Are you ready for…THE SCREAM??? Probably not, unless you're already numb to necrotic vaginas, the endless repetition of the titular scream (“EEYAAOW”), terribly symbolic names, edgelord rock n'roll theatrics, and a complete and total fear of sex in every form. Fondly remembered by readers, this 1988 Bantam release is to horror paperbacks what William Gibson's Neuromancer is to science fiction, only stupider. There are a lot of reasons to criticize The Scream, however, but a lack of ambition isn't one of them. Overstuffed to the point of insanity and relentlessly immature, there’s also something beautiful in its total commitment to going over the top with all the passion of a stoned, half-naked rock star shouting “I can dance in the sky!” before putting both hands on the railing of his balcony and vaulting off his 45th floor hotel suite.
(That cover is by Cover by Stan Watts of Black Sabbath's “Live Evil” album, Quiet Riot's “Metal Health,” and Exodus's “Impact is Imminent.”)
The Scream are not a mere band but a “postmetal cyber-thrash band” whose debut album went double platinum. Their lead singer, Tara Payne (what’d I tell you about those names?), is introduced to us as a fan looks up her skirt, marveling at “the oriental perfection of her features” (later she'll wield a samurai sword on stage, because of course she will). There's Rod Royale on guitar, dressed in studded leather and lace, his “Amadeus-gone-mad” twin brother, Alex, on synths, and the unmemorable rhythm section of “Gene and Terry.” Moments later we meet the book's second female character, Cyndi Wyler, “all tits and tan and perfect even teeth” who's about to be raped by her teenaged boyfriend at a house party. Then some Screamers — berserk fans of The Scream — wearing mirrored shades and sporting black teeth, black gums, and squirming worms in their eyeholes, crash the house party and murder everyone, before gang raping Cyndi and stabbing out her eyes. So, really, she needn’t have bothered: if her boyfriend wasn’t going to get her, the eyeless sociopathic zombies will. The only survivor is 15-year-old Mary Hatch who missed the blood orgy by heading outside to pee in the bushes. Within two sentences of meeting her we learn that she's tall for her age and “her breasts would probably never be large.”
Whereas a book like Kill Riff has female characters who exist solely to either be murdered or revealed as evil, scheming shrews, the depiction of women in The Scream doesn’t feel like the authors have anything against women, they just haven’t met any. They’re the equivalent of that guy who stares at women's chests while talking to them and you almost feel bad for their awkwardness because they just can't seem to help themselves.
Like Kill Riff there are long chapters devoted to rock stars appearing on talk shows to defend rock n'roll against the charges that it makes kids kill themselves, and that's where we meet the book's hero, Jake Hamer. The Scream are more of the evil Sauron in the background of this book, referred to reverentially as “the Khmer Rouge of rock and roll,” but mostly staying offstage, while the action revolves around Jake of the Jacob Hamer Band, a Vietnam Vet, a “warrior,” and a hard rocker whose band (which includes synth genius, Jesse, who records her own brain waves at the moment of orgasm and turns them into music) is falling apart.
The accusations of evil against The Scream are that they do cocaine and that their lyrics encourage their fans to “fuck the Devil” which is posited as the worst possible thing you can do. On the attack are not just the socially conservative group M.O.M. (Morality Over Music) but also Pastor Furniss, an evangelical anti-rock preacher who, of course, turns out to be a secret child molester. To battle these forces of right wing oppression, The Scream have organized Rock Aid, a concert for 16,000 fans at JFK Stadium to raise money so all the poor, oppressed rock n'rollers can pay their lawyers. The line-up consists of Genesis, Joni Mitchell, Mr. Mister, Amy Grant, AC/DC, Madonna, Judas Priest, Jackson Browne, and Frank Zappa.
But the concert is actually camouflage for The Scream to open a portal to another dimension and summon a hideous, 30-foot-tall zombie hermaphrodite with breasts, a prehensile penis with teeth, and a vagina that eats people, which wants to use red worms to eat everyone on earth's brain and turn us into some kind of communistic-sounding “hivemind.” This horrible beast is, of course, named “Momma” which means that both the forces of evil in this book are named after mothers. It also turns out that Tara Payne is not only into S&M, but her vagina is a portal to Momma's dimension, and when a man is dumb enough to perform cunninlingus on her she ejaculates “vomitcumshitslime” into his mouth which sucks his soul into her “poisoned womb.”
Women: if you see one, run.
On the way to Rock Aid we learn that members of The Scream are also S&M serial killers (when their Staten Island estate is raided the police find 153 corpses in the kinky underground torture dungeon) and at the show, when they play their song “Stick It In (and Twist),” their Screamer fans say “EEYAAOW” for the 900th time, then begin stabbing everyone in the crowd right before The Scream douse the audience in napalm and blood from the venue's sprinkler system. It's almost as if the moral majority is totally and completely right about rock n'roll. It does make people act like assholes.
Balancing the scales, somewhat, is good rocker, “warrior,” Purple Heart recipient, and Vietnam vet, Jake Hamer who shows up at the show with silenced Uzis, a crossbow, and a couple of rocket launchers to send Momma back to her sick, hivemind dimension (“Welcome to Earth, bitch…WELCOME TO THE FOOD CHAIN!” he screams, making this feel like James Cameron's Aliens only without the feminism). When all is said and done, in addition to the 153 people tortured to death at The Scream's estate, 6,000 fans die at the concert.
The head-spinning message that conservative Christians are total nutjobs who turn out to be right all the time is driven home in the book's subplot about Jesse, Jake's keyboard player, who spends most of the page count trying to get an abortion (her third), before winding up in a pro-life “clinic” where the staff try to guilt her into having her baby before she punches her way out, and then she ends the book deciding to have her baby anyways because all life is precious. The creepy conservative Christians were right again.
420 pages of frantic, aggressive prose, The Scream sums up everything that was good (over-the-top gore, non-stop mayhem, campy delirium, coked-up writing) and everything that was bad (exhausting misogyny, blockheaded philosophizing) about late ‘80s splatterpunk. It may not be to your taste but it would be hard to argue that this isn't some kind of monumental achievement. If my tone seems overly critical, that’s probably self-loathing you hear, because as much as this book irritates me now, I strongly suspect that if I’d first encountered it as a 14-year-old it would have immediately become my favorite novel, and that makes me want to go back in time and punch my stupid teenaged self in the balls, then maybe go into the gas station and buy him a six-pack anyways.