The explosion of books by indie authors has created an embarrassment of riches for readers. There’s no reason not to venture out of one’s comfort genre and read something unfamiliar. I’m not a fan of rock music, and haven’t been too taken by vampires in fiction either, but Chris Harrison’s blog, The Opening Sentence, opened the way to an interesting reading experience. His Smashwords interview is also worth reading.

Harrison has written several books about the mysterious heavy metal band called Toten Herzen. The first in the series is We Are Toten Herzen. Here is the plot summary:

In 1977 all four members of the rock band Toten Herzen were murdered. Thirty five years later an investigation by British music journalist Rob Wallet led him to discover the band still alive in a remote village in southern Germany. He persuaded them to make a comeback. Hoax or strange reality? Find out in the only official account of Toten Herzen’s long awaited reappearance.

Sounds fairly straightforward, right? Well, it isn’t. The narrative swirls from place to place and decade to decade. A scene in which the reader is closeted with the band members (three formidable women and one understated guy), is followed by a flurry of tweets and news reports. Twenty-first century music biz honchos have to work out a modus operandi with folks from the 1970s who are pretty touchy about criticism and have their own ways of getting things done — ways that aren’t always pretty. Then there are flashbacks to the band members’ origins and the forces that created Toten Herzen. Rumors abound and tension builds as the first concert of the comeback tour approaches.

Harrison creates memorable scenes with masterly prose and what seems to be a thorough knowledge of the music business. I have to say, I didn’t find the characters terribly likable (they’re definitely not “sparkly” vampires), but they are certainly not cardboard cutouts. Rob Wallet, sometime journalist and general hanger-on, is an odd duck. He has clearly thrown in his lot with the band, but isn’t really “of” them. For the reader, he serves as a point of view character, furnishing “insider” views of the secretive, night-loving band. At times I found myself thinking he was a fictional version of the author, making an appearance in his own book the way Alfred Hitchcock used to show up in his movies. (But I may be wrong).

Curiouser and (to me) more entertaining, is The One Rule of Magic, a book whose main character has something in common with the members of Toten Herzen, and inhabits the same world (she’s a friend of Rob Wallet’s), but is engaged in a different sort of comeback.

Here is the plot summary:

Frieda Schoenhofer is dead, murdered in Rotterdam. For her grief-stricken parents the true story of their daughter’s life is about to begin.

Her father, slowly demolishing the world around him, tries to eradicate painful memories by throwing out his lifelong collection of film memorabilia. Her mother is convinced Frieda has been reincarnated as a new born foal.

But Frieda isn’t dead. She is travelling Europe hoping to rescue her father’s discarded collection. A journey of redemption that takes her to Nice, Prague, Turin and Vienna, where she meets a crooked dealer in antique silverware, joins a funeral party full of mourners who can’t stop laughing, falls in love with a beautiful marionette, and discovers a plan to destroy the legacy of Mozart.

The One Rule of Magic explores Frieda’s attempts to make amends for the crimes of her old life, come to terms with what she has become, and prepare her parents for the bizarre truth surrounding their daughter’s disappearance.

The book is charming as well as bizarre. Frieda’s quest for her father’s film memorabilia takes her to a variety of places and situations, some of them dire and others just weird. I found it a bit odd that anyone should pursue relentlessly things like hats, overalls and model skeletons, but of course it’s obsession that drives the serious collector, or, in this case, the collector-by-proxy. The items had all appeared in well-known movies, and were unique. Frieda’s odyssey started to intrigue me; by the time she hit Prague I had warmed up to her and sympathized with her mission. A surprise twist near the end provided extra payoff for reading this book.