Stairway to Hell

April 26, 2010
Williams’s fourth novel (Deadfolk) is a funny, absurd, and deeply nerdy channeling of his inner record store clerk. Richard Sutton, aka Rik Suntan, is a rock and roll legend in his own mind. He’s a winner in the local pub circuit in Warchester, England, but his harelip has prevented him from breaking into the big time. So imagine his surprise when he learns he has the soul of David Bowie, the result of a strange, convoluted bit of black magic conjured decades ago by none other than Jimmy Page, who, it turns out, was a warlock during the 1970s. Though the soul swapping is confusing (and involves urine samples), Rik comes to believe that several other locals—most notably a dwarf, who is hosting the soul of George Foreman—are also victims of Page. But all is not as it seems as Rik is approached by the shadowy record Svengali, Marino, and his arch enemy, the pop singer Zachary Bremner. Williams’s prose keeps its tongue firmly in its cheek throughout this spaced-out oddity, mixing a bit of Douglas Adams–style wit with a hipster’s tight-pants irony.

May 15, 2010
British bar singer Rik Suntan, winner of the local Pub Idol contest two years in a row, is quite confident that its just a matter of getting the right break before he becomes an internationally renowned rock star. The fact that hes singing to 15 people at the Blue Cairo three times a week has done little to dim his aspirations for global dominance of the music industry. Then his gig is canceled, and his girlfriend throws him out of their apartment; even bigger problems loom when his manager attempts to convince Rik that he is really the host for the soul of 70s rock icon David Bowie, a ritual performed on Rik when he was an infant by Led Zeppelin guitarist and black-arts practitioner Jimmy Page. A novel as barmy as this one is hard not to love, especially when Rik and a grizzled band of the halt and the lame attempt to take back the music from the greedy swill-masters behind The X Factor (what they do to Simon Cowell is worth the price of the book). Inspired lunacy for music fans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)