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Better to Beg
The bloody Deserters—the band that belongs nowhere. To no one.
With raw musical talent and wild sexual chemistry, early aughts NYC rock duo The Deserters, comprised of ambitious midwestern feminist Viv and the half-cracked British expat Hux, head west in a stolen jalopy to perform in the seedy bars and sketchy clubs of America’s great cities, hoping to “make it” as crowds grow violent, money dries up, and their trust in each other erodes, forcing them to confront the limits of freedom, faith and creative integrity in an ever-changing post-9/11 America.
“…a rip-roaring, heart-and-soul-gutting tour through the rock-n-roll sleaze of early aughts New York City, the funereal desolation of desert highways, and those many drug-fueled pit stops in between.”—JILLIAN LUFT, author of Scumbag Summer
“…pulses with rebellious energy [and] deftly captures music’s gritty world with wit and hope, making this debut a true muse for those who dare to be different.”—MALLORY SMART, author of I Keep My Visions to Myself
“...smart and irreverent, sexy and unhinged in all the right ways.”—D.T. ROBBINS, author of Leasing
“…an honest, raw, and unsentimental look at what it means to stay true to yourself and your art, and what it can cost you.”—AMY JONES, author of Pebble & Dove
“Two muses, two killers, two heartbroken loners—this duo can’t fly too close to the sun because they’re never awake to see it.”—SCOTT LAUDATI, author of Play the Devil
“Electrifying! One of the best fictitious rock books you’ll ever read—a This is Spinal Tap for early-2000s indie sleazebags.”—BRIAN ALAN ELLIS, author of The Errors Tour
“…conjures a literary Behind the Music that swept me up and sucked me in until I was moving through my days thinking about The Deserters alongside so many real-world bands.”—AARON BURCH, author of Year of the Buffalo
“…will leave you hungover and still longing for more.”—LEXI KENT-MONNING, author of The Burden of Joy
“[A book] for primal-screaming, dumpster-diving, cactus-shaped souls [and the] ones who understand what it means to cage yourself in search of freedom, reject yourself in search of validation, destroy your environment in search of home, and ostracize yourself in search of belonging when all you really need is space to fall apart.”—CLAIRE HOPPLE, author of Take it Personally
“…Meet Me in the Bathroom reimagined as a road novel—a celebration of the beautiful pain that defines creative partnership.”—KEVIN M. KEARNEY, author of Freelance
“...peels back the filthy film overlaying early-aughts rock ’n roll, a world of sweat and grime and drugs and jeans that have been worn for three-hundred-and-eighty-four days, to expose the ambition and heart underneath—unforgettable characters yearning to prove their worth, and the necessary reminder to make art no matter what. ”—EMILY COSTA, author of Girl on Girl
With raw musical talent and wild sexual chemistry, early aughts NYC rock duo The Deserters, comprised of ambitious midwestern feminist Viv and the half-cracked British expat Hux, head west in a stolen jalopy to perform in the seedy bars and sketchy clubs of America’s great cities, hoping to “make it” as crowds grow violent, money dries up, and their trust in each other erodes, forcing them to confront the limits of freedom, faith and creative integrity in an ever-changing post-9/11 America.
“…a rip-roaring, heart-and-soul-gutting tour through the rock-n-roll sleaze of early aughts New York City, the funereal desolation of desert highways, and those many drug-fueled pit stops in between.”—JILLIAN LUFT, author of Scumbag Summer
“…pulses with rebellious energy [and] deftly captures music’s gritty world with wit and hope, making this debut a true muse for those who dare to be different.”—MALLORY SMART, author of I Keep My Visions to Myself
“...smart and irreverent, sexy and unhinged in all the right ways.”—D.T. ROBBINS, author of Leasing
“…an honest, raw, and unsentimental look at what it means to stay true to yourself and your art, and what it can cost you.”—AMY JONES, author of Pebble & Dove
“Two muses, two killers, two heartbroken loners—this duo can’t fly too close to the sun because they’re never awake to see it.”—SCOTT LAUDATI, author of Play the Devil
“Electrifying! One of the best fictitious rock books you’ll ever read—a This is Spinal Tap for early-2000s indie sleazebags.”—BRIAN ALAN ELLIS, author of The Errors Tour
“…conjures a literary Behind the Music that swept me up and sucked me in until I was moving through my days thinking about The Deserters alongside so many real-world bands.”—AARON BURCH, author of Year of the Buffalo
“…will leave you hungover and still longing for more.”—LEXI KENT-MONNING, author of The Burden of Joy
“[A book] for primal-screaming, dumpster-diving, cactus-shaped souls [and the] ones who understand what it means to cage yourself in search of freedom, reject yourself in search of validation, destroy your environment in search of home, and ostracize yourself in search of belonging when all you really need is space to fall apart.”—CLAIRE HOPPLE, author of Take it Personally
“…Meet Me in the Bathroom reimagined as a road novel—a celebration of the beautiful pain that defines creative partnership.”—KEVIN M. KEARNEY, author of Freelance
“...peels back the filthy film overlaying early-aughts rock ’n roll, a world of sweat and grime and drugs and jeans that have been worn for three-hundred-and-eighty-four days, to expose the ambition and heart underneath—unforgettable characters yearning to prove their worth, and the necessary reminder to make art no matter what. ”—EMILY COSTA, author of Girl on Girl
294 pages, Paperback
Published October 24, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
March 22, 2024
Each sentence hums with electricity that propels this rock-n-roll saga along the highway, following The Deserters on their wild tour through the US. Kirsti MacKenzie’s ability to navigate two distinct narrators with unique voices and expertly capture the state of music in a 2003 American landscape makes this novel something special. I’m no musician, but as a writer I deeply connected with Viv’s and Hux’s journey to pursue their art in a world where asking permission and staying between the lines is default. Full of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll in the best way possible, Better to Beg is a novel I couldn’t put down.
