#Murder mystery house game series#
Until the controversially clunking ending to the Game of Thrones TV series in 2019, it was the biggest debacle with which Martin had been associated. So perhaps it is no surprise The Armageddon Rag didn’t merely underperform. And yet, Boomer-contemporary fantasy built around fire and ice motifs was always going to be a hard sell. Martin makes these various moving parts work. It then turns into a gory murder mystery before arriving at its final destination, Neil Gaiman-style urban fantasy bleeding into Lovecraftian horror. The book starts as a lament for the death of the hippy dream. So why did it fail? One likely reason is that, though The Armageddon Rag is rip-roaring, it’s hard to put in a box. If only as a reminder that Martin can do more than medieval violence and sexposition (though it isn’t as gripping as his finest novel, 1982’s meditative vampire romp Fevre Dream). To say more would be to ruin the plot of a book worth rediscovering. Welcome to his groovy, woozy Boomer novel. This is also the book in which Martin, born in 1948, reveals himself to be a child of the Sixties. Its setting is the real world and the den of iniquity that is the music industry. In other ways, The Armageddon Rag couldn’t be further than the Seven Kingdoms. The ritual is to be sealed by the performance of their anthem Armageddon/Resurrection Rag (think The Doors’ The End meets Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival). But of course “corpse armies” is a line that could have come straight from the Game of Thrones TV adaptation, which culminates with the Night King unleashing his undead minions upon Westeros. This is towards the end of the novel, when Sandy has concluded that the reformed Nazgûl are about to become unwitting participants in an occult ceremony at a rock festival, where the energies unleashed by audience and musicians will bring about armageddon. “The band would play on, play on and on forever, play the Armageddon Rag to the darkness and the cold,” writes Martin, “while the corpse armies gathered and spread out across the night.” One pivotal scene in The Armageddon Rag feels like foreshadowing for the White Walkers from Thrones. In Game of Thrones they embody the feuding royal houses of the dragon-riding Targaryens and the Starks of snow-bound Winterfell – while in the TV show they are seen as representing Mother of Dragons Daenerys and the Night King (a shadowy, off-stage figure in the novels).
It also can be read as a testing ground for many of the concepts which Martin would later bring to A Song of Fire and Ice, beginning in 1996 with the novel A Game of Thrones.įire and ice are presented as opposing forces throughout The Armageddon Rag – fire embodying the hippy ideals of the Sixties, ice the reactionary forces of law and order. The Armageddon Rag is a meaty caper in its own right. Is this connected to rumours the Nazgûl are to reform with a new frontman? But now the Nazgûl’s former manager has been ritualistically killed. Back in the Sixties, Sandy was closely associated with a rock band called the Nazgûl – a shameless nod towards Tolkien – until their brooding singer was shot dead at a Woodstock-style concert. Our hero is Sandy, a former writer with a Village Voice/Creem-type counter-culture magazine, The Hedgehog. And which drove him to television to make a living. The book was a flop that ruined Martin’s reputation as a novelist. Just not in the way he – or his publishers – anticipated. It was intended to be the bestseller that changed Martin’s life. The Armageddon Rag is a rock ’n’ roll murder-mystery set in the aftermath of the 1960s hippy revolution. And it feels prophetic that Martin sketched out just such a scenario – of an author buckling under the pressures of success – in a book he wrote some 40 years ago. Martin has been supposedly toiling on the penultimate novel, the Winds of Winter. But the seven-volume cycle itself remains conspicuously unfinished, with books six and seven yet to see daylight.Įleven years have elapsed since the most recent volume in the series, A Dance With Dragons. The saga has spawned Game of Thrones and new Thrones spin-off House of the Dragon. “He stared at the words with distaste, took a swig from the bottle in his hand, and looked around for a distraction,” announces the narrator.Ī writer reluctant to finish a much-anticipated novel will be a concept familiar to readers of George RR Martin’s A Song Of Ice and Fire. We meet him in his Brooklyn apartment, where he is gazing, in terror, at “the blank paper he was supposedly turning into a book”. It’s 1983 and a bestselling author is doing everything in his power to avoid finishing his next novel.
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