The Best of Rock Fiction, the first volume in a planned series of music fiction anthologies, is not an up-to-the-minute compendium of the year’s best genre writing in the mold of the Best American series from Houghton Mifflin. This volume reaches back decades for its pieces and is thus able to include some of the most well known contemporary writers, many of whom are not wedded to music as subject matter per se, but who might have touched upon it once or twice in the not so distant past. Don DeLillo, William Gibson, Rick Moody, Tom Perrotta - all big names, and they