The setting: a London street. Jack Solomon has recently moved from Los Angeles to front a heavy metal band called Hounds of Winter, scheduled to open at Wembley for Black Sabbath. But Jack has two problems. The first is that the band, pressured by management, has booted him in favor of another singer. The second is that after leaving a bar owned by a friend and mentor named Henry, he’s been shot to death by a stranger.

Bands come and go, but death is permanent. Or is it? Following a visit to “an enormous mountain of fire” surrounded by tens of thousands of infernally tortured statues, Jack, himself a tormented soul, finds himself back on this mortal plane, now blessed—or perhaps cursed—with psychic and magical gifts befitting his new role as a “thanatist,” a sort of dead whisperer.

Welcome to the richly imagined world of Brandon Sanderson’s latest novel. Songs of the Dead (Saga/Simon & Schuster, June 16) is the inaugural volume, co-written with Peter Orullian, in the new Strata Wars series. The strata in question are the many layers of history, much of it dark, that define the great cities of the world. Henry’s club, where Led Zeppelin once played, is a portal to each of those layers, fiercely desired by at least one unhinged master of the damned and doomed.

Sanderson, whose 70-odd books have sold more than 50 million copies worldwide to date, is celebrated by legions of fantasy readers for two things: one, a talent for worldbuilding that is both believable and suitably fantastic, and two, systems of magic that are coherent and self-contained, guided by maxims such as “Always err on the side of what’s awesome.” His London is recognizable, if ever stranger with each stratum. And the magic is, yes, awesome.

Sanderson is also a stickler for authenticity, and here’s where the collaboration with Orullian comes into play. Speaking with Kirkus while at a fantasy convention in Atlanta, Sanderson gladly admits to knowing little about Jack Solomon’s métier. “I was very interested in metal music culture,” he says. “When I get into an idea, I go to the forums, I go read people’s blogs, I go read people’s social media who are really into something. And I was surprised by what I found because I had this picture in my head of what metalhead culture was—kind of brain-dead rage machines. Instead, I found a community [that] had deep appreciation for music, a kind of fraternity [that takes] people as they are. And I thought a story with someone from that culture would be really interesting.”

Still, apart from having once attended a Winger concert as a kid growing up in Nebraska, Sanderson didn’t have much firsthand experience of metaldom. Enter Orullian, a fantasy writer with several books under his belt who also happens to sing in a metal band. The two agreed on a division of labor: Sanderson would write a detailed outline—Orullian calls it a “world bible,” and it has grown to more than 50,000 words—in which he would spell out the main lines of the story, including those worldbuilding and magic-making rules, while Orullian would flesh out the details.

“I had the structure of the story,” Sanderson tells Kirkus, “but the details really became Peter’s as he worked on it. The most interesting thing, and the thing that’s best for the book, is that he steered it away from the comedic tone that I had had into something more epic and more sincere.”

Speaking from his home in Seattle, Orullian elaborates. “Brandon had had this idea, and the moniker he used was ‘death by pizza.’ It was very tongue-in-cheek: There was this American rock singer living in London, delivering pizzas while he was trying to make it as a musician, and he delivers a pizza and gets shot, dies, and wakes up as a necromancer. But a couple of things happened. The more we got into it, the more we decided we wanted to play it straight, if you will. We also gave Jack a real internal arc.”

“Peter’s so good at that bittersweet musicality of a plot,” adds Sanderson. And musicality is certainly a keyword: Much of the struggle in Songs of the Dead between good and evil, roughly speaking, involves resisting Brach, a fellow of formidable magical powers who has very strong opinions about heavy metal. Says Brach to Jack, “Start in your circle of influence by reining in the decadent and historically ill-informed music that plagues your topside world,” adding that “it isn’t only the music you make, but all the music that isn’t made while you’re composing your rubbish, which ultimately means your world isn’t hearing the right songs.”

Spurred by Brach’s demands for symphonies instead of headbanging anthems, the inhabitants of the Strata are getting restless, and they’re amped up to clamp down on what the kids up above are listening to. Brach means what he says, too: A bunch of once-mortal musicians are snuffed out in the afterlife for their sins, including the wondrous Marianne Faithfull and Marc Bolan of T. Rex fame, who is unceremoniously zapped: “A moment later the notes ceased, and only remnant embers of Bolan drifted on the air like fireflies winking out.”

“I was looking for a metaphor for stripping identity and culture from people,” says Sanderson. “The machine of the world sometimes says, You’ve got to all be the same now. That thievery of identity feels like a thing that’s happening in our society in ways that are both mind-boggling and heart-wrenching.”

“Part of the fun for me is giving a little airtime to great musicians I love who may go underappreciated by modern audiences,” adds Orullian. “Some of the readers will not recognize, say, Marianne’s name and will go look her up. Many of Brandon’s readers are younger, even teenagers, and they probably have no idea who that person is.”

Keep an eye out for John Lennon in a future volume, then, to be written by Orullian alone. Orullian isn’t daunted by the prospect: Thanks to that world bible and his own abundant imagination, he foresees the series running to a dozen volumes, three for each of four cities, with “a bespoke villain for each one.”

Orullian is flying solo because, as he puts it, Sanderson “just entered into a monster deal with Apple TV” and is going to be busy writing and producing screenplays along with his novels. Those scripts will be built on his immensely popular Cosmere books, an elaborately crafted fictional universe that unites several of his multivolume series, such as the bestselling Mistborn trilogy and his ongoing Stormlight Archive, slated to be adapted as films and a television series, respectively.

Given an unprecedented amount of creative control over the Apple productions, Sanderson readily accepts the challenge of adding more tasks to his already daunting workload. “I have so many dreams, so many stories in my head,” he says. “And if I don’t make good on them, I’ll feel like I’m letting down all the people who want to be in my seat.”

Gregory McNamee is a contributing writer.