Dan Kois’s novel Hampton Heights is a thoroughly entertaining coming-of-age story.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“Splendid . . . what really sells this imaginative, scary, verge-of-growing-up tale is its characters, each with a distinct voice and personality. . . . Kois’ surprising second novel is a natural for fans of the character-based horror fiction of Grady Hendrix or Paul Tremblay and will win him a whole new sphere of readers.”
In his own words, here is Dan Kois’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel Hampton Heights:
As in my first novel, Vintage Contemporaries, where the central duo meet-cute over a 25-disc CD changer, Hampton Heights features a great music-technology advance of the late 20th century: the CD boom box. When a Milwaukee Sentinel paperboy named Joel brings his boom box along for an evening of canvassing—selling subscriptions—in an unfamiliar neighborhood in 1987, his fellow paperboys can’t believe how fancy the stereo is. It even has a graphic equalizer. Unfortunately for the purposes of this playlist, Joel doesn’t use his boom box to play music. He uses it to record his farts on a cassette tape. I have not included any of those farts in this playlist.
There’s actually very little music specifically referred to in the novel. All the boys in the book share my experience of waking up early in the morning for your paper route to hear your clock radio playing “The Lady in Red” again. In the book, Joel is a rap fan, which is to say he has just discovered the Beastie Boys, whose songs dominated my school’s talent show when I was in seventh grade. (I think four different groups of boys “performed” a song off Licensed to Ill, which is to say, lip-synced to it, music-video style.) The boys’ manager, Kevin, has an epiphany in a bar to one of the worst songs of the 1980s, Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again,” and later goes home with a woman who puts on Steve Winwood as sexy mood music. And when one of the boys, Sigmone, meets a group of older kids, he’s intrigued to hear, playing from their boom box, a song from a little earlier in the decade, X’s “Los Angeles”—a song my brother played a lot that year, one that I found alluring and a little frightening.
While writing Hampton Heights, I listened diligently to a 1987 playlist, light on radio hits and heavy on the vibrant underground music that was burbling in the subculture like magma underneath the earth’s crust, almost ready to burst forth in the great eruption of the 1990s. Of course, that playlist did not at all represent what I was actually listening to in 1987, when I was 12, like the boys in the novel. For most of that year, I listened only to what was on the radio, while across the hall my brother, five years older than me, was knee-deep in the college rock, post-punk, and dance-music scenes. Only late in the year did I start distinguishing my own taste in music from what was “popular,” though even then the albums I spent my paper route money on were hardly indie: Sting’s …Nothing Like the Sun, Bryan Ferry’s Bête Noire, Robbie Robertson’s self-titled album.
For Largehearted Boy, I’ve split the Hampton Heights playlist, like a mix tape, into Side A and Side B. Side A consists of songs from 1987 that I actually loved in 1987. (Some of them remain great, and some of them … huh!) Side B consists of great songs from 1987 that I didn’t hear until later in life—in some cases, much later. Like the boys in the book, I was blind to much of what was going on around me; I was only starting to understand what taste even meant; I was just starting to figure out what I loved, what I cared about, who I was. Here’s a mix tape from a liminal year.
SIDE A
Club Nouveau: Lean on Me
Swing Out Sister: Breakout
Madonna: Who’s That Girl
Belinda Carlisle: Circle in the Sand
John Cougar Mellencamp: Cherry Bomb
Grateful Dead: Touch of Grey
Terence Trent D’Arby (Sananda Maitreya): Wishing Well
INXS: Need You Tonight
George Michael: Faith
Sting: The Lazarus Heart
The Bangles: Hazy Shade of Winter
SIDE B
The Psychedelic Furs: Heartbreak Beat
The Replacements: Alex Chilton
Sinead O’Connor: Mandinka
Dinosaur Jr: Little Fury Things
Eric B. and Rakim: Paid in Full
The Go-Betweens: Bye Bye Pride
The Housemartins: Five Get Over Excited
Kool Moe Dee: How Ya Like Me Now
10,000 Maniacs: A Campfire Song
Prince: I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man
Tom Waits: Innocent When You Dream (78)
also at Largehearted Boy:
Dan Kois’s Playlist for his novel Vintage Contemporaries
Dan Kois is a writer, editor, and podcaster at Slate, where his work has been nominated for two National Magazine Awards and two Writers Guild Awards. He’s the author of the novel Vintage Contemporaries; How to Be a Family, a memoir; The World Only Spins Forward (with Isaac Butler), which was a 2019 Stonewall Honor Book; and Facing Future, a book of music criticism and biography. He is a frequent guest and host of Slate’s Culture Gabfest podcast, was a founding host of Slate’s Mom and Dad Are Fighting podcast, and hosts The Martin Chronicles, a podcast about Martin Amis. He grew up in Milwaukee, where his first job was delivering the Milwaukee Sentinel, and now lives with his family in Virginia.