Melbourne · 1986
His band stood at the edge of a genuine breakthrough.
He just refused to make the sound that would take them there.
The Story
Melbourne, 1986. A young synthesiser musician is trying to figure out who he is — through the music, through the scene, through the relationships that define and confine him. His band stands at the edge of a genuine breakthrough, but the path forward means disappointing everyone who thinks they know him. The industry wants a sound that isn't him. His activist girlfriend wants a presence he can't sustain. His family no longer recognise him. A novel about growing up, creative ambition, and the painful discovery that becoming yourself can mean outgrowing the people who loved who you were.
Set in a time and a place where making music with synthesisers and drum machines was met with suspicion — or violence.
Publication
No noise. Just a single email when the book is available.
The Author
Mark S. Perry
Naarm/Melbourne · Literary fiction, horror, memoir
Mark came back to creative writing in his forties, after decades of technical work — proposals, tenders, the precise and bloodless prose of IT consulting. What he keeps returning to, in fiction and memoir, is the question of authentic selfhood: the masks worn so long they fuse to the skin, the selves suppressed because they're inconvenient, or frightening, or simply not what was expected.
He mines his childhood and teenage years — a displacement from Melbourne to Queensland, the 1980s alternative music scene, the slow discovery that the person he was performing wasn't the person he was — because that's where the fractures are. He still plays the same vintage synthesisers he played in the '80s, and never entirely left the goth scene.
His short fiction includes "Band Practice" (autofiction, Patter literary journal, 2025), "Moonah" (cosmic horror), and "Black Celebration" (psychological horror). His current novel in progress, Reception, is a folk horror set in the Scottish Highlands.