Broken Hope lyrics always seemed like mini-synopses of potential horror sagas, so perhaps guitarist/wordsmith Jeremy Wagner’s the burgeoning second career as a dark fiction author should not come as a huge surprise.
In his debut novel The Armageddon Chord — ably reviewed in the current issue of Decibel by Lucas Hardison — Wagner intertwines the two vocations with a bracingly original demonic adventure yarn detailing the supernatural insanity which ensues when the world’s greatest living six-string shredder is duped by a nihilistic billionaire into transcribing an apocalypse-inciting song from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic tablets — Nile’s Amongst the Catacombs of Nephren-Ka meets the flat-out nasty fun of Joe Lansdale or a Clive Barker-ian epic magical realism landscape laid over the classic George Burns rocker-temptation threequel Oh God, You Devil.
We have three signed copies of The Armageddon Chord — complete with oversized “armageddon” guitar picks! — to give away this week, courtesy the man himself. And while we won’t ask you to do anything so difficult as transcribing an primordially evil riff from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, we are going to make you work for the goods.
Here’s the deal: Most old-school death metal fans well recall such mid-tempo death grind nightmare visions as “Embryonic Tri-Clops,” “Hobo Stew,” and “High on Formaldehyde.” Your mission, should you be demented enough to accept it, is to dream up the sickest, most suggestive/original Broken Hope song title never written and post it in the comment section below. Think of it as a one-line flash fiction contest, if you like. Mr. Wagner will peruse the entries this coming weekend and pick the best three. We’ll announce the winners on the Decibel Facebook page and Twitter feed next week, perhaps even with a few honorable mentions of our own.
For some inspiration, get “Swamped in Gore” after the jump.
