Welcome Dane Erbach, Author of For Your Entertainment |

For Your Entertainment is a a story by a punk music lover for a punk music lover. This YA contemporary story is full of references to the post-hardcore era of music we *ahem* old *ahem* millennials remember with affectionate nostalgia.

For Your Entertainment is a love letter to the adult generation’s misfit youth and the power of music, but what happens when music is not enough, when your “found family” is toxic, and when you feel betrayed by something so core to your values and identity.

We had the opportunity to interview Dane and learn more about For Your Entertainment! Sans spoilers of course 😉

What inspired you to write For Your Entertainment?

I actually had ideas for two books. One idea was inspired by punk-rock bands that almost “made it,” like Operation Ivy, who broke up after a couple years and a single tour but still managed to influence music in some profound ways. I used to talk to a lot of bands and interview them for magazines, so I’ve always been interested in the “human” side of artists. I had wondered how one goes from being a teenager in a popular band on the cusp of “success” to just a regular teen when your band breaks up.

I also had an idea for a book set at a place like Chuck E. Cheese’s. I worked there when I was in high school and, yes, I was the mouse in the costume. Working there felt surreal, since it was a fun place where kids could lose their minds playing games and winning prizes, but also a stressful place to work (I used to have nightmares about running pizzas back and forth from the kitchen). I thought it would make for a fun setting, so I squished these two ideas together to make For Your Entertainment, thinking it would be interesting to watch my main character Sammy could go from punk-rock tour van to the fuzzy Billy Bob Brokali-type bear suit.

Without any spoilers, what was your favorite part of the book to write?

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that the book builds up to a sort of Battle of the Bands where Sammy’s band performs. When I write books, I always know how the book is going to end, but I don’t have all the details in mind. During the Variety Show, writing the performances were fun because the story started telling itself to me, making connections to other parts of the book, and naturally seeking a kind of resolution. There are three big performances, and each one took an immersive week to right because each performance needed to provide something to Sammy, to fix something, but all in a particular order. Is it cheesy to admit that, whenever I read those Variety Show chapters back, I get a little emotional?

Were there any major influences for you as a writer?

For Your Entertainment probably draws a lot more from my own experiences and feelings. My time in the mouse costume combined with my time playing music as a young person — and all of that divided by my complicated relationships with friends and family — were probably the bigger influences. A lot of my books are my attempts at making sense of my own life. For Your Entertainment is one of those.

In a broader sense, I don’t think any one author inspired me to want to write. That desire to write has sort of been in me since I was little, so I didn’t really need the inspiration. That said, there are a few authors that made me love reading and helped me see what kind of writer I wanted to be. For all the things that are problematic about Catcher in the Rye, it was the first book I read that made me excited to read literature. Before that, R.L. Stein kindled my fascination for spooky stories (some of those Goosebumps book are genuinely scary). As an adult, reading books by Frank Portman inspired me to try out writing YA, and Barbara Kingsolver helped me see that stories can be emotionally big without having a ton of action propelling the plot. Writers like Jeffrey Eugenides and Joe Meno showed me how to wield voice in creative, beautiful ways.

Without any spoilers, is there a character who holds a special place in your heart?

Joey Alonso is the guitar player for Flipflop who turns his back on Sammy and starts a new band called Don’t Slow Down, even going as far as reclaiming some of their old recordings. When I first started writing the book, Joey was the clear antagonist, an egocentric bully who basically ran Sammy out of his position in Flipflop and used his new band’s popularity to bully him even more. In the earilest drafts of the book, Joey was even more of a jerk.

But as I was writing the novel, something weird happened: Joey started feeling bad about what was going on. I swear, his switch just happened during the writing process and was not something I had planned (in fact, another antagonist takes his place). Joey holds a special place in my heart for this reason—he’s a character with a hard edge and puts up a tough front, but writing this book helped me see there was someone else beneath it, someone who might be hurting and may require an opportunity to reveal it. I think it’s a lesson I needed to learn when I was a kid.

If your book had a soundtrack or theme song, what would it be?

Oh boy, well, this is the big question, isn’t it? Because this whole book is about music. And, as a matter of fact, I made a special playlist to go along with it. What I tried to do is pick songs that might sound like Flipflop and Don’t Slow Down and Sonex, punk-rock and indie/alternative bands from the 1980s and 1990s that would have been peers for their bands. The playlist itself moves from more four-chord poppy punk (like Flipflop) to more dynamic, emotional post-hardcore (like Sonex), though I sprinkle some solid ’80s dance jams and hits in there along with some hair metal for good measure.

The playlist features the songs mentioned in the book, and there’s a couple big songs that shaped Sonex, like “Wave of Mutilation” by the Pixies and “I Will Follow” by U2. It also has songs that, lyrically, match what’s going on in the story a little too well, like “So Long Sucker” by the Mr. T Experience and “Never Go Back” by Dag Nasty.

But, secretly, there are a couple songs that hit a special place for me because they captured something essential about the bands in my imagination. There are three songs at the end of the playlist that capture this. “For Your Entertainment” by Unwound is the song that, to me, feels most like Sonex during that Variety Show scene in the book; it’s also the song I ultimately named the book after, and it’s sort of THE song for this book. It’s really special to me because of that. “Radio” by Rancid, to me, feels the most like Don’t Slow Down, and “You’ve Done Nothing” by Face to Face reminds me a lot of how Flipflop would sound. Granted these aren’t the songs I imagined these bands playing; instead, they captured the vibe of each band, if that makes sense.

So, yeah, not a single theme song for this book. It required a whole soundtrack, and there’s more I wish I could have added.

What is your favorite trope?

I don’t think I’m really a trope person — or at least I tell myself that every time I am on social media looking at “trope maps” and stuff like that. If I were a trope person, it’d be more horror tropes, like haunted houses or “the real monsters are people!” or something like that.

But then I get over myself and realize there are a couple tropes that I love to read and that pop up often in my books. For example, I really like underdogs — misfits that can’t always find their place or who think they have but are wrong. The cards are stacked against them and they need to rage against the systems set up against them to prevail.

For that reason, I also love found families — the people who rally around the underdogs (whether the underdogs like it or not) and help them get across the finish line. Found families pop up in my own writing a lot, and I think it’s my subconscious trying to tell me that I need to allow my found family to help me out more often.

What was a memorable moment for you when you learned language had power?

I wrote a lot when I was younger — like elementary and middle school. At the time, it just seemed like the sort of thing you did when you were bored. Like, as a teenager before smart phones and social media, it just made sense to work on a novel before bed, you know? I had one big cheerleader at the time, and that was my grandmother Eileen, who loved reading all those early stories and encouraged my writing. I’ll never forget how this one short story I wrote as a tween about a fallen angel during war seemed to blow her away; whether it did or she was just a wonderful, supportive grandmother, it made me feel like my words had power.

When I went to college and started writing a weekly “slice of life” column for the newspaper, my grandma read every single one, but so did a lot of other students and teachers on campus. That was another moment I learned that my experiences — these dumb little vignettes that I squeezed meaning out of like toothpaste at the bottom of a tube — could impact other people. There’s nothing like having a drunk freshman crying on your shoulder at a party because they were moved by one of your articles. Before then, I knew I liked writing; after that, I think I realized my writing could impact strangers too.

So what are you reading now? What’s on your TBR List?

At this exact moment, I’m reading Fever House by Keith Rosson. It’s part horror novel, part crime novel. Its layers of characters and backstory, all the information he withholds and how he reveals it, the twisted conspiracies threaded through the book — it all puts me in awe of what excellent writers can pull off.

My TBR list can change day-to-day based on my mood, but a few books I have on my list are Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay, The Unmothers by Leslie J. Anderson, We Have Always Lived in this Castle by Shirley Jackson, and The Island by Natasha Preston. Again, a lot of spooky stuff — it’s been my happy place lately as a reader.

What else have you written and where can we find them?

I self-published my first novel Friday Night at Humble House in the summer of 2024. It’s an adult historical novel, and the first novel I ever wrote. Looking back, I didn’t try hard enough to find an agent or publisher for that one, so it sat on a shelf for many years before I decided, what the heck, I could be an indie author. I’m really proud of that book, but it’s a lot different than what I’ve been writing lately. Still, in other ways, it’s probably easy to see connections between it and For Your Entertainment. It’s easy to find on Amazon.

I have been writing a lot of horror lately, and have another YA horror novel in the works. For now, it’s scheduled to come out from Gendel Press in 2026. Likewise, I’m pitching another YA horror novel to agents and small presses at the moment, so we’ll see if I can get that novel out there too.

I’ve published a lot of shorter works. Until recently, it was mostly music writing — features about bands, album reviews, etc. — but, the past year or two, I’ve been writing a lot of short stories. Some are horror stories and out there in small magazines; others are flash nonfiction essays about my own experiences. You can find links to everything linkable at http://daneerbach.com.

About Dane Erbach

Dane Erbach is a writer from Chicago’s northwest suburbs who teaches English and journalism at a public high school. His writing has appeared in a number of small online literary magazines, and his adult literary novel FRIDAY NIGHT AT HUMBLE HOUSE was published in 2024. When not writing or reading, you can find him catching Pokémon with his family, raiding his community library, and tending to the pumpkin patch in his backyard.

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About Dane Erbach

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