An Augmented Fourth, a Heavy Metal Horror Novel By Tony McMillen

You can preorder the novel here.

LitReactor was kind enough to put my upcoming book on their list “The 16 Most Anticipated Horror Books of 2017” so I suppose the cat’s out of the bag, let's talk about this thing. I'm happy to announce that my next book An Augmented Fourth will be here in June and published by the well-intentioned reprobates of Word Horde.

“Great title, what the hell is an augmented fourth?”

Alright, here you go:

Augmented Fourth: Also known as the “The Devil’s Chord,” “diabolus in musica,” and“The Devil’s Interval.”

·         A type of tritone used in musical compositions for harmonic and melodic dissonance and to avoid traditional tonality.   

·         This tritone has appeared in Western music for hundreds of years. For its dark and often unsettling sound the augmented fourth was supposedly banned by churches in the Middle Ages. 

That hackle-raising musical cue that’s been in scary movie music since forever ago, chances are what you thinking of is an example of an augmented fourth. Since this is a novel very much about music and very, very much about being scared, the title fits perfectly.

We’re still conjuring up the artwork for the book (update, Alan M. Clark done conjured it) so I don’t have anything on that front to share yet but I will tell you a little about the work. The shorthand is that An Augmented Fourth is Black Sabbath meets The Thing. But the further truth is that while it is that it’s also its own thing. Pun neutral. To quote from John Carpenter’s aforementioned masterpiece “It’s weird and pissed off, whatever it is.”

I’m going to keep it mostly mysterious for now but I will tell you the book involves the following:

Four individuals trapped in a snowed in hotel.

One of which, our narrator, is the bass player for the legendary, seminal heavy metal band Frivolous Black.

None of the four trapped in the hotel are exactly what they appear to be.

 One might not even be human.

*Cue sizzle reel.

I’m going to be posting some more info about the book when I feel like It, including artwork, proper synopsis and even a contest and some other clever bits of coercion. Check back at this space for more of that as well as a series of essays I’ll be doing about some of the inspirations for this work including my favorite old metal albums. We’re gonna be talking Sabbath a whole damn lot. So get used to it.

Also I’ll be routinely dropping some “Found Metal” artifacts on you. This will be pop culture stuff I’ve dredged up from the corners of my mind and mother internet that aren’t explicitly heavy metal in and of themselves but nevertheless they still possess that unnameable thing that makes something metal. Some things just have that connotation with them and it’s hard to say exactly why. Metal is one of those things that’s impossible to define exactly but you know it when you see it.

Case in point this Nintendo Power cover:

Metal as fuck.

My book will be the same.