I Read Books: Backmask

 

Backmask

Valerie Chill works for Hush Productions, which is Nicholas Hush’s record company. One day he has a dream for music, using the latest electronic distortion, to make music that is evil. Or seems evil. Or has magical qualities. He has Chill call up various places, Freemasons, an Institute for Psychic Research etc. The Freemason representative also works for the FBI. He and the Masons are unhappy that the Institute have bought up some Masonic texts.

It's the 1960s in New York. Hush and Chill are both gay. They met as Chill was selling Librium, as she deals drugs on the side and has been prescribed it by her therapist.

Hush’s project gets backing from the government, both the FBI/Mason and, mysteriously, the CIA fund it. He takes two bands, one some white boys from Long Island, the other some black lads from the Caribbean as he thinks ska might be the next thing. They work on their look, the music, the lyrics, the sound. Trying to make something new and evil. Something odd and magical.

Hush, always armed with a gun, becomes increasingly obsessed, has mood swings. Chill finds romance in the person of Sophia Blaine from the Institute. But Blaine isn’t the driving force there, and things start to spiral out of control even as the music starts to pick up. The CIA are trying drug trials and now Chill is finding herself inside Hush’s dream.

A walkthrough New Tork subcultures of the 60s, or a fairground mirror reflection of them, imagining how they might have come together (in different ways to how I seem to recall they actually did). If it’s occasionally confusing and scattershot, then so be it; how much more actual drugs, music and the occult were and are.

Read This: A mindbending exploration of music and (not quite) magical conspiracy in secret corners of 1960s New York
Don’t Read This: Music didn’t happen this way, and probably can’t 
Disclosure: I received a review copy from Malarkey Books