Where Stars Won't Shine by Patrick Lacey

Their arrangements feel more varied, the riffs often technical yet never just for the sake of it. I’ve always found Exodus to be tighter than many of their peers. Or maybe it’s 2019 and you’re watching your seventh straight YouTube video of Gary Holt assaulting his fretboard, trying desperately to interpret more than three notes of any given song. There’s a monstrous illustration of conjoined twins on the cover and you purchase it for however much a record cost in 1985 - I’m still not born yet - and you bring it home and head bang until your nose bleeds. It’s 1985 and there’s this thing called thrash metal and it’s blowing up and you see this album entitled Bonded by Blood at your local Tower Records, the first studio effort from some band called Exodus. Let’s take a trip, shall we? A trip to the Bay Area.

And I can’t remember not listening to metal, whether it was watching Metallica and Megadeth videos on Headbangers Ball or gravitating toward Cannibal Corpse albums in the record store and thinking: One day, I will own all of these…whatever these are. “The first movie I recall watching is A Nightmare on Elm Street, thanks to a very groovy pair of parents. “My love for horror and metal is a chicken-or-the-egg scenario,” he says. To celebrate the release, Lacey was kind enough to send along a playlist to accompany the long-simmering harrowing oceanic tribulations he’s summoned. “If you like pirate cults and giant sea serpents,” Lacey tells Decibel, “it was created with you in mind.”

Now he’s back with a green mist n’ sea monster epic - co-authored with fellow metal-head writer Tim Meyer - boasting the very metal title Lords of the Deep. From Dream Woods (2016) and We Came Back (2017) to Bone Saw (2018) and the serial-killer-dropped-in-a-haunted-town opus Where Stars Won’t Shine (2019), visionary heavy metal horror stylist Patrick Lacey has been on an absolute tear the last few years, bringing a kaleidoscopic brilliance to his thrills, kills, and nightmare landscapes that keeps readers constantly on his toes.

Where Stars Won't Shine by Patrick Lacey