5 Rock Stars Who Dabbled in Fiction

Wolf in White Van, by John Darnielle
The acclaimed indie band the Mountain Goats is led by John Darnielle, who writes the band’s songs, plays guitar and piano, sings, and is sometimes the only actual member of the band. Darnielle has a lot of creative juices flowing, and he published a novel in 2014. Wolf in White Van is a story about the pros and cons of escapism and nostalgia, told through the reflections of a disfigured video game designer. Not bad for a first try: it was nominated for a National Book Award.

I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, by Steve Earle
Earle writes and performs gritty, grimy story songs about hard livin’ people—real country music about heartbreak, booze, and the road. The fact that Earle’s novel is named after a Hank Williams song should provide further clues as to the nature of his work, should you not be acquainted. Such atmosphere and richness translates well to the page in Earle’s book, in which Williams also figures prominently. Set in Texas in the early ’60s, it’s about a morphine-addicted doctor who loses his license and gets by performing illegal surgeries. All the while he’s haunted by the ghost of Williams, who he was with when he died.

Where Is Joe Merchant?, by Jimmy Buffett
There’s not really a name for it, but there’s a highly recognizable subgenre of mystery fiction that takes place in Florida, and they usually involve a laid-back burnout detective. (Carl Hiaasen and Dave Barry are the masters of the form.) The craziness of Florida (and its humidity) practically steams off the page, and the reader can practically hear the Jimmy Buffett soundtrack. It’s quite perfect, then, that the guy who romanticized being an old dude in the tropics with songs like “Margaritaville” and “Cheeseburger in Paradise” would take a stab at writing the kinds of novels that owe him a great debt.

Wildwood, by Colin Meloy
The leader of Portland indie rock collective the Decemberists is as responsible as Portlandia for spreading the mystique of Portland. In his series of children’s novels, Meloy shows a another, less quirky side of Portland familiar to those who grew up there: the woods that grow inside and outside of the city, that surely contain spooky secrets.

And the Ass Saw the Angel, by Nick Cave
Dark Australian rocker Nick Cave (as in Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) has written dozens of unsettling songs about scary things, and he has also published six books. They include lyric and fragment collections, an epic poem called The Sick Bag Song recounting a concert tour, and two novels. The first: And the Ass Saw the Angel, published in 1989. Like his other work, it’s gothic in nature, but in this case it’s Southern Gothic. It concerns a girl named Euchrid, daughter to an alcoholic mother and a violent father. Euchrid is mute and prone to nightmarish visions of angels and revenge. A debt is owed, we’d say, to the work of William Faulkner.