Spider Kiss (originally published as Rockabilly by Gold Medal Books in 1961, retitled for later editions) is Ellison’s rock-and-roll novel — a fierce, fast, and deeply knowledgeable portrait of the early rock industry and the human wreckage it produced.
Stag Preston is a poor Southern boy with extraordinary talent — a voice, a face, and a sexual magnetism that can fill stadiums. He is discovered by a promoter and transformed into a star, and the transformation destroys him. Success does not make Stag happy — it makes him vicious. He abuses his band, his women, his managers, and his fans with an escalating cruelty that mirrors the industry’s own treatment of its artists. The “spider kiss” of the title is the embrace of fame: it attracts, it paralyzes, and it devours.
Ellison wrote the novel from experience — he had spent time in the music industry and knew its operations intimately — and the details of recording sessions, concert tours, payola, and promotional machinery are rendered with documentary precision. The novel’s emotional center, however, is not the industry but Stag himself — a portrait of narcissism as a progressive disease, in which each success feeds the hunger for more and each act of cruelty makes the next one easier.
Collecting Spider Kiss
First edition (Gold Medal Books, 1961, as Rockabilly): Mass-market paperback original.
Market values:
- First edition (as Rockabilly): $20–$60
- Revised edition (as Spider Kiss, Armchair Detective Library, 1975): $15–$40
- Signed copies: $40–$100