December 15, 2025
In a recent promo about her debut novel, BETTER TO BEG, Kirsti MacKenzie said she knew nothing about making music or touring. If true, I have even more respect for her than I already did, because this book reads like a memoir by someone who’s made her living on the road.
In BETTER TO BEG, duo Viv and Hux of The Deserters embark on a cross-country tour that sees them on the verge of a music deal yet unable to get out of their own way as personalities, finances, past hurts, and sex-and-drugs get in the way of their dream.
MacKenzie’s greatest strength is her evocative use of language, which is very much on display here: characters are unique and have distinct voices; settings are vibrant, dirty, lived-in; emotions are raw; hangovers are oppressive. Truly a masterclass in style.
Too much description can drag down a story, but at the risk of a bad pun, the writing in BETTER TO BEG just *sings*, enhancing a road-trip tale that’s been done before and making it one of a kind. It feels wholly authentic, which is the greatest compliment I can pay.
BETTER TO BEG is an ode to the creative lifestyle, giving oneself over to the process no matter what it takes or how many people are paying attention, while at the same time showing it’s ok to get a little lost in order to find yourself. Go grab a copy. You’ll love it.
In BETTER TO BEG, duo Viv and Hux of The Deserters embark on a cross-country tour that sees them on the verge of a music deal yet unable to get out of their own way as personalities, finances, past hurts, and sex-and-drugs get in the way of their dream.
MacKenzie’s greatest strength is her evocative use of language, which is very much on display here: characters are unique and have distinct voices; settings are vibrant, dirty, lived-in; emotions are raw; hangovers are oppressive. Truly a masterclass in style.
Too much description can drag down a story, but at the risk of a bad pun, the writing in BETTER TO BEG just *sings*, enhancing a road-trip tale that’s been done before and making it one of a kind. It feels wholly authentic, which is the greatest compliment I can pay.
BETTER TO BEG is an ode to the creative lifestyle, giving oneself over to the process no matter what it takes or how many people are paying attention, while at the same time showing it’s ok to get a little lost in order to find yourself. Go grab a copy. You’ll love it.
October 5, 2024
A writer pal told me about Better to Beg. He messaged me: “It’s quite good. Super voice-y, with characters hair-pullingly frustrating that you can’t help rooting for.”
Yep. That about sums it up.
Viv. And Hux.
You won’t soon forget them. Or their fights as their band The Deserters makes its way cross-country on an epic journey to, well, one of the best endings you’ll come across.
But let’s start at the raunchy beginning. You might wince. Or cringe. Hux even warns of us of that fact. I mean, it’s a rowdy rock band. There will be a drugs. And more drugs. Especially in the Hux chapters. “You do not get to flinch because I do not get to flinch, not even as I am the one face-down on a sticky barroom table in the squalid basement of some humid bar on the Lower East Side,” Hux tells us.
Hux often turns to the camera (us): “We don’t know each other yet so this may strike you as a bit of overshare, but it is very important you understand specifics,” Hux tells us. “I ditched a gig to be here. A big, very important gig. Vivy will be livid and your testimony will be key. Blowing off a professional commitment in order to have substances blown up your bum will not track as an excuse with my bandmate. You must take notes, for she is more brutal with cross-examination than your average barrister and no whereabouts, whoseabouts, whatsabouts, and f***abouts must be documented rigorously. I am spread out on this grotty table instead of at the Mercury Lounge doing a dog-and-pony for some A&R dope from Columbia.”
