WHILE MY GUITAR GENTLY WEEPS

A painfully predictable, British rock-and-roll/revenge novel. Billy Dancey, lead guitarist for a group out of Crewe named Black Dog, narrates its slow rise--the first guitar, the alienations from parents, pub gigs, a few booking breaks, good press, immature marriages, and a concert that's destined to send Black Dog to the top. Then, however, comes a big hitch: during the intermission of that concert, three bikers--two blokes and a girl--have sadistic revenge-fun on Billy for a minor pre-concert scuffle; they lure him out to an alley, then stomp his right hand so badly that two fingers need to be immediately amputated afterward. So, while Black Dog continues to soar, Billy is out--fingerless, obsessed with getting even. He does--by becoming a kind of rock slasher: he lies low, stalks his attackers assiduously, then cuts their throats, one by one. Intercutting between present tense (Billy's post-amputation descent) and flashback (Black Dog's optimistic ascent), Breeze attempts to give this banal story some shapely tension. But the result is a totally suspenseless, unlifelike book--vastly inferior to such US rock novels as John Eskow's Smokestack Lightning and Laurence Gonzalez' Jambeaux.