The Best Ever Death Metal Novel Out of Brooklyn

A conversation with John Wray

I first became aware of John Wray after reading Marco Roth’s 2009 essay in n+1 on “The Rise of the Neuronovel,” which grouped his novel Lowboy along with books by Jonathan Lethem, Rivka Galchen, and a few others. Roth described the neuronovel as a book “wherein the mind becomes the brain,” something I found fascinating since this was before people were casually tossing around terms like “neurodivergent,” self-diagnosing themselves as “a little on the spectrum,” or adding “#ADHD” in their social media bios. As somebody who has spent a lifetime dealing with the funny way the chemicals in my brain like to work, I was intrigued by the idea of the “neuronovel,” so I read the Lethem book first because I was already a fan, then the Galchen book because I had read something else by her that I liked, but it escapes me now what it was. Wray was new to me, but I was initially skeptical since the jacket copy of Lowboy mentioned a character dealing with paranoid schizophrenia, and I’d seen plenty of good writers botch writing about that before. I assumed that, at best, I was going to feel lukewarm about the novel. So it’s funny writing this years later and now I place it alongside heavy hitters like White Teeth by Zadie Smith, The Plot Against America by Philip Roth, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, Chabon’s work, Whitehead’s Sag Harbor, and some of the other books that I can’t see when I turn and look at the shelf next to me and think about the best books of the aughts.

Over time I became friendly with Wray. I see home from time to time since we live in the same zip code. But the truth is that I’m friendly with a lot of authors now, and I don’t read all of them as feverishly as I do Wray’s work. He’d put out two books before Lowboy and three more since. I’ve read every book of his after Lowboy when they came out, and I’ve come to the conclusion that Wray is obsessive about making sure each new novel is a totally different experience not just for the reader, but for him as well. You hear a lot about artists and how they want to find new challenges all the time, but it often just feels like lip service. Wray truly seems to relish in moving forward with each new book, doing something totally different, stepping out of his comfort zone, and sometimes tackling topics that might make people who just read jacket copy uncomfortable. Lowboy with mental illness and 2018’s Godsend especially come to mind. The latter book I’d put among the best of the last decade the way Lowboy resonated with me in the aughts.

Now we’re in the 2020s, and I’ll admit it feels funny to say that his latest, Gone to the Wolves, is the most accessible novel of his I’ve read. I suppose that isn’t wrong, but he doesn’t compromise anything in his tale of friendship, loss, and heavy metal. Or maybe it isn’t accessible so much as it is cinematic. Gone to the Wolves was very easy to see playing out in my head as I read it. There was this sense of forbidding and loneliness I might feel when I watch a Gus Van Sant film or even think about the film version of Stand by Me, and I couldn’t help but think how Wray has tapped into something similar to what John Darnielle has been doing with the Mountain Goats and his own literary output over the last few years.

Even if it wasn’t a writer I already liked, I’d still give any novel with black metal font on the cover a chance. What I wasn’t expecting when I picked up Gone to the Wolves is that I’d finally figure out what links Wray’s books even though the tone or subject might change from one to the next. It was through his latest novel which stretches through the heavy metal scene of the ‘80s and ‘90s that I started to think about how Wray’s books portray people who live outside the lines of what some people might consider “normal society” in the fairest light imaginable. But linking this book and its characters that will resonate with anybody who gravitated towards some sort of “scene” show that Wray’s greatest gift is his deep well of compassion. It’s the sort of thing that can’t be taught and something I find not many writers can tap into the way Wray does, and that’s a big reason why I always pick up his books when they come out.

Something I love about the novel is the metal evolution, so to speak, and the way you work it into the narrative. I think metal is this genre that people have to adapt to over time, like going from British stuff, then to thrash, and eventually maybe into doom or black metal is actually a thing people do. What was your own metal evolution as a listener?

I began where so many others have—with Black Sabbath, which still seems to me the best of all possible beginnings. My body chemistry was permanently altered by the first song of theirs I ever heard—'War Pigs,' off their breakout album, Paranoid. I'll never forget its opening seconds: those massive-sounding power chords with the muddy bass line behind them, building slowly and inevitably toward a riff that somehow felt both suicidal and ferociously alive. It was a genuine conversion moment. For weeks I didn't want to listen to anything else—basically just that song, over and over.

From that point of no return, it was a pretty swift progression to thrash bands like Slayer and Death Angel and early Metallica, then from there to the really extreme, I-dare-you-to-listen-to-this stuff, like Deicide and Napalm Death and Carcass. A weird thing about metal—about all heavy music, I think—is how it leads to a kind of almost narcotic dependency. It's like a personal aesthetic arms race. You start to continually crave heavier and creepier sounds.

I sometimes have trouble with novels that deal with musical communities or specific genres because they can come off as too overly-researched. I was telling a friend it feels more like a Gus Van Sant movie to me for some reason and that you do this really great job of not alienating people that might not know about metal but also the "heads" will appreciate it. Not to get too into the craft, but how did you find the balance? 

