your time to sneak a few in before it releases.
I love the way he writes his lead characters. They are complete pieces of shit yet they have so much heart that you just can't help rooting for them and and they just keep redeeming themselves and there's a part of you that wishes you knew them in real life. Like, these guys and gals are where it's at. They live on the edge and aren't afraid to bruise their knuckles or bloody their fists or gnaw off a fucking finger. They'd do anything to protect their own. And they are all just so perfectly badass.
Mohr hits a homerun with this one. It's all gritty LA punk scene, drugs and eyepatches, machetes and glowing reindeers, Viking bloodlines, and hallucinations in a Whole Foods. And it breaks the 4th wall the entire time which is just... mwaaaah! Chef's kiss!
This is a book you have to experience. Go pre-order it. You won't want to miss it. And if you've never read a Mohr before, now's your time to sneak a few in before it releases.
October 23, 2024
“I had no love for forty dollar rolls of hand-stitched toilet paper, but since getting clean, I had a Whole Foods in me, too. A part of me wanted a relaxed life, but that impulse couldn’t win a fight with the punk rockers and Vikings in me.”
Guys… When I was 20% into Saint the Terrifying, I went and added other books by Mohr to my TBR list. 40% through the book I promised to buy a physical copy for myself. 100% through I was crying with happiness because I realized this is going to be a trilogy. Hell yeah!!!
Good grief, everything about this book hit the sweet spot with me. The writing style, the thematic, the… I don’t know. You read about punks like this and you’ll come away thinking, you know what? I don’t need to fit in! And it’s glorious! I felt envy during a certain scene in this book. There’s a scene when someone (not Saint) trashes a car. Goes full on whammy on a vehicle. While the owner is like “Dude, man, my car!”, Saint and co are just laughing. Laughing at the fact that it’s just a damn car and who cares. No care for materialistic things. I felt envy at that in my heart. Imagine being so… free? feral?… something? that you just don’t care about a car being demolished by bricks.
“We all live in the moral mud. We all feed on the empty calories of rationalizations.”
As you may have gathered from the blurb, our main character is Saint. But before he is Saint, we don’t really know his name, at least I don’t think it is uttered in any shape or form. So, the beauty of it all is, we, the reader, get to be there when he earns his new name. And the whole scenario is rather sweet. Who and why calls him Saint. Anyway, Saint gets pulled into “a day” by Got Jokes who says that his band’s gear got stolen, and Got Jokes has a lead – Jesse. So, Saint goes “marching in” (sorrynotsorry) to Jesse’s – it’s not unhinged at all, as he explains, it’s totally hinged – and ends up doing something completely opposite because Jesse is literally at the edge of the abyss, and then Jesse eats Saint’s eye! That’s right. Saint has a fake eye. And Jesse eats it. How and why? Oh, do go on, get the book already and find out yourself! So… we get more leads about who stole the band gear and basically Saint vows to get the gear back. Who and how gets in his way? Again, you’ll have to read for yourself.
During the mad day that leads to all sorts of many other things, we learn about Saint’s childhood. About his mom and his Norwegian dad. And it’s all enough to break your god damn heart! But, Saint has Vikings whispering in his blood and he will do good, he will fight to find joy… He may think he want the Whole Foods life, and his… his… I don’t know what to call them, his “mind trips” give him glimpses of the Whole Foods experience with Green Day Billy. Green Day. Saint hates Green Day.
Anyway!
You know, this is a book of opposites. Saint is any bit as much a saint as he is terrifying. There is as much brutality in the story as there are melt-your-heart, I’m-crying-so-hard-I-can’t-see moments. It’s so harshly black and white as much as it is chaotic and I freaking loved it so much. Even though the whole book is pretty much one big trigger warning sticker, there is simply something about the stark contrast of someone so full of Viking plundering and punk actually showing empathy and love where it counts the most. A magnificent character. A magnificent character with empathy, lovehearts and kindness in his eyes.
All of this, the epic and terrifying character of Saint and the chaos around him and in him, is delivered with a very neat skill of setting beautiful and fitting words one after the other. God damn it, Mohr has some sharp style, and enviable creativity, because some of this stuff is bonkers. It’s so bonkers and so entertaining and so disgusting and so beautiful, all at once!
“I played guitar and she growled, alive in this drywall tundra, this snow globe, this sleep and sleaze, this squall, this fuss, this tempest, this bomb cyclone, this ice storm, this out-of-tune Valhalla.”
So, anyway… as I said, I loved this book. In fact, Saint the Terrifying is my Book of 2024. It has been a LONG time since I enjoyed reading quite so much. I don’t think it was so much the plot… but the characters in all their rawness and life’s tragedies and the persevering through it all. And the writing. It just mm-mm-mmm… And, it’s not even fantasy! *throws hands up in air in disbelief! I would be willing to give up fantasy forever if every general fiction book managed to kick up a storm in me quite so. I don’t even know how to explain its magic to you. Not really. But it’s something. Something powerful.
