A West Oakland Punk Turns Detective in ‘Saint the Terrifying’

At first glance there doesn’t seem to be room for overlap between a traditional hard-boiled detective story and the crucibles of a group of punks in West Oakland. But in Joshua Mohr’s new book, Saint the Terrifying, these two worlds collide head on, exploding across the page in glittering sentences that tell an eccentric and grimy vigilante story.

Saint the Terrifying has an unlikely origin story in a different music genre entirely. A friend contacted Mohr about contributing to an anthology of stories based on Taylor Swift songs, and Mohr, who has a 10-year-old Swift-loving daughter, jumped at the opportunity.

“I finished it and I was like, ‘This guy’s not done squawking in my ear,’” Mohr says over Zoom. A very different version of that first self-contained piece became chapter one of his new novel.

Further inspiration came to the author, who splits his time between San Francisco and Seattle, after a visit to Seattle’s National Nordic Museum. The trip prompted a deep dive into Viking mythology and Mohr, a “card-carrying nerd,” found himself 30-plus books deep into the lore.

“The cool thing about these books is it’s every possible genre,” he says excitedly. “It’s magical realism, it’s horror, love stories, fantasies. Whatever I wanted to throw in there, I could. It became this really beautiful blank canvas to really allow my imagination to leap down every rabbit hole I possibly could find.”

That narrative flexibility led to a realization: “There were no limits in the Saint universe.” Mohr’s already found enough story to turn Saint’s Viking punk tales into a three-book saga.

A punk mystery

Saint the Terrifying, the first installment of Saint’s saga, has a simple premise. A local punk bands’ gear goes missing and Saint, a middling guitarist in the West Oakland scene, takes it upon himself to investigate on behalf of his peers. Mohr strikes a harmonious chord between the tropes of hard-boiled detective stories: a central mystery, a cynical anti-hero playing lead investigator, events taking place in low-rent places, and the anti-establishment and anti-consumerist ethos of punk culture.

Saint has a freewheeling spirit (an inheritance from his Viking ancestors) and spent eight years at San Quentin where he got a glass eye and a neck tattoo that reads “No More Drunken Mistakes.” Throughout the book he is plagued by visions of blown-glass birds that circle his head like he’s a concussed cartoon character.

The book possesses a dark whimsy and humor — there’s a busker named Elon Busk — that is anchored by Saint’s thirst for truth and street justice. There’s also a colorfully degenerate cast of characters in his life, including someone named Got Jokes. The Bay Area’s preternaturally gloomy weather nurtures the novel’s dark mood. “The day gave off a gray stare,” Mohr writes. “You never knew if the fog was gonna burn off.”

Mohr even adopts the noir trope of first-person narration. The book opens with a run-on sentence written stream-of-consciousness style, a succession of alternately manic and beautiful rambling. “Amphetamine poetry,” as one character puts it. And then, quite fittingly, Saint loses his train of thought before finishing his sentence. The book unfolds in this stop and start zigzag style, mirroring the short frenetic bursts of punk songs.

Dramatizing gentrification

Mohr’s punchy writing and observations draw from his own experiences as a 17-year-old in a San Francisco punk house. “No house starts out as a punk house,” the author says of the slow but natural way he ended up living with his friend, a member of the band American Steel, in a place where the basement and kitchen ended up becoming home to even more people.

“There are things that chronologically probably wouldn’t have happened when Saint was telling his story, that I would be scraping from a memory of mine from 1995 or 1999,” he explains. “I used to play in shitty punk bands, we practiced in West Oakland. In the book, I called [the rehearsal space] Sound Check, but in reality it’s called Sound Wave, and it was a pretty wild place in the ’90s.”

Another scraped-from-reality sequence finds Saint in a warehouse fire similar to the Ghost Ship fire that claimed 36 lives in 2016. In it, Saint experiences a kind of theoretical time slip as he ponders how the outcome may have changed if he arrived at another time: in an alternate universe, in an alternate warehouse, lives may have been lost. He imagines 36 names to attach to these lives, the names of the actual Ghost Ship fire victims, “friends who can still live forever if we fan their story.” In Mohr’s book they are immortal.

The rollicking pace of the book is only ever interrupted by hallucinatory interludes in an imaginary Whole Foods. There, Saint and the frontman of a popular pop punk band Saint despises (because he’s a more hardcore Butthole Surfers and Bad Brains kind of guy) have tête-à-têtes in a checkout line.

“I’d lived in West Oakland since it was really West Oakland,” a fresh from lockup Saint remarks early on in the book. “I made it back … and it had a Whole Foods.”

“It’s a really difficult thing to make gentrification interesting because it immediately sounds as though you’re trying to feed your audience the vegetables she probably doesn’t want to eat,” Mohr says. “You have to figure out a way to dramatize it in the most compelling way, but also subtextually get at the heart of those stories. When a pal of mine told me that there was a Whole Foods in West Oakland, I was like, ‘What?’ And then that became the running joke in Saint’s life: he can either be a Viking or he can have a Whole Foods.”

Saint’s spiritual wrestling match with gentrification will be particularly familiar to Bay Area residents. There is a mystery to unravel in this book, but Saint’s story is ultimately about so much more than the who, what, where and why of this case. It is a search for salvation, for Valhalla, for community in a shifting and merciless world, that is ultimately deeply human.

‘Saint the Terrifying’ is out Oct. 29, 2024 from Unnamed Press. A musical companion project by Slummy (Saint’s fictional band), a five-song EP titled ‘The Wrong Side,’ will be released in late October.