A Song for Quiet Is a Mournful Lovecraftian Fantasy That Never Misses a Note

A Song for Quiet, the second installment after last year’s Hammers on Bone, is a smartly timed suckerpunch of horror, a story full of suspense, grace, and sharp terror, told with the author’s flair for careful, menace-laced prose. It’s not a true sequel to Hammers on Bone, but it shares characters and a larger world. Sit down, H.P. Cassandra Khaw is here to show you how it’s done.
The story follows a grieving, down on his luck bluesman named Deacon whose world goes sideways when his saxophone begins to show him unspeakable images whenever he plays it. He flees town, unnerved by what he can’t unsee. As a black man in Georgia, Deacon is unsurprised to find himself being hassled on a train out of the city, but that chance encounter leads him down a horrifying path: private eye John Persons, (the lead of Hammers on Bone), shows up to speak to Deacon and explain what’s going on with the sinister sax, but the bluesman bolts. Persons keeps an eye on him, watching as reality begins to slip through Deacon’s fingers at an alarming rate. There is a seed in Deacon’s head, feeding on his music, and it will destroy the world if Deacon lets it flower.
Deacon stumbles upon a runaway girl named Ana and they band together to face a torrent of Lovecraftian horrors, all teeth and tentacles, trying to tear the very world apart. The ending left me an utter wreck, weeping openly on the train home. This story tore my heart out and ate it for lunch.
Khaw prose borders on the preternatural. She crafts staccato turns of phrase so heart-stopping, and images so vivid, I’m not sure she hasn’t made a contract with some ancient entity. A train “rattles like teeth in a dead man’s skull” and music is the “moaning of dead and dying gods.” So much of the story is told in music, tunes that turn reality “boneless, creamy. Like someone’s dug under the flesh and extracted all the calcium; flayed the skin; spun the gelatin and meat into spools of taffy. Thick now and tractable, it’s then tugged by its unseen confectioner into its appointed place.”
These are notes that burst off the page, so finely detailed I can hear the mournful saxophone, a haunting harmony of beauty and terror.

A Song for Quiet is rooted in grief. Deacon has just lost his father and his attempts to come to terms with a world without him is almost more terrible facing one newly full of monsters. (Khaw has said writing this book is how she processed her own grief after her own father suddenly passed.) It’s grief like a hot scalpel, the sharpest of cuts, right down to the bone—the kind of wound that never fully heals. Loss becomes its own kind of horror, and it makes the gruesome beats of the story hit that much harder. Not all of us will know the cold fear of being chased by something non-Euclidean and dripping with ichor, but we all know the same deep ache of grief and the agony of loss.
Deacon is a kind man, twisted by sadness and ill-equipped to deal with his new reality. A quiet pain hangs upon him like a heavy shroud. He’s a complex character, noble and steadfast, and he lived in my brain for weeks after I finished reading his tale. John Persons, monstrous PI, takes a bit of a backseat, but still manages to be smart and oddly compassionate (for an Old One). His hands are tied, and it bothers him. And Ana is a bright spark in all the darkness, vivid and so very alive, yet burdened with her own terrible secrets. Not everyone makes it out of the story in one piece.
This is magnificent slice of scarecraft playing in Lovecraft’s backyard. It’s a painful, poignant look at life and loss against a gory backdrop of cosmic horror, and it has swiftly become one of my favorite books of 2017. Khaw sharpens the genre’s teeth even as she gives it a beating heart. It will haunt you like a scrap of mournful melody you just can’t get out of your head.
A Song for Quiet is available August 29.