“King Cal” by Peter McDade

King Cal (Trouser Press 2025), Peter McDade’s third novel, opens with an abrupt moment of loss. By the bottom of the first page, Calvin “has managed to lose his band and his girlfriend, and [realized that] it turns out fighting with people you love drains you emotionally and physically.” A few hours after his girlfriend drives away, Calvin is back at work taking orders at a drive-thru, and though he may not realize it yet, his journey to rebuild his life has begun.

King Cal is, of course, a coming-of-age story, but it is also a deep dive into a life structured by music and the inescapability of the creative impulse. Peter McDade has a unique lens into the musical coming-of-age narrative, having spent fifteen years as a touring drummer for the rock bands Uncle Green and 3 lb. Thrill. This personal experience is evident in the close third-person perspective of King Cal, which gives the reader a close-up view of not only the social dynamics and logistical considerations associated with a career in music, but also of Calvin’s creative, wide-ranging, sometimes overthinking mind.

The book’s epigraph from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway—“Clarissa spent most of her life thinking about some one thing or another”—is the first clue that this will be the case. Like Clarissa, Calvin is always thinking about something, and the way his mind ranges from topic to topic is an insight into the creative songwriting process. The reader gets a front-row seat to the development of lyrics, to the evolution of rhyme and rhythm, when Cal takes a shower:

“[He] stands under the water and runs variations of the line through his head. It’s so hard to know at first if he’s had some cool new insight that he can work into a song, or stumbled onto a cliché a million people have already bled dry… Sometimes he doesn’t know for sure until he’s tried placing the words on top of some melody he’s working on, and sometimes he knows right away he’s headed down a wrong end.”

For much of the book, Calvin balances his work at a fast-food joint with his musical dreams. The music playing at Burger Buddies joins the stream of his consciousness; he re-plays lyrics in his head as he works, and talks about the nature of passion and artistry with his co-workers and bandmates. The omnipresent need for money both conflicts with and merges with his artistic aspirations, making a critique of capitalism and the materialism that pulls artists away from their real work and true calling.

Without revealing too much about how his music career evolves, and transforms Calvin and his relationships in the process, the story shows how art can simultaneously transform us and bring us into contact with our own untransmutable nature. At the end of the book, Calvin’s life has changed in many ways, but he is still the same person:

“It feels like he’s drowning from the weight of all the ideas in his head, but if someone asked him to say what was wrong, in clear words, he’s not sure he’d be able to say anything. It’s the same problem he’s had for years, a head so full of thoughts he can’t pick any of them out, which makes it feel like there are no thoughts at all.”

Maybe what is at the heart of this story, and all musical coming-of-age stories, is the way that music returns us over and over again to ourselves. Calvin’s songs are a vehicle for self-understanding, for processing and harnessing the words that run on treadmills in his head. The gift of King Cal is the reminder that our thoughts and emotions and omnipresent words do not have to isolate us but instead, through art, can become bridges that connect us to each other in moments of understanding and illumination.

Peter McDade

Peter McDade spent fifteen years traveling the highways of America as the drummer in the rock bands Uncle Green and 3 lb. Thrill, releasing a half-dozen albums on various major and independent labels. Raised in New Jersey, he now lives with his family in Atlanta, where he teaches at Clark Atlanta University. He is the author of two other novels, The Weight of Sound and Songs By Honeybird.