Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin: the list of famous musicians who have died tragically young goes on and on. Living fast and dying young seem to be the way of the rock star, history suggests, and fame never offers a blink of concern for said rock star’s physical or mental health, all the while their songs enrich the lives of thousands of admiring listeners.

The devastating relationship between fame and destruction is the central concern of Canadian author Marissa Stapley’s latest novel The Lightning Bottles, which opens in December of 1999 on the fifth anniversary of American rocker Elijah Hart’s disappearance in the waters off the south coast of Iceland. In his disappearance and presumed death, Elijah leaves Jane Pyre, his bandmate and wife, in mourning, alongside international droves of their band’s—the titular Lightning Bottles’—fans. Chapters alternate with precision and ease between the Lightning Bottles’ rise to fame in the early nineties Seattle alternative scene and the poignant events of December 1999. The older Jane comes to believe that Elijah is still alive and leaving clues as to his whereabouts, and, accompanied by seventeen-year-old Lightning Bottles superfan Hen Vögel, she embarks on a quest across Europe to uncover the truth about what happened to him.

The Lightning Bottles is a novel about running away from the greedy mouth of an industry which chews up artists and spits them out over and over again, so long as the mess sells records and can be regurgitated one final time on the seedy front covers of tabloids. The novel is relentlessly pessimistic in its depictions of professional musicianship, and Jane and Elijah’s move from Seattle to Los Angeles in 1991 becomes a nosedive into a blazing hell. Stapley characterizes exploitative music executives and omnipresent paparazzi as ravenous birds circling Jane and Elijah’s heads, hungry to pluck from the pair whatever will make money and get the public talking. The young hopefuls stagger to protect the sacred vision that they had for the Lightning Bottles during their early years in the Seattle scene, but the turbulence and chaos are impossible to stand against, and their crystalline dream inevitably shatters into pieces scattered across the booze-sticky California floors. Critics and general audiences may rave about the Lightning Bottles’ music, and Grammys may collect in the wake of the release of the band’s debut album, but the novel foregrounds the dark side of fame.

In the chapters set during the early nineties, we see overdoses, suicides, and fatal drunken accidents pick away at Jane and Elijah’s contemporaries and form an ever-darkening cloud of prophecy over the pair’s heads. As Jane and Elijah fade away into their own addictions, Stapley paints a vivid portrait of two formerly bright-eyed musicians becoming victims of their industry. The pressures of fame and touring prove to be all too much when private griefs and public opinions are always clashing head-on.

The public loves to hate things, and women in rock music will learn this personally. Through Jane’s experiences, Stapley critiques the treatment of women in a masculinist music industry. Despite being the primary songwriter of the Lightning Bottles, Jane is consistently discredited by music executives and producers, and in news articles and public discourse she is relentlessly blamed for Elijah’s personal struggles with substance abuse and recurring stints in rehab. Dedicating the novel to Courtney Love, Fiona Apple, Kim Gordon, Sinéad O’Connor, and various other famous women musicians, Stapley demonstrates her respect for the real stories which inspired Jane’s own. By including characters such as musician Fiadh Connelley—Stapley’s fictionalized version of O’Connor—Stapley contextualizes the public hatred of Jane against the real conversations around the women rockers of the nineties, reminding readers that the horrors Jane encounters are not really fictitious. Famous women have always been scrutinized by the media, but The Lightning Bottles does an exceptional job exposing how media narratives around these women’s lives are rarely ever a reflection of the truth. Rather, it is a moral failure to allow the media’s dramatization of rock stars’ lives to eclipse the real experiences of the women behind the music we love.

In Part Two, the tensions established in the first half of the novel evolve into a gripping, full-blown crisis. Everything seems to fall apart for the two battered protagonists. The chapters grow shorter, and the reader is tossed back and forth between the early and late nineties at an increasing pace, causing Jane and Elijah’s past and present to collide with each other, amounting to an explosive effect.

At its heart, The Lightning Bottles is about uncompromising love, and this love is the root of any hope that still lingers in the novel after Jane and Elijah’s experiences in the beginning of their career. An epigraph from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet grounds the story: “One day you will ask me which is more important? My life or yours? I will say mine and you will walk away not knowing that you are my life.” By the end of the novel, the resonance of Gibran’s words with the biting tragedy and lingering hope of Jane and Elijah’s journey is fully realized and crystal clear.

The Lightning Bottles should be on the radar of anyone interested in the nineties alternative music scene—it is undoubtedly a novel for music lovers. Stapley may take the lives of rock stars as her primary focus, but she also has compassion for the love fans have for their favourite musicians. The reader can sympathize with Jane, but likely shares more similarities with Hen, who spends her days tuned in to her local radio station eagerly waiting to hear her favourite songs and practicing drums in her bedroom on a DIY kit made of buckets, dreaming of one day starting a band of her own.

In The Lightning Bottles, the best-case scenario for its protagonists is to simply emerge on the other side of fame damaged but at least still alive. After the damage has been done, you will be left wondering if the suffering that comes with fame could ever be worth the music made in the process.