It was really important to me to at least attempt to write a story that wouldn't be in any way exclusionary—the mission here was to open up the world of metal to outsiders, not to wall the true believers in. Luckily, I realized early on that the subject matter in and of itself would ensure the book's appeal to insiders, just because no novel about this culture had ever been written and published before. All I had to do was strive for accuracy, and be true to my own memories. 

That meant I could focus my attention, especially in revisions, to making things as—welcoming, I guess you could say, to people who might normally regard metal with suspicion, possibly even fear. And the decision to center the novel on Kip Norvald, a kid who has next to no knowledge of metal when the story begins, turned out to be the key for me. We learn about the scene right along with Kip, and hopefully come to appreciate it, too—or at least enjoy the ride.

Again, not trying to get too into the craft talk, but I couldn't help but think of countless aimless drives I've taken through the state of Florida when I was reading the book. There's one part in particular that hit me real hard, Kip touching down at Tampa international airport, the Florida sky, the sprawl of one city touching up against the other. Did you go to some of the places in the book in order to get a better understanding of them? Because place plays a huge part and I really felt like "Damn, I feel transported!" 

I have to spend time in every location I write about—non-negotiable, no exceptions. No other kind of research gives me the same confidence, the same freedom to cut loose and make things up. I need to know how the light hits things, what the air smells like, whether there's background noise from an interstate or an airport somewhere. I'm not sure why.

In the third and final part of Gone to the Wolves, two of the three main characters, Kip and Leslie, travel to Norway in the middle of the winter. They've spent their whole lives so far in Florida and L.A.—they've never really even seen snow before, not up close—and their almost total unpreparedness for the cold and the gloom gives an otherwise pretty dark and suspenseful section a crucial touch of comedy. So I knew I had to do the same. I flew to Oslo in early February and spent a long and mostly sunless week doing my nerdy little version of location-scouting there. I'd expected that week to be brutal—and it was, in a way. But it was also very fun.

 I'm not sure whether you're a write-to-music or write-in-silence person, but were there any metal albums that were in heavy rotation while working on the novel? 

An easy question to answer! Yes indeed.

I usually can't write to music that features anyone singing—it's just too distracting. But fortunately, in a lot of metal, the vocals are so unintelligible—so buried, or just overwhelmed by the distortion—that paying attention to the lyrics isn't even an option. I listened to a lot of Sabbath, and a lot of so-called 'Stoner' and 'Doom' metal—bands like Cathedral, and Candlemass, and Earth, and Sleep—and a lot of Indian ragas, actually, which have more in common with slow, drone-y metal than people might think.

I was thinking about how I first started reading you around 2009 when Lowboy came out and it took a few years to realize I'd actually read you a few years earlier when you wrote about Sunn O))) for the Times Magazine in 2006. I don't think a lot of people, especially Times readers, had caught onto Sunn or what they were doing in 2006. I know that article literally came out two decades ago, but what was it about Sunn that made you want to pitch a piece to the NYT Magazine? 

How funny that you remember that article! It was actually my first-ever piece for the NYT Mag. I was really surprised that the top brass gave me the go-ahead—I have a really brilliant editor there, Sheila Glaser, but I think some of the higher-ups needed more than a little convincing. SunnO))) were just so very unlike most people's preconceptions about what a metal band is supposed to be: they were experimental, articulate, and wildly eclectic in their tastes and influences. At the same time, they performed in druid robes and threw fake blood around! It just seemed like the kind of piece that would basically write itself, and it did. It's still my favorite of all the profiles I've written for the Times.

Finally, a big part of why I loved this book, besides just downright enjoying it, is because I find myself thinking about how certain more aggressive musical genres like metal, but also hardcore or noise, don't always get the respect they deserve as art. Some of it is downright brilliant and technically perfect, and some of it is garbage but maybe in a more primitive way that will take on new meaning over time. As you show in the book, metal can be a lot of different things and sounds and scenes, but I'm wondering if you have some big-picture idea of what metal music means. Like what does it say about us as a society that this music has stuck around and evolved and splintered out into these weirder little sub-genres? 

I don't have any big-picture explanation for the continued vitality and appeal of scary, heavy, angry music—either in the U.S. or globally. I'm as puzzled by its staying power as anybody, to be honest. All I can really give, by way of an answer, is the description I wrote in Gone to the Wolves of Kip hearing extreme metal for the first time—which was taken directly from my own memories of listening to Slayer's South of Heaven in my friend's suburban bedroom: 

Horror films were Kip's one point of reference, his lifeline, and not just because of the airbrushed zombie on the LP sleeve. Before the song was over he'd begun to understand. He was being offered the same self-purifying fear, the same catharsis, the same revelation midnight slasher movies gave: that everything wasn't going to be all right. Not now and not ever. And that made perfect sense to him.