Hardcore Rules

Hardcore Rules
The Unreal Story of Youth On Trial

A Novel

He was thirteen. Alone in a roach-infested apartment. And a sound came out of the radio that split his life in two.

Brent Calloway wasn't supposed to become anything. His father choked him in a La-Z-Boy and called him a loser. His mother vanished into a boyfriend's life and left cash under a salt shaker. His sister was slipping away in Atlanta and nobody would listen when he tried to warn them.

So he screamed into a microphone instead.

Hardcore Rules rips through the explosive birth of American hardcore punk - from the housing projects of Tallahassee to the church basements of Washington, D.C., from a guerrilla recording session in a concrete bunker in Miami to the stage where cops tried to drag him off mid-song and he kept screaming until they let go.

The band was called Youth On Trial. The cops hated them. The local scene tried to destroy them. Kids drove hundreds of miles to hear them play.

There's Enzo - the rich kid with the loudest voice and the least to say. Douglas - the preacher's son hiding behind silence so complete it could break your heart. Peter - the guitarist who built riffs like architecture and walls around himself like fortresses. And Tess - the woman who'd been at CBGB and the Hope and Anchor before she was old enough to drink, who heard Brent play and said you need to put out a record, and then made it happen through a network of postcards, phone calls, and padded envelopes that stretched from New York to Helsinki.

She was twenty-one. He was sixteen. She'd seen the Damned in London and the Clash at the Rainbow. And she was the first person who ever told him the truth.

This is a story about a boy who sold his bicycle to buy Unknown Pleasures. A boy who fought back with a karate kick he learned from a library book. A boy who found his sister unconscious in the back of a stranger's car and called his father and his father said she's fine, you're jealous - and hung up.

This is a story about what music does when it's the only thing standing between you and the dark.

A broken nose. A courtroom. A walkout that backfired. A seven-inch record that traveled from Miami to Helsinki through padded envelopes and the hands of strangers. A father who couldn't see the truth standing right in front of him until it was almost too late. A scene that tried to erase a band and watched the room fill up anyway.

A novel about punk rock, broken families, and the most radical act of all - surviving long enough to build the life you never had.

Hardcore Rules is brutal, beautiful, and unforgettable - a book that reads like a fist through drywall and lands like a hand on your shoulder in the dark.

You'll finish it in one sitting. You'll carry it for years.