August 11, 2025
Simultaneously dark and incredibly fun. This is not usually my genre whatsoever, by Josh is such a magnificent writer that I quite enjoyed it. Some gorgeous moments of contemplation on humanity and love and some Douglas Adams-esque blurbs of absurd humor scattered throughout the thoroughly engaging plot.
November 28, 2024
Joshua Mohr really outdid himself with this one. Full of punk rock whimsy and violence. Looking forward to the other books to come.
May 12, 2025
Punk. Anarchist. Viking thriller. And then it proceeds to defy the expectations those words set up while simultaneously hitting them entirely. Into it. On to the next one.
June 25, 2024
Yes! I feel like I just rode shotgun on the way to kick some a**! Then stopping to play a gig with this one-eyed, Liberty spiked Viking guitarist. Great story of adventure an making a turn to do right by fellow punk rockers who just want to make music. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to go on an unexpected adventure with a crazy cast of characters.
September 2, 2024
Joshua Mohr's Saint the Terrifying tells the titular Oakland punk's story of a band's stolen music gear, a gig at 924 Gilman St. supporting Jawbreaker, and an action-movie-ish vendetta against a drug dealer, interspersed with some childhood back story in Norway, in turn mixed with hallucinations in a Whole Foods where the dude from Green Day mans the cash register and spouts wisdom...
I'm not familiar with Rohr's other books, but I have seen him compared to Charles Bukowski in other reviews. I would draw a closer comparison to Martin Millar, though—books like The Good Fairies of New York or Dreams of Sex and Stage Diving—even if Mohr is rather lacking in the humour and whimsy which makes Millar appealing to me. Mohr certainly has a similar grim, dirty realism as Bukowski, but Bukowksi's prose is terse and simple, raw and direct. Mohr's is florid and turgid, self-(over?)stylized "amphetamine poetry" which seems to have more in common with The Beats than Bukowski's hard-boiled Ernest Hemingway-isms. Lots of lists, lots of names, objects, free associations and tumbling phraseology filled with flashing wild (real? hallucinatory?) birds and spark(l)ing violence...
If punk is meant to be minimalist, the prose is quite opposite in its maximalism. Pretentious? Yes. Does it work? Well...maybe...is pretension antithetical to punk? Possibly. Possibly not. If you're a reader who might ask what punk is—is it just attitude or is it fashion, a costume? is it a way of thinking, ideology or about the music?—then you might have problems with this book. If you're just in it for the colourful characters and wish-I-were-there, rock'n'roll fantasy camp-ness of the music-related narrative, you will probably find the book more enjoyable.
Punk is, of course, always concerned with authenticity. While I have only a passing familiarity with the Oakland punk scene, I have played a few shows there over the years—including in venues much like the infamous/tragic Ghostlight (which gets something of a cameo in this book). The settings seem authentic enough to me, but I sometimes found the characterisation problematic—or at least the characters themselves. Maybe I have been living in Europe too long and EU punks are different than US punks? But all the guns and violence—the action movie-ness of the vendetta subplot—was a bit off-putting. I did wonder why the plot couldn't have just been about the music...
Speaking of off-putting...Saint spends some of his teenaged years in Norway with his father, learning about Viking mythology, how to fight and hunt, how to wrestle bears (to be frank, it was unclear to me whether the bear wrestling scene was literal or figurative). There is an interesting sort of surrealism to these sections—caribou with glowing antlers—but I found the emphasis on heritage and masculinity just a bit too Robert Bly (or Jordan Peterson? if Bly doesn't mean anything to you) and/or über-mensch-y for my tastes.
All in all, a bit of a problematic book, then, for me. Some enjoyable elements, some troublesome, and difficult to say, in the end, which element won out...but, regardless, thanks to Unnamed Press for sending me an ARC in exchange for an honest review! I am curious to read what happens to Saint in the next two instalments of this trilogy.
I'm not familiar with Rohr's other books, but I have seen him compared to Charles Bukowski in other reviews. I would draw a closer comparison to Martin Millar, though—books like The Good Fairies of New York or Dreams of Sex and Stage Diving—even if Mohr is rather lacking in the humour and whimsy which makes Millar appealing to me. Mohr certainly has a similar grim, dirty realism as Bukowski, but Bukowksi's prose is terse and simple, raw and direct. Mohr's is florid and turgid, self-(over?)stylized "amphetamine poetry" which seems to have more in common with The Beats than Bukowski's hard-boiled Ernest Hemingway-isms. Lots of lists, lots of names, objects, free associations and tumbling phraseology filled with flashing wild (real? hallucinatory?) birds and spark(l)ing violence...
If punk is meant to be minimalist, the prose is quite opposite in its maximalism. Pretentious? Yes. Does it work? Well...maybe...is pretension antithetical to punk? Possibly. Possibly not. If you're a reader who might ask what punk is—is it just attitude or is it fashion, a costume? is it a way of thinking, ideology or about the music?—then you might have problems with this book. If you're just in it for the colourful characters and wish-I-were-there, rock'n'roll fantasy camp-ness of the music-related narrative, you will probably find the book more enjoyable.
