You want to read stories that rock. Stories that slap glitter on their face before leaping off a Marshall stack in an agonized pose that appears to be the result of electrocution. That’s what Hair Lit is for. A new collection of stories inspired by the best glam metal of the 1980s, it reads like a VH1 tribute to a teenager who attended every ill-advised concert if the decade. The Mötley Crüe of contributors includes Fiction Advocate favorites Lindsay Hunter and Shawn Andrew Mitchell, along with Roxane Gay, Chip Cheek, Steve Himmer, and a bunch of people who absolutely shred.
Below we’ve compiled a mixtape of our favorite lyrics from Hair Lit. And we’ve paired them with music videos of the ballads that inspired them. When you finish strutting, lip-synching, and waving your lighter in the air, get your copy of Hair Lit from Orange Alert Press.
Chip Cheek: “Twisted Sister Makes a Comeback”
They take bites out of textbooks and spit the pulpy bits into the air. They bust through another wall and rampage through other classrooms. In the hallway there’s a rush of students and faculty, but this isn’t “Rock and Roll High School”–everyone is clawing at each other, trampling the freshmen; there is real blood.
Back in the biology room the air is still gauzy with dust. The teacher gathers his students together and holds them close like kittens.
“Were they terrorists?” a girl asks.
“I don’t know, honey,” the teacher says. “I think it was Twisted Sister.”
Roxane Gay: “To Think The Mouth Can Generate Such Heat (We All Die Young)”
The serial killer leaned into me. His breath was hot and sharp. He was a drinker. He licked my neck from my shoulder to my ear, real slow like. The roughness of his tongue against my skin filled the room loudly. As the damp trail cooled, my stomach rolled.
Shawn Andrew Mitchell: “The Bigger the Balls”
After campfires Rick would show the new scouts how it worked. The scrotum unscrewed from the rest of the genital structure fairly easily once you released the child safety lock. It was sort of fun, being able to take them off, he’d say, and it didn’t hurt, only tickled. The downside was that along with being plus once detachable scrotum, he was minus one ability to procreate.
Lindsay Hunter: “Don’t Kiss Me”
I have a blond wig, it came packaged with the mermaid costume I bought for my child at CVS the year she was in hiding, the wig does not fit my head and that is what the glue is for
I wear that wig sometimes when I’m alone and I make myself a salad of pretzels drizzled with tabasco
Sam Weller: “The Lord of the Wasteland”
Tony Cleveland awoke one winter morning from the most unusually gratifying wet dream to find that he had, miraculously, transmogrified into the mighty Gene Simmons of the rock band KISS.
Ben Tanzer: “Dead or Alive”
We were not cowboys and there were no steel horses, or six strings on our backs. There was big hair, though, lots of it. And we didn’t sleep. It was 1986. Reagan was President. The Oprah Winfrey Show debuted. Bill Buckner let a groundball pass through his legs. Len Bias died. The Olsen twins were born. And Wanted Dead or Alive was playing everywhere.
Yet none of this mattered, not to us anyway.
Because all we could think about was pussy, looking for it, getting it, eating it, fucking it and getting more of it. Way more, way more than we could manage, more than we could imagine.
– Fiction Advocate