When Percy LeBlanc, the lead singer and guitarist of up-and-coming New Orleans black metal band, Bethlehem, is brutally murdered after a disastrous performance on the last stretch of an even more disastrous tour, their unassuming wallflower of a bass player is arrested. Sammy Singerman is subsequently freed, with only circumstantial evidence to connect him to the crime, but he won’t let the unquiet dead rest. Taking on the role of both detective and avenging angel, Sammy goes hell-for-leather to find Percy’s killer, plumbing Bethlehem’s history of trauma for answers before the killer finds him too.

A provocative subversion of the real-life saga of murder and criminal one-upmanship which plagued Scandinavia’s own metal scene in the early 1990s, at once reminiscent of Elizabeth Hand’s Cass Neary novels and Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps, Rough Beast is a drug-soaked sewer ride straight into the grimy underbelly of the Big Easy, where nothing is sacred and nothing stays buried.