Book Review: Our Black Hearts Beat as One by Brian Asman

 

(podcast interview coming up. so stay tuned...)

Our Black Hearts Beat as One by Brian Asman

145 pages, Paperback

October 2023, Mutated Media
 

First of all shout- to the author of this book local San Diego author Brian Asman. He will be coming on the podcast. When he offered me a copy of this book he was able to drop it off on the porch and shout out to my dog Barney who didn't bite Brian when he came on the porch. Shout to Dracula, Brian’s foster failure doggie, hey we were supposed to foster our dogs too. I think the front door was shut, if it had been open I would have totally gotten Brian bit. I felt bad about it. Brian is a person I like seeing at book events around San Diego. He is a fun person to talk to because his energy is infectious.  His gonzo semi-bizarro style of horror is not exactly my personal favorite style but I enjoy reading it in small doses.

Our Black Heats Beat as One is a punk rock horror novella, short in page count, not unlike your typical punk rock song. The book also has that energy. One thing that is fun for me personally is how much of Brian's personality seeps into his fiction. That is generally true of every author, but in this case it is a strength. When you are most known for writing a haunted house novella with the great title  Man, Fuck This House, you know the man has his own style.

Misfit romances are a genre I greatly enjoy, and if you like off-beat original horror and misfit romances this is a great book to read. From the back cover: “Michael Mallory's living the dream as the lead singer of a hot, up-and-coming band, Modern Love. When a sudden breakup shatters his world, he plunges headlong into the city's occult underbelly in a desperate bid to salve his pain. Lost amidst wayward souls and brutish killers, godlings, and grotesqueries, Mike's about to learn one incontrovertible There's nothing more terrifying than love.”

Romance is not just as straights and normies. Reality is the love and passion punks feel for their music has raw energy that is hard to explain to anyway who has never been swept up in a circle pit. The adjacent romance often has the energy of slam dance, joy, and pain in equal measure. That balance, mixed with occult weirdness and a little subtle humor is the reason the one hundred and forty pages fly by.  

We know Mike mostly as the singer of modern love a punk band who I saw as the touring business side of punk, no the sweaty basement struggling type.  He leaves it all out on stage, he burns hot so when his girlfriend Kara wants a break – he spirals. The passion Mike feels makes the break-up crashed into the weird underbelly of occult Boston. Strange history and stories haunt the strange characters who float into the novel are super interesting.  "I don't think this entity I encountered was this man, transmutated by death into a strange new form. I've seen all death can do. But maybe this creature was the ghost of what happened to him..."

I know a thing or two about writing Punk fiction, capturing that energy for people who have never experienced it is not easy. If there is a weakness in this book, the fast pace will lose some readers. The mythology was explained enough for me but I could see a few readers having to double back or feel lost.  It is natural in a book like this. I am OK with it but I would bet a Gorilla Biscuits colored vinyl 7-inch that reviews will complain that they wanted more.

Indie-published novels cut both ways. You get fierce original stuff, but an outside editor might push an author to head off those complaints. That said if you are reading Brian's work you don't want cookie-cutter stuff. The raw energy is the point. It is the strength. "Hearts break, but they don't just break, they explode destroying everything around them."This novel is about the dark corners that broken hearts expose. The tale and the message wrapped around a broken heart is one you know but the characters and setting are fantastically Brian Asman.  

More than anything this made me excited to see what Brian does with Good Dog,  his coming werewolf novel. Black Heats Beat as One is a fun, not-for-everyone read. The people it is for will love the shit out of it.