Music In Hell

BRATS IN HELL was written on a steady diet of Satanic inspired music. Though the story is horror comedy, Frank J. Edler felt keeping the tone of hell required maintaining a certain mood while writing the parts in Hell. This is an exposition of the music that inspired the the underworld of BRATS IN HELL.

I don't normally write with music on. I find it distracting. But for some reason, when it came time to write BRATS, I felt I needed some extra oomph to stay in that zone. True, I was writing a comedic version of Hell, but I still felt the story needed to keep this misfit, chaotic mood for these demons to exist in.

I though about how I saw the demons in my head. I honed their visage from metal album cover art. Two particular albums lent themselves heavily to how I saw these demons and the world they existed within. First is Rob Zombie, particularly White Zombie era Rob Zombie art. I always loved that type of demonic/satanic art. Its colorful and vibrant and conversely gross and disfigured. The Hell that exists in BRATS IN HELL is like that. There are several 'species' of demons which are identified by their primary color and their behavioral demeanor.

More over Rob Zombie type demons, I really saw my demons as the demons from a lesser know cover, Dangerous Toys "Pissed" album. They are a little trickier to pick up on. They are crawling out of the corners from the central image of the Dangerous Toys iconic clown. If you owned they album you saw bigger, isolated images of these demons on the inside folds of the liner notes. These demons were more sinister looking. They were were green and purple and red but they were darker shades of those cover. And they had a mischievous vibe about that. Also, they also had a sense of coming from a communal place where as Zombie's demonic figures are very singularly identified.

So these were the demons I saw in my mind as I wrote the story. I played a lot of Rob Zombie and Dangerous Toys as a result. I found it helped keep me in the zone of the atmosphere of Hell.

I took to Spotify and began to see out more Satanic, creepy, dark music. I knew to go to Venom's "Evil In A League With Satan" which was probably played the most during the writing of BRATS.




But BRATS IN HELL isn't a deeply dark story. I found Twisted Sister's "Burn In Hell" fit the mood of the book perfectly. Anyone familiar with the song probably recalls it being played in the movie Pee Wee's Big Adventure . The song, a dark, growling anthem stands in stark contrast to the silly mood of a Pee Wee Herman movie. If there were a soundtrack to BRATS this would be the lead song on the album.




Those who've not yet read BRATS IN HELL may not realize the book not only takes place in Hell but a good chunk of the book also is set in Heaven. For those more pure moments I turned to more "heavenly metal" to put myself in the proper state of mind. So in order to shift gears from Hell to Heaven I had to find a way to cast the devil out of my mind. The answer was simple, play Stryper's "To Hell With The Devil"




Before I sat down to write BRATS IN HELL, I found trying to listen to music, any music while writing a complete distraction. For BRATS I felt I really need to sink myself into a frame of mind while writing in the setting of Hell. The only way I figured could help that would be to listen to dark chugging heavy metal music with Satanic sounding lyrics.

I don't know if that mindset poured out onto the page but without a doubt it helped me chug though the writing and held my normally jocular, upbeat psyche down in a dark space for a little longer than it cared to linger.

I haven't written anything since that I've felt I needed to force a state of mind for. I do listen to music as I write from time to time. I try to play stuff I'm not familiar with so I don't start focusing on the lyrics and get distracted and start singing along. It's nice to have something in the background sometimes and serves the dual purpose of being able to discover new music at the same time.

I wonder, do you play music while you read? I thing that would be an even bigger distraction that listening while writing. What songs do YOU think would make a great BRATS IN HELL playlist?