To the extent that writer/musician Adam Gnade is known at all, it’s for a sparse and desolate talking-song folk music that sits on the raw edge of the New Weird America trip, often recorded very primitively and directly, a la John Lomax’s field recordings, or early Mountain Goats. His musical and literary output together comprise a singular and ambitious body of work—the same characters and plotlines continue through both forms, telling stories set in his hometown of San Diego.

Gnade has been prolifically releasing music and books for about eleven years, and his newest novella, Locust House, is being published by Pioneers Press in collaboration with Three One G, a record label run by Justin Pearson of the brutally spastic hardcore band The Locust (the band is referred-to in the book, the title isn’t a coincidence). Locust House is ostensibly a night-in-the-life story of a concert at a punk flophouse getting broken up by the police (and if it was based on a real-life show, it would have been a pretty fucking epic night), but the plot is only an excuse to take us deep into the inner lives of the characters, something at which Gnade excels. Among other themes, he explores scene members’ changing relationships to music and community as life advances, viscerally nailing that discrete, unrepeatable, life-altering thrill one gets when the right music hits the right young brain at the right time. It’s a feeling I’d love to have again, and reading Gnade’s words persuasively re-immersed me in that experience. (It also made me wonder if he’s read Ageing and Youth Cultures.)
 
More after the jump…