Rough Beast

by Adrian Van Young

When Percy LeBlanc, the lead singer and guitarist of up-and-coming New Orleans black metal band, Bethlehem, is brutally murdered after a disastrous performance on the last stretch of an even more disastrous tour, their unassuming wallflower of a bass player is arrested. Sammy Singerman is subsequently freed, with only circumstantial evidence to connect him to the crime, but he won’t let the unquiet dead rest. Taking on the role of both detective and avenging angel, Sammy goes hell-for-leather to find Percy’s killer, plumbing Bethlehem’s history of trauma for answers before the killer finds him too.

A provocative subversion of the real-life saga of murder and criminal one-upmanship which plagued Scandinavia’s own metal scene in the early 1990s, at once reminiscent of Elizabeth Hand’s Cass Neary novels and Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps, Rough Beast is a drug-soaked sewer ride straight into the grimy underbelly of the Big Easy, where nothing is sacred and nothing stays buried.

284 pages, Paperback

Published October 13, 2026

About the author

Adrian Van Young is the author of four books of fiction—most recently, Rough Beast from Black Lawrence Press. His fiction, nonfiction, and criticism have been published or are forthcoming in Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, Black Warrior Review, Conjunctions, Guernica, BOMB, Granta, McSweeney’s, and The New Yorker online, among others. He is a professional freelance editor, and splits his time between New Orleans and Paris, where he lives with his family.

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rough Beast is a howling homage to the extreme music of New Orleans, where the term “blackened sludge” applies to both the homegrown metal scene and to the muck pushed through the pumps that keep the city from drowning in its own filth. Adrian Van Young’s riffs on music are nothing short of sublime, but make no mistake: Rough Beast is a five-star sewer ride.