On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

Posted by Athena Scalzi

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Music. magic. and undead creatures; The Black Fire Concerto has really got it all. Read on to see how metal music paved the way for author Mike Allen’s newest novel.

MIKE ALLEN:

Whatever could have possessed me to write The Black Fire Concerto, a post-apocalyptic secondary world body horror novel in which a pair of heroines who cast spells through their music face off against hordes of undead monstrosities?

My heroines, warrior-sorceress Olyssa and her teenage apprentice Erzelle, draw inspiration from the likes of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Elric and Moonglum, Roland the Gunslinger and his sidekicks, and more. They are musicians traveling through a world overrun with ghouls. 

Many scenes from the book, if a painter chose to illustrate them, could serve as death metal album covers. (Hint, hint, to any horror-loving artists out there.)

I’m not a musician, but music with a dash of darkness has been central to my life since my middle school explorations of my parents’ collection of symphonies by classical composers. Much of it did little for me — I tend to find soft, gentle music boring and irritating rather than relaxing. But some conveyed power, momentum, menace, like Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from the “Peer Gynt” suite. I especially fell head over heels for Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” — I loved its energy and its rebellious atonality (the very qualities that caused the audience to riot at its 1913 premiere.)

At my mother’s insistence I sang in church choirs until I grew old enough to be allowed to say no. At about the same time I stopped going to choir practice I discovered that —somewhat to my parents’ dismay — the qualities of classical music that energized me could be mainlined in concentrate from heavy metal. The point of no return arrived when I used my dishwashing allowance to purchase Defenders of the Faith by Judas Priest, an album packed with science fiction, fantasy, and horror imagery, paced at an adrenalized frenzy.

Beyond just listening, all those years in choir proved to have a startling side effect: I had the lung power of a lion and could produce ear-shattering screams at will, leading to some delightful years as a garage- (or really, basement-) band singer, and hours and hours spent writing and recording songs with friends who were (and still are) excellent musicians. A special shout out here to my lifelong brothers-in-the-arts Mike Berkeley and John Morris. Our band was called She’s Dead, a phrase lifted from one of the stories in Clive Barker’s Books of Blood.

Now, I’ve been a huge horror fan for decades, but that wasn’t always so. As a child, I wanted nothing to do with horror tales or movies. A third grade reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” traumatized me for years. 

Yet hanging out with those same musician friends as a teen led to my first horror movies seen in theaters, and the discovery of a lifelong love of over the top, beyond the pale body horror, both humorous and ghastly serious: “Return of the Living Dead,” “Re-Animator,” “Evil Dead,” “Day of the Dead,” “From Beyond,” “Aliens,” “The Fly,” “Hellraiser.”

“Return of the Living Dead,” Dan O’Bannon’s blackly humorous unofficial sequel to “Night of the Living Dead,” deserves special attention. Everyone remembers how those zombies craved brains in their diet. What’s less remembered is that those zombies from 1985 ran fast, and shooting or slicing them did no good. Nothing short of incineration got rid of them. My ghouls, fueled by a magical curse, totally belong to the O’Bannon school.

With all these movies and metal, I’ve surely dated myself as a creature that reached my first creative bloom in the 1980s. I would not have dared to make my heroines classically trained musicians, though, were it not for a surprise return to the world of classical music in mid-2009, when I became the arts columnist for my home city’s newspaper.

In October of that year, I landed a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship that sent me to review world class orchestra performances in New York. I am still no expert on the topic, but I learned enough to describe these performances, and my appreciation for them, with at least a dash of eloquence.

In truth, my duo would not sound much like a metal band if you heard them play. Search the web for videos of harp and pan pipe duets to hear an approximation of their harmonies. The way they fight with musical notes, on the other hand, comes straight from the iconography of heavy metal.

As do undead fiends. (Hello, Eddie from Iron Maiden!)

Both elements have the potential to send the blood racing. I intend The Black Fire Concerto to serve as a double jolt.

A fair question: Is there truly any overlap between the world of classical music and the armies of the dead? I say it depends on the choice of music.

Remember my explorations of my parents’ classical music records? In sixth grade, I drove classmates nuts by constantly humming the “Dies Irae” passage from the fifth movement of Berlioz’ “Symphonie Fantastique.” Entirely unbeknownst to me, that very same year, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining used a synthesizer version of that same musical segment as its opening theme.

In hindsight, considering the influences which inspired this novel, that sure seems like foreshadowing.

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https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/04/23/the-big-idea-mike-allen-2/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=55405