Why this one?
It’s a new book by Benjamin Myers! That’s all you need to know.
Benjamin Myers (1976- ; active 2004-) was born in Durham, England. In his teens, he was a member of the local punk band Sour Face, and began writing for the weekly music paper Melody Maker. Alongside his journalism, he also published books on the likes of John Lydon, Green Day and The Clash. He published his first novel, The Book of Fuck, in 2004, but it was his second Richard: A Novel (2010), about missing Manic Street Preachers member Richey Edwards, that brought wider attention.
His third novel, 2012's Pig Iron, won the inaugural Gordon Burn Prize, and this, his fifth, The Gallows Pole (2017) won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. The latter was also the inspiration for a BBC TV series by Shane Meadows (This is England) that aired in 2023. His beautiful 2019 novel The Offing is being adapted as a film by director Jessica Hobbs (Broadchurch, The Crown) starring Helena Bonham Carter. 2023’s Cuddy won the Goldsmith’s Prize and is generally incredible. He followed that book with the much lighter in tone but equally enjoyable Rare Singles (2024) and most recently the brilliantly bonkers Jesus Christ Kinski (2025). Alongside his literary novels he has also published crime fiction, short stories and poetry. He is married to fellow author Adelle Stripe.
Wolfadder/Whitespider is due to be published in March 2027. Thanks to Bloomsbury and Netgalley for the ARC.
Thoughts, etc.
Wolfadder/Whitespider is a book in two parts, set in the early 1970s in England, in the grubby and chaotic world of the fictional psychedlic rock band Once Upon a Time. In its first section, Wolfadder, set in 1973, the band and their entourage decamp to a row of dilapidated cottages in Scotland, by the Wolfadder river, to work on new material. Accompanying them is Kit, a thirteen year old who’s still figuring himself out (fittingly for the time, many of those who encounter Kit are ‘not sure if they’re a boy or a girl’) and is the son on Bronwyn, the partner of one of the band’s members, Bob (himself the somewhat passive foil to the band’s creative leader, Alex). Into their cold, wet and dark world comes the mysterious figure Johnathan, who despite his ominous vibes and general grumpiness ends up joining the band and taking them in an unpromising new direction. While the rest of the band are generally too mashed to notice, Kit is threatened by Johnathan and ends up taking desperate measures to deal with that threat.
The next section jumps a little in time to 1974. Kit has escaped the chaos of Scotland and made his way to London. Initially finding himself in the midst of a gang of teenage rent boys in Piccadilly and Covent Garden, he sinks further into the world of crime when he has to deal with a creepy old judge, but finds himself with a bunch of cash in his pocket as a result. After chopping off his ambiguous locks and becoming something of a suedehead (and ‘a man’, as many observe) he then sets off to find Gibby, a Once Upon a Time roadie and generally nice guy. Despite being comfortably well off due to a lucrative sideline in the narcotics trade, Gibby lives in a rat-infested squat in Notting Hill, which becomes Kit’s temporary home. There he meets a lovely young girlfriend, Loopy,. and for a time they have a relatively fun time before Once Upon a Time rock up back onto the scene with a new religious-inspired direction and a plot for a comeback which involves playing at a shambolic festival called Whitespider. In the book’s dizzying and kaleidoscopic final section at the festival, Kit reveals even more about his role in the dark events in Scotland, gets off his nut on mescaline (accidentally) and ultimately sets himself off for an exciting future, which everyone reading hopes is far enough away from the madness of Once Upon a Time.
I’ve said a few times before that (as a music nerd, and someone who works in the music industry as a day job) novels about music the world of music can be incredibly hard to pull off. Several otherwise mighty names have (in my view) come a cropper when trying to capture the magic and quirks of the musical world in print, and I’ve cringed my way through a few such cases. It probably shouldn’t come as too much surprise that Myers, with his pedigree as a musician and then as a music journalist, is a notable exception to this typical rule. He’s already pulled off at least one triumph with music front-and-centre, in the lovely Rare Singles. Here, the focus is not quite so squarely on the musicians, with Once Upon a Time acting in some senses as part of the landscape and time-period scene-setting, there as a malevolent force hanging over the life of the book’s central protagonist, Kit, and from which he must escape in order to thrive. That’s probably the book’s smartest trick, in a way: subverting the traditional coming of age novel by having the forces that the young hero needs to overcome not being challenging social conditions or suchlike, but a clapped-out and comical musical ensemble.
Once Upon a Time are not just any musical ensemble though, but one very specific to their time and place. They’ve had a degree of success in their time - their time being the late 60s, when their brand of wild hippie abandon just happened to coincide with the peak of the flower power movement. There’s no real sense that they were ever that good, but they captured a vibe and have kept a loyal fanbase as a result. Now it’s the early 70s, music is moving on (we get Kit listening to emergent Glam Rock acts, themselves in some cases preparing the way both for the revolution of punk and for the abandonment of the core tenets of musical proficiency that characterised the band’s own era; we also get the occasional appearance of a rather brilliantly render German krautrock combo, more evidence of a world in which the hopelessly out of time Once Upon a Time can never hope to catch up with). In the book Kit seems to symbolise the next generation, the beginnings of an exciting new world of adventurous sounds and musical deviations that will come to characterise the late 1970s, a contrast to the band stuck in the 60s and trying to drag him and everyone else back with them. The early 70s (for all its great exceptions, representations of which are lurking in the background here throughout) has always seemed a little like an ‘in between’ period in the history of pop (especially in the UK), the 60s dead and gone but not entirely from the imagination, the revolution/s yet to come, but a fascinating place nonetheless, a drug-addled chaotic environment from which magic could occasionally emerge, but so could a whole load of silly nonsense. Anyway…
For all that, the book’s really about Kit’s journey, and it’s one that’s brilliantly done. Myers is of course no stranger to a coming-of-age novel, with The Offing representing a genuinely top tier example of the genre (alongside being many other things). As an aside, there’s a brief link to that novel in the Wolfspider section that really made me smile - I won’t spoil it here, but if like me you loved that book, then I’m sure you’ll find it equally pleasing. Once again Myers has his protagonist go through a relatively swift shift from underdeveloped child to purposeful man. This is not a gradual evolution, but a rapid turnaround, fuelled by Gibby’s drugs and an urgent need to escape the dark forces threatening to hold him back. No sooner is he away from this darkness, than he’s thrown into another sort of underworld and forced to grow up as quickly as possible. With the shearing of the ambiguous/60s-coded flowing locks, he’s already a man and one ready to go into battle to ensure he doesn’t become part of the world that he came from (rather more literally, we ultimately discover, than we first thought).
This, for me, is yet another triumph from the brilliant Mr. Myers. Its sense of time and place, as ever, is absolutely on point. Its characters are memorable, often memorably awful but with a few exceptions to bring some warmth into the picture. It’s got all the right shades of dark and light, humour regularly punctuating its grimy landscapes. And it’s generally a joy to read. My only slight comment would be that it’s presented as a book that is designed to be “read forwards or backwards, upside down or right-side up” - from this I was somewhat expecting a book that made just as much sense read each part first, but I’m struggling to imagine how there would be any logic to reading the Wolfspider section before Whiteadder? Maybe I missed the point there. What would be logical is going back to the beginning again after the multiple revelations at the end, so perhaps there is something in it. But otherwise it did feel like the story had a very clear forward linear momentum and not one that I could see benefitting from an inversion.
Score
9.5
Cracking stuff, a joy to read, no surprises there!
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Next up
Whatever takes my fancy, I have yet to decide…