Punk is, of course, always concerned with authenticity. While I have only a passing familiarity with the Oakland punk scene, I have played a few shows there over the years—including in venues much like the infamous/tragic Ghostlight (which gets something of a cameo in this book). The settings seem authentic enough to me, but I sometimes found the characterisation problematic—or at least the characters themselves. Maybe I have been living in Europe too long and EU punks are different than US punks? But all the guns and violence—the action movie-ness of the vendetta subplot—was a bit off-putting. I did wonder why the plot couldn't have just been about the music...
Speaking of off-putting...Saint spends some of his teenaged years in Norway with his father, learning about Viking mythology, how to fight and hunt, how to wrestle bears (to be frank, it was unclear to me whether the bear wrestling scene was literal or figurative). There is an interesting sort of surrealism to these sections—caribou with glowing antlers—but I found the emphasis on heritage and masculinity just a bit too Robert Bly (or Jordan Peterson? if Bly doesn't mean anything to you) and/or über-mensch-y for my tastes.
All in all, a bit of a problematic book, then, for me. Some enjoyable elements, some troublesome, and difficult to say, in the end, which element won out...but, regardless, thanks to Unnamed Press for sending me an ARC in exchange for an honest review! I am curious to read what happens to Saint in the next two instalments of this trilogy.
November 4, 2024
This book is so unhinged to an extreme that works. There’s entire paragraphs of somewhat related nonsense that build such a specific mental image. It’s such a cool way to world build/describe stuff. It’s very unique and I love it.
The writing style is somewhere between rambling lunatic and poet which is so perfect for the main character. The way that style revolves around the Saint makes it so even the smallest description is said in his voice. It sets up a story with a very unreliable narrator (ie Whole Foods hallucinations) and it’s so much fun.
Despite how unhinged the story is it’s emotional raw and I wasn’t expected that. The combo of abrasive humor with the heart wrenching scenes are done so well. It’s amazing.
This kind of book is a genuine delight that pisses me off because I know I’ll never read another one like it.
The writing style is somewhere between rambling lunatic and poet which is so perfect for the main character. The way that style revolves around the Saint makes it so even the smallest description is said in his voice. It sets up a story with a very unreliable narrator (ie Whole Foods hallucinations) and it’s so much fun.
Despite how unhinged the story is it’s emotional raw and I wasn’t expected that. The combo of abrasive humor with the heart wrenching scenes are done so well. It’s amazing.
This kind of book is a genuine delight that pisses me off because I know I’ll never read another one like it.
October 2, 2025
Mohr creates another bizarre surreal world in which his lunatic characters do weird shit. With a gonzo style lyricism, he paints another bleak picture in the landscape of West Oakland this time. The dream-like hallucinatory prose keeps you guessing at what comes next in this strange story told by a violent, unreliable yet lovable narrator. I bought the vinyl punk soundtrack as well and am so happy that in this day and age of the internet ceppool, there are writers who are still dedicated to pushing limits and creating tangible things we can all hold and rock out to.
October 18, 2024
Saint the Terrifying by Joshua Mohr is a raw and thought-provoking novel that explores the complexities of addiction, redemption, and personal transformation. Mohr's unique narrative style blends dark humor with brutal honesty, capturing the internal struggles of his protagonist as he seeks salvation in a chaotic, unforgiving world. Thank you Unnamed Press , Joshua Mohr, NetGalley for this ARC!
December 29, 2024
I had Josh as a professor while doing my grad work at USF, so I've read the majority of his works. And? he continues to hit it out of the park on character and voice and the right level of absurdity. This is a great introduction to the character of Saint, who I hope we get to hear more from in the very near future. This book was an absolute ride from start to finish.
January 3, 2026
Sometimes a book comes along just at the right time and does exactly the right thing. That's how Saint the Terrifying was for me. An absolutely wonderful whirlwind of a story mixed with some hard hitting emotional punches that left me breathless. I'll be thinking about this book for a very long time.
May 15, 2025
A tensionless power fantasy. There is no obstacle Saint cannot overcome with ease, no enemy he cannot win over, no life he cannot change for the better. It seems like Saint can do anything he puts his mind to, and that doesn't make for a very interesting read.
December 21, 2024
I’d give this 10 out of 5 stars if I could. Beautiful. Loved it.
January 27, 2025
Super fun read. Josh Mohr is the Joe Strummer of the literary world. I was all lost in the Whole Foods hallucination.
February 15, 2025
Bukowski, SLC Punk, Fear and Loathing vibes. Excited for the series!
March 2, 2025
I want everyone I have ever loved to read this book. Actually ‘want’ isn’t the right word. Need, that’s the one.
I need everyone I have ever loved to read this book.
I need everyone I have ever loved to read this book.
June 24, 2025
Compelling story but I hated the narration. He was trying to be deep but in a humorous way that just didn’t land and made me cringe a lot
July 21, 2025
Favorite book this year
December 2, 2024
Great stuff. My notice, for ZYZZYVA magazine, is linked below:
https://www.zyzzyva.org/2024/11/21/th...
https://www.zyzzyva.org/2024/11/21/th...
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews