Mark Lanegan is set to release a new memoir about his close call with COVID-19 and “cheating death” his whole life.
The Grunge legend contracted the respiratory virus in March and was “slipping in and out of a coma” and went “completely deaf” after being rushed to Kerry Hospital in County Kerry, Ireland, with “little hope of survival”.
And the near-death experience saw the former Screaming Trees frontman “assaulted by nightmares, visions and regrets” about his “lifelong battle with mortality”, owning to living “on the edge of chaos and disorder”.
Mark, 56, penned a series of prose and poems about the terrifying ordeal and they feature in the upcoming tome ‘Devil In A Coma’, which is out on December 14.
A description of the book reads: “One blindingly bright morning in Ireland in March 2021, Mark Lanegan woke up and walked into the kitchen to pour himself a cup of coffee. Having gone completely deaf during the illness that had been slowly devouring his sick body, he found himself floored with cracked ribs unable to breathe. His body — burdened with a gigantic dose of COVID-19 — was quickly taken to Kerry Hospital with little hope of survival.
Slipping in and out of coma, Lanegan’s mind and body were left oscillating between life and death, unable to walk or function for several months. As his situation becomes more intolerable over the course of that bleakest of springs he is assaulted by nightmares, visions and regrets about a life lived on the edge of chaos and disorder. He is prompted to consider his predicament and how, in his sixth decade, his lifelong battle with mortality has led to this final banal encounter with a disease that has done for millions, when he has apparently been cheating death for his whole existence.”
White Rabbit Books. Publisher Lee Brackstone said: “Devil In A Coma is the latest work by a master of many forms, who has once again made art out of suffering and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Unsparing – of both himself and the world we now find ourselves in – and grotesquely compelling, this book could not be more visceral and intense if it were written in blood.”
The new book follows 2020’s ‘Sing Backwards And Weep’, a warts-and-all memoir about surviving the 1990s Seattle grunge scene, which was synonymous with drug-taking, and its sequel, ‘Leaving California’.