Rime of the Angry Metalhead

by Jason Luna, Christopher Luna (Editor)

Long Island, 1988. Mikey Pellegrino and his nihilistic metalhead friends, The Ridge Boys, are thirsty for revenge against the classmate they deem responsible for the car crash that took their best friend’s life on New Year’s Eve. The teens construct a shrine at their hangout spot in the woods in honor of their fallen friend, Cliff, whose nickname resulted from the young man’s striking resemblance to Cliff Burton, the heavy metal legend who was killed in a bus crash two years earlier. As “Angry Mike” steps into 1989 ready to settle the score for Cliffy’s untimely death, his confusion and rage lead him down a path of self-destruction that forces him to enter a residential rehab facility. There he meets Cheyenne, who surprises both with her peculiar method of romantic pursuit and the information she holds about the night Cliffy died, an insight that will forever change the way Mikey sees the event that took his friend away. Rime of the Angry Metalhead is Mikey’s tale of loss and love, metal and mayhem.Inspired by his own experiences as a teenage metalhead on Eastern Long Island in the late 1980s, author Jason Luna uses the backdrop of the end of the Cold War and the suburban heavy metal subculture in order to tell the story of a cynical, chaotic young man whose worst enemy is himself.

462 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 13, 2021