THE STRIP 1985

Rock ‘n’ roll is sex, sleaze, and lipstick. It’s your first kiss, your first beer, a mad dog barking at the moon. It’s burning rubber, black eyes, hormones so wound up they pop like big, pink bubbles. It’s loud. Really loud. That’s the only rule.

— The Strip by Hedda Lundquist       

Hollywood, 1985.  

Trying to make it is a thankless grind. A high-priced consultant trashed her outfits as farm-girl-bland. Another told her to start smoking. The rasp in her voice is seriously underwhelming. Her next-door neighbor and best friend, a quirky drummer everyone calls Worm, says landing any kind of deal in Tinsel Town is all about who you know and who you blow. She knows Worm. So, that’s not happening. Still, it’s not a total mess. Hedda Lundquist is making ends meet working as a cocktail waitress at Jade Dragon, a club at the heart of the wildest bar scene in the entire world, West Hollywood’s infamous Sunset Strip. America’s youth, some underage, almost all under twenty-five, pack the Strip every night to get wasted, get laid, see the hottest bands, and maybe, if it all magically comes together, get famous. Hedda Lundquist is chasing her rock ‘n’ roll fantasy. That’s not the whole story. An ancient power hidden in her bloodline is chasing Hedy, too.

Topflight doctors and third-rate shrinks have labeled Hedy a dangerous enigma. Her overbearing mother wants her committed to a psychiatric ward. That’s totally unreasonable. Yes, she suffers brainstorms that scare the hell out of people. She blacks out. The craziness that happens after that—is it really her fault? There isn’t a single concoction in those witchdoctor’s cabinets that’ll medicate her enough to make her magically fit in. That’s why she hitchhiked to California, a scene where she can be all in on herself, even if she’s as crazy as they all keep telling her she is.

Everything is going okay—until she walks into some kind of insane West Side Story meets Dracula showdown.

Jade Dragon’s ladies’ room is where the risky sex and hard drugs part of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll goes down. It’s no surprise when Hedy opens the door into a guy’s butt. It is something else that has her swallowing the lame apology she’s about to spit out. The guy is a punk rocker with a greaser haircut and wearing a leather jacket open to a buff, bare chest. The girl by his side has a red-and-black dyed mohawk gelled into spikes looking sharp enough to impale a charging rhinoceros. The Strip is definitely not their turf, and the out of place punks have squared off with a trio from Dead Hollywood, the band du jour. Everyone at Jade Dragon would instantly recognize Sunday, Dead Hollywood’s tattooed lead singer, Salem, their guitarist whose pure white hair is an impressive mass of hair-sprayed poof, and Valentine, the heavy metal feme fatale all the famous guys wanted to score. Two rival music scenes matter in Southern California; there are the spike-haired punk rockers, brash adherents of the gritty, anti-fashion hardcore scene, and their exact opposites, the metalheads, the lovers of glam, hairspray, hard drugs, and sleaze. Their disdain for one another’s music, style, and credos is loud, mutual, and sometimes violent. Only these rivals are less oil and water and more fire and gasoline; they’re more than human, too—and their rivalry has been killing thousands a year for a thousand years.

In a flash, life spirals from a manageable mess into a violent nightmare. Salem bares vampire fangs. The punk girl starts transforming into a werewolf. She smells fresh ozone—an all too familiar warning—and she’s terrified of what happens next. One of her insane brainstorms is coming on—fast. There is no stopping it. She blacks out. What she does next leads to a fantastic mystery only she can unravel.

The fight at Jade Dragon is Hedy’s entry into an unknown-to-humans world where the creatures of known mythologies, pantheons, and folk tales come to life with new origin stories and outcomes.

Hedy learns, fast and fateful, her brainstorms are the first tendrils of a terrifying metamorphosis; a long dormant gene in her family’s Nordic bloodline has chosen her, coming to life, evolving mind, body, and soul. Her sudden intrusion into the hidden world unleashes a storm of power struggles and betrayal that thunder through the universe of fairytales and myth. Few can rival her emerging power. Not even the wisest elders can say for sure what she is, but the most malevolent want to manipulate who she will become.

As she grapples with each new discovery, the mystery deepens, her grasp on reality unravels, and she comes face to face with a defining choice. Is she good? Evil? She feels trapped in between. The desire to do things she’s never imagined doing is overwhelming. Her parents are normal. Her grandparents, brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles—are normal. Why is this happening to her? How does she get rid of it? To hell with the old Norse myth and legends. She wants to go back to her life as the singer songwriter from nowhere Minnesota taking her feeble shot at fame.

But that’s not the way any of this works. She is a force no one can ignore. And when a rancid, one-armed monster takes Worm for a midnight snack, to save him, she must hold her crumbling life together while navigating the lure and repulsions of inhuman, seductive manipulations coming from within and without.

Monster Me by Hedda Lundquist — 

My closet is full of skeletons, call them my scars. My Oz is dark, my monsters are human. My Wonderland is nevermore, forever more. Alice’s rabbit hole, what the hell have I fallen into. Dorothy’s tornado, what hell hath swept me away. Fairy Godmother, say goodbye to happier ever after. Guardian angel, give me danger. Mr. Poe, my poems beguile, I’ve got that wicked witch smile. Come out to play, let’s set the demon free. Run and hide, the monster is me.