HOUSE MADE OF SOUND

In Jayce’s fiction debut, a washed-up music producer will do anything to find a lost album—or die trying.

Jensen Bennett is separated from his wife, on the wrong side of 30, the lap dog of his employer at Wicked Records, and facing an enormous bouncer who won’t let him backstage to see the hit group Quiet Catastrophe. Bennett discovered the band and shepherded them to stardom with their first two albums, but his own rotten behavior has alienated him from the group. Wicked Records has heard a rumor that the band has breached their contract by secretly recording their third album, House Made of Sound, and Bennett has been dispatched to get the master recordings by any means necessary. With the help of a lovely medium named Daphne, he gets backstage at last but finds nothing—so he stows away on the band’s plane, hoping for a chance to steal the album and somehow get his life back on track. Instead, the plane crashes, and when Bennett wakes up, he’s in some kind of afterlife; he’s told that although his mortal body is still back at the crash site clinging to life, the members of Quiet Catastrophe are as “dead as disco,” leaving Bennett with the task of finding them in this weird paradise and learning the location of that elusive third album before he’s pulled back to life. From these strange elements, the author has carefully constructed an absolutely winning story, a rousing, funny, and surprisingly moving tale of love lost (as Bennett points out to himself, he hasn’t loved many people in his life—but he’d loved the lead singer of Quiet Catastrophe, back when they’d been as close as brothers) and love found (Daphne’s assistance may serve as the prelude to a real romance). Jayce’s elegant prose is a joy to read: “But now the void, familiar and unwelcome, had come home. His thoughts returned to the empty wallet, and to the ousted presidents that once held office there.” Readers won’t want the novel to end.

An enormously fun and addictively readable story of redemption in the seedy world of stadium rock music.