A year after releasing the best selling Sing Backwards and Weep, Mark Lanegan picked up his pen will be releasing Devil in a Coma, a book about his brutal battle with COVID earlier this year.
The former Screaming Trees frontman said he was left “completely deaf” for a bit and “slipping in and out of a coma” when he picked up COVID in his new home of Ireland this March. A press release explaining Lanegan’s COVID experience said the following:
“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 a 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.”
Lanegan spoke with SPIN in October about his new full-length collaboration with former Icarus Line anchor Joe Cardamone, Dark Mark vs Skeleton Joe. One of the lyrics from the album is an eerie mirror to Lanegan’s COVID battle: “I woke to find a spider bite / So infected I was paralyzed.”
SPIN has reached out to Lanegan’s book publicist about his condition.
Devil in a Coma is set to release on December 14 and is available for pre-order.