Yes, for Hux, we readers are co-conspirators. He wants us in his corner. He’s prone to addressing us as, yes, “babies.” (Hux is British.) And while all Hux wanted was a “little bitty bump off the tip of a blade” before this opening scene begins, he ends up in Alphabet City and claims he was bullied into this somewhat sordid means of getting coked up.
Meanwhile, Viv is meeting with their landlord at the Chelsea Hotel because there’s a little bit of a problem with a dead body. May or may not be another drug issue. Viv tells us it was Hux who wanted to stay at the Chelsea because of its “proxy of greatness.” Hux wanted the sleazy squalor and Viv takes us back to the moment when she and Hux talked their way into the Chelsea, including the moment they handed landlord Dan an unmarked demo disc to listen to on his little boombox with “aging, dust-muffled speakers” as if you need to pass an audition as struggling artists to secure a room in the infamous hotel. They get the room. “Luck was a dead lady who left a tidy 200 square feet of hallowed ground to two greasy musicians not three days after we got to New York. Luck is a dead lady again today. As it starts, so it goes, I guess.”
It’s the voices that drive Better to Beg. Back and forth from Hux to Viv we go and it’s rarely convivial. Viv is the grown-up (and that’s a relative term) and Hux is the delinquent subadult. Hux isn’t good with time or money. Viv tries to lay down the law after a show in Boston. Sitting in an alley after dumpster-diving for some scraps, Hux doesn’t care too much that the band is broke. He wants to cultivate a “myth” like Ziggy Stardust or Captain Beefheart. “All art must be the presence of craft, not the reminder of labor,” he tries to explain to Viv. “They only want the finished product.”
Viv doesn’t buy it. She wants a record deal. Hux wants to work on his rowdy, drug-fueled reputation.
I love a good rock and roll novel as much as I love a good baseball novel or a dark piece of crime fiction and Better to Beg is right up there in the music category. But it’s also a masterclass in energetic, original writing. Turn to a random page and you’re bound to find a fresh image or five.
Hux: “In Atlanta we play a bar like a bachelor flat, roughly the same size but somehow more depressing. Nobody’s paying attention to us and these shows are the worst because Vivy, like most frontmen, is a bit of a vampire and needs something to feed off. She needs something, or someone to run up against, someone to challenge. While I’m happy to goad her, the effort’s a bit for naught if there is no one to witness our little brawls. Bands run on a certain degree of tension and that’s what makes performance magical. There is a bit of pantomime to it; people like to imagine you are f***ing or fighting each other on stage. Vivy has learned to prowl and growl and control the people, but there are no people to control. She brawls with me anyway, but we end up looking like a couple having an argument in a grocery aisle. We all know how uncomfortable a scene that is, babies.”
What can I say about the ending other than it’s one of the most well-earned, perfect moments I’ve read in a long time. Art, myth, identity … and the power of story. Despite themselves and because of who they are, Hux and Viv are legends. So it starts, so it goes. Around and around.
In her heartwarming acknowledgements at the end of Better to Beg, MacKenzie tells the story of how this novel grew out of a serious health crisis and how she turned that scary moment into art. “The idea of creating art and pursing passion without permission, and without apology,” she writes, “is woven throughout this book.”
Yeah, that’s Hux. And Viv. The presence of craft. And no reminders of the labor involved.
Yep. That about sums it up.
Viv. And Hux.
You won’t soon forget them. Or their fights as their band The Deserters makes its way cross-country on an epic journey to, well, one of the best endings you’ll come across.
But let’s start at the raunchy beginning. You might wince. Or cringe. Hux even warns of us of that fact. I mean, it’s a rowdy rock band. There will be a drugs. And more drugs. Especially in the Hux chapters. “You do not get to flinch because I do not get to flinch, not even as I am the one face-down on a sticky barroom table in the squalid basement of some humid bar on the Lower East Side,” Hux tells us.
Hux often turns to the camera (us): “We don’t know each other yet so this may strike you as a bit of overshare, but it is very important you understand specifics,” Hux tells us. “I ditched a gig to be here. A big, very important gig. Vivy will be livid and your testimony will be key. Blowing off a professional commitment in order to have substances blown up your bum will not track as an excuse with my bandmate. You must take notes, for she is more brutal with cross-examination than your average barrister and no whereabouts, whoseabouts, whatsabouts, and f***abouts must be documented rigorously. I am spread out on this grotty table instead of at the Mercury Lounge doing a dog-and-pony for some A&R dope from Columbia.”
Yes, for Hux, we readers are co-conspirators. He wants us in his corner. He’s prone to addressing us as, yes, “babies.” (Hux is British.) And while all Hux wanted was a “little bitty bump off the tip of a blade” before this opening scene begins, he ends up in Alphabet City and claims he was bullied into this somewhat sordid means of getting coked up.
Meanwhile, Viv is meeting with their landlord at the Chelsea Hotel because there’s a little bit of a problem with a dead body. May or may not be another drug issue. Viv tells us it was Hux who wanted to stay at the Chelsea because of its “proxy of greatness.” Hux wanted the sleazy squalor and Viv takes us back to the moment when she and Hux talked their way into the Chelsea, including the moment they handed landlord Dan an unmarked demo disc to listen to on his little boombox with “aging, dust-muffled speakers” as if you need to pass an audition as struggling artists to secure a room in the infamous hotel. They get the room. “Luck was a dead lady who left a tidy 200 square feet of hallowed ground to two greasy musicians not three days after we got to New York. Luck is a dead lady again today. As it starts, so it goes, I guess.”
It’s the voices that drive Better to Beg. Back and forth from Hux to Viv we go and it’s rarely convivial. Viv is the grown-up (and that’s a relative term) and Hux is the delinquent subadult. Hux isn’t good with time or money. Viv tries to lay down the law after a show in Boston. Sitting in an alley after dumpster-diving for some scraps, Hux doesn’t care too much that the band is broke. He wants to cultivate a “myth” like Ziggy Stardust or Captain Beefheart. “All art must be the presence of craft, not the reminder of labor,” he tries to explain to Viv. “They only want the finished product.”
Viv doesn’t buy it. She wants a record deal. Hux wants to work on his rowdy, drug-fueled reputation.
I love a good rock and roll novel as much as I love a good baseball novel or a dark piece of crime fiction and Better to Beg is right up there in the music category. But it’s also a masterclass in energetic, original writing. Turn to a random page and you’re bound to find a fresh image or five.
Hux: “In Atlanta we play a bar like a bachelor flat, roughly the same size but somehow more depressing. Nobody’s paying attention to us and these shows are the worst because Vivy, like most frontmen, is a bit of a vampire and needs something to feed off. She needs something, or someone to run up against, someone to challenge. While I’m happy to goad her, the effort’s a bit for naught if there is no one to witness our little brawls. Bands run on a certain degree of tension and that’s what makes performance magical. There is a bit of pantomime to it; people like to imagine you are f***ing or fighting each other on stage. Vivy has learned to prowl and growl and control the people, but there are no people to control. She brawls with me anyway, but we end up looking like a couple having an argument in a grocery aisle. We all know how uncomfortable a scene that is, babies.”
What can I say about the ending other than it’s one of the most well-earned, perfect moments I’ve read in a long time. Art, myth, identity … and the power of story. Despite themselves and because of who they are, Hux and Viv are legends. So it starts, so it goes. Around and around.
In her heartwarming acknowledgements at the end of Better to Beg, MacKenzie tells the story of how this novel grew out of a serious health crisis and how she turned that scary moment into art. “The idea of creating art and pursing passion without permission, and without apology,” she writes, “is woven throughout this book.”
Yeah, that’s Hux. And Viv. The presence of craft. And no reminders of the labor involved.
January 7, 2024
Kirsti has such a great voice and an ability to hold a reader's attention. The whole way through Better to Beg, I didn't want to put it down. I wish more authors knew how to write like this!
January 3, 2026
I’ve never wanted to be a rockstar. I still don’t, even after reading Kirsti Mackenzie’s excellent BETTER TO BEG. But with characters as vibrant and realized as Viv and Hux, I concede it’s hard not to. And though we are sometimes our own worst enemies, the lucky ones go one better and find a way to understand this self destructive behaviour. Whether we learn from such observations will forever remain the question. In my heart, I sure hope Viv and Hux do. Go forth, seek out, purchase and enjoy. Tell ‘em a fan of Kirsti Mackenzie sent you!
January 21, 2024
In the post-9/11 American backdrop, where dreams clash and legends emerge, Better to Beg pulses with rebellious energy. Kirsti MacKenzie deftly captures music's gritty world with wit and hope, making this debut a true muse for those who dare to be different.
November 16, 2025
Fantastic!
A new fave. This one hit all the right notes for me, and I'm looking forward to more from MacKenzie. Highly recommended!
A new fave. This one hit all the right notes for me, and I'm looking forward to more from MacKenzie. Highly recommended!
November 15, 2025
Like the music she’s writing about, Kirsti MacKenzie’s Better to Beg has real verve. It’s Meet Me in the Bathroom reimagined as a road novel—a celebration of the beautiful pain that defines creative partnership.
November 16, 2025
Fantastic!
A new fave. This one hit all the right notes for me, and I'm looking forward to more from MacKenzie. Highly recommended!
A new fave. This one hit all the right notes for me, and I'm looking forward to more from MacKenzie. Highly recommended!
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews