Last week, Datura Books published Confessions of an Antichrist by Marta Skaði — a novel that takes readers into the world of Norwegian heavy metal. As a long-time fan of Scandinavian metal (mainly Swedish), I was very much intrigued by the novel. To celebrate the release, Datura has provided this excerpt (Chapter 2) with us to share! First, check out the synopsis:
Marta Skaði is on a mission to destroy the world. Rebelling against the perfect, picturesque Norwegian fishing town she was born in, she has formed a black metal band of such disturbing depravity she knows they’re the perfect weapon to corrupt the masses.
When a record deal is dangled before the band after a particularly offensive gig, Marta has to hold the young, wannabe Satanists in her midst together as they reach for their destiny. Not easy when they consist of her ox-brained best friend drummer, a Viking-obsessed bass guitarist, a sex-addicted lead guitarist, and a barely human singer who could well be the Anti-Christ.
Yet as the record deal seems within reach, everything falls apart. And so begins the spiralling descent into madness of Marta and her strange, sordid group as they corrupt Christians on crosses and battle fascists with dildos, while coming to realise that one of them may be more evil than they realised…
Set in the grungy heavy metal scene of 2010’s Norway, Marta chronicles her descent into chaos and murder, fuelled by thinly veiled lust described as love. From burning down churches to satanic orgies, Confessions of an Antichrist is a fast paced and hair raising story, detailing the gruesome fulfilment of teenage dreams and nightmares.
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2
So, on the night this story begins, the last of the three support bands ended up being a bland collection of circus freaks peddling the predictable zombie/Nazi shtick.
It was loud and shit and nobody cared. Texting and messaging are the most effective forms of communication in an environment like this and if the ill-judged clamour of the band could have been edited out of the mix I would have heard the muted clicks of a hundred fingers swarming deftly over their devices. Even as the vocalist was fire-eating and the bassist smeared fake excrement over his face, the sparse crowd sat cross-legged and resolute on the sticky floor of the club staring into tiny screens that up-lit their pale, bored faces with a sinister digital glow.
I had a few people to keep an eye on that night: the journalists and the man from Satan’s Spawn record company. The latter wasn’t going to be there yet – he was only in this for the main attraction. But the journos arrived before I did. The promise of a subsidised bar probably helped, but with four unsigned bands playing statistically at least one of the performers would go on to sell a handful of records or, better still, kill someone. The bragging rights that came from witnessing the inaugural Oslo gig of a notorious psychopath was a draw that was too much for any heavy metal hack to resist.
As you know, at the time, Norway had two magazines catering for this sort of extreme metal: Downtuned and Hate Sounds. I have no idea which of the magazines any of the journos were writing for that night. I’m not sure they were entirely sure themselves. Movement between the titles was pretty fluid at the time and many journalists were on the payroll of both.
My first impression of Sigurd was that he was an appalling little man who had made it his life’s work to do the opposite of what everyone expected. Bucking trends, championing the most awful of bands, and roasting anyone that dared enjoy a positive review from any of his peers.
Sorry, Sigurd, but you’re a cock-sucking prick.
Od, was of course, his wingman. In contrast to Sigurd, I considered Od a big, wet pussy. I bet he was once a bookish teenager, good at science, eager to please, and hit puberty at the same time as he fell in love with black, death, and thrash metal along with its numerous sub-genres.
Am I right?
His reviews were always benevolent and read like the chemistry homework of an enthusiastic schoolboy with a crush on his teacher.
This is what I remember hearing:
“So how would you describe them?” Sigurd yelled over the noise.
“Goresludge,” Od answered with a certainty that didn’t invite discussion. Heavy metal nomenclature is a serious business and Od, having coined both the designations narco piss flange and gothsmack neo-bender (classifications that outlasted the bands to which they were first applied), was regarded as one of the foremost metal taxonomists practising in Oslo.
Sigurd wasn’t having it though. He’d never agreed with anyone in his life and there was little chance he was going to start now.
“They played too fast to be sludge, Od. And didn’t he say something about Satan at the beginning?”
“Blackened goregrind then,” Od said, less convincing now.
Sigurd shook his head and smiled patronisingly. “But they used a D-beat? Plus, that guitarist can shred like a petrol-engine Moulinex, so to speak.”
“What are you saying then? They’re blackened D-beat deathcore?”
“No. More melodic than that. I’d call them blackened D-beat power death.”
“Cool.” Od had to accept the wisdom of Sigurd’s words. “Still shit though.”
From the pictures I have seen the crowds at Norwegian black metal gigs aren’t any different from the crowds at black metal gigs anywhere else in the world; except that over here we take it all a bit more seriously. Tonight there were the usual assortment of oddballs. Boys scarred by a recent and virulent puberty with bad skin and terrible hair. Others who could tell you where any curve bisects the x-axis without breaking sweat, but who found themselves chemically incapable of speaking to girls. A slightly more sophisticated clique in the midst of a twelve month fad who will grow out of it. One or two cute girls with far too many tattoos, who just want the love and attention of an emotionally distant father. Those who were permanently lost, not wanting to be found by anyone and seeking refuge from everything. And then you had the handful of very earnest, hideously ugly misanthropes who call themselves Satanists and hate anyone who doesn’t share their particular worldview. Ironic really, as the combined worldview shared by a room full of self-proclaimed Satanists is likely to be more wide and varied than that enjoyed by any other cross-section of society.
Oh, but tonight we also got to see an aspect of Norway’s metal scene that remains unique to us.
Oslo Iron had arrived. The self-proclaimed guardians of black metal.
Americans have the Hells Angels, the Brits have their football hooligans and here in Norway we have these fucks: a gang of old faux-bikers with greying beards and sagging guts who maintain that wearing sunglasses in the dark, having a gun licence, sporting the same clothes and holding the same views for decades makes them worthy of respect. These guys served their apprenticeships during the second wave of black metal in the early 90s, some of them traded blows with the mainstream rock scene when black metal was born in the 80s, and two of them, regarded by the others as noblemen, earned their spurs crashing bottles into punks back in ‘77 before black metal had given them a philosophy upon which to justify their hatred and violence.
They arrived just as the support act finished their pathetic set and the atmosphere grew tense with an anticipatory sweat for the main event. Sigurd and Od joined me, as I wandered over to the perimeter of the pit and watched events unfold on the stage.
“Fucking hell, have you seen the size of that drummer?” Sigurd said, as an enormous slab of meat and hair, with sticks looking tiny in his oversized hands, crouched over the drum-kit. He looked like a bear on a child’s tricycle.
“I bet that stool could disappear up his ass and he wouldn’t notice,” Od replied.
“He’s the one I told you about. Apparently, he’s already killed two people.”
Od nodded, like a prospective employer perusing an impressive CV. “I can believe it. From the size of him, I can imagine he probably just bit their heads off.”
I smiled into the straw of my lemonade. It was bullshit, of course.
I knew Peter had only killed once.
I‘d seen that beautiful beast of a drummer nearly every day of my life, so his outlandish proportions didn’t seem strange to me. But I always enjoyed the reaction he provoked in those new to him.
“And look at this dude!” Od shook his glass in the direction of the bassist as he heaved what appeared to be a cuboid torso onto centre stage using a pair of short, stout legs that were poorly suited to the task.
“Jesus! I have never seen a man with a lower centre of gravity than that. I bet he’s never fallen over in his life.”
These two unusually-shaped individuals did make for a unique rhythm section, I won’t deny it. Not since the Siege of Minas Tirith had there been such an odd-looking alliance of creatures. It never seemed to bother them though: Peter the drummer and Edvard the bassist were quite comfortable in the skins nature had deigned to stretch so generously across their two opposing planes.
Peter rolled his snare and tom-toms and then gently crashed some symbols, as all drummers do, just to check that the laws of physics hadn’t changed since he last tried. Meanwhile, Edvard grimaced at the kids sat on the floor and ran two tree-trunk fingers down the neck of his bass with such vigour anyone not equipped with his callused skin would have surely seared the flesh on their fingers to the bone.
Their appearance onstage provoked a ceasefire in the telecommunication combat being waged across the floor of the club. Brows furrowed, heads inclined to one side and neighbours were nudged as the crowd tried to assimilate what it was seeing.
Those that had sought sanctuary from the support bands began to migrate from the bar back to the thick of the action and the last of those seated were forced to stand up for fear of being trampled on.
It was a surprisingly big crowd for a Wednesday night.
“Lots of girls here,” Sigurd commented. He glanced at me, though his gaze never climbed higher than my cleavage – which he stared at as if it was some complicated train timetable that required his analysis.
“They’re not your standard metal-trolls either,” Od replied. “Look at her.”
He pointed at a blonde stood close to the front of the stage with clean, straight and waist-length hair. She was well over six feet tall with a face and body lovingly chiselled from ivory.
Sigurd dragged his attention off me and redirected it stage-ward. I could see that he was forming an opposing argument, but it never escaped his mouth and quickly he was forced to shuffle uncomfortably and adjust his zipper. I suspect he had never been aroused at a black metal gig before.
“I’m pleased to see that corpsepaint is back in vogue,” Od continued, staring at the band, not realising or caring to notice Sigurd’s discomfort. Sigurd himself was still too busy adjusting himself to comment.
Corpsepainting, an artistic movement that has never quite impacted on the mainstream, involves the use of make-up to give the impression that you are recently deceased. By evoking a countenance devoid of all colour, with sunken eyes and sometimes even wounds or parcels of decay, it is designed to be the antithesis of glamour. But, as is so often the case, if you push off a sufficient distance from the safe and acceptable shores of fashion you will eventually find yourself crashed upon the rocks of its cutting edge. Many in this crowd were sporting a look that can only be described as corpse-chic.
The band were old-school devotees of the corpsepaint oeuvre. Huge Peter sported a full, dark blonde beard and what remained of his huge face had been painted white with eyes shaded into narcosis. Squat Edvard was also bearded, albeit much less generously than his band mate. Even from a distance, I could discern each individual hair in his beard and moustache and map with precision their course out from his skin. With the application of corpsepaint his face looked like a salt plain populated with sparse brush.
There was a collective intake of breath as the guitarist then joined the pair from the wings. While corpsepaint is always intended to look horrific, this confident youth was the most beautiful corpse imaginable. A celebration of strength, sex and decay.
The arrogance I knew so well was also evident in spades as he sauntered across the stage. The man, Snorre, screamed many silent contradictions: strong of feature, yet soft of skin; clothed like a punked-up biker but with the gait of a Victorian poet; tall and muscular but with the grace of a young willow swaying in the breeze. Everything about him was overwhelmingly masculine while at the same time beautifully feminine, like a frilled cuff on a boxing glove.
He immediately noticed the tall beauty at the front of the crowd. With legs astride a monitor he loomed over her and fixed her with a stare. Everyone in the room was transfixed by this encounter – a meeting of divinities deserving of an epic poem to preserve the moment for posterity. There was an air of spiritual anticipation, as if the perceived power of their celestial majesty was such that in their coupling they might conceive a new universe.
The girl leaned over the stage. Staring up at him, she tilted her head and inhaled deeply at the side of his boot, drinking in the aroma from the leather as if were a heady intoxicant. She closed her eyes briefly, then, having had her fill, she opened them and extended her tongue, dragging it, slowly, expertly, from toe to heel.
All but one of the audience held their breath. The one was me, rolling my eyes and sucking noisily on the straw in my drink.
I waited until she had completed this ritual adoration. Raising her head as if seeking thanks, forgiveness, or some other consideration for her worship. A sly and perhaps cruel smile fractured the guitarist’s face which, until that moment, had been impassive. Snorre then looked up, and with close to three hundred pairs of eyes trained upon him, he sought out mine. I greeted them with the raise of an eyebrow and a subtle tilt of my head.
He lifted his boot, resplendent with a streak of fresh saliva, and placed its sole carefully on her exquisite forehead. With a fraction more than playful pressure he pushed her back into the crowd and she sank beneath its surface. He then turned, strode over to a guitar that was perched against an amplifier and strapped it on.
It was around then that I spotted the record company guy had arrived. I’d looked him up on one of those corporate networking sites that wankers use to show other wankers how many different wankers they know. The giveaway was the expensive spectacles that cleverly gave the illusion of depth to his otherwise lifeless eyes.
He stood at the bar with a diet coke, waiting for things to kick off.
I grinned to myself, knowing I’d got all the pieces in place.
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Marta Skaði’s Confessions of an Antichrist is out now, published by Datura Books in North America and in the UK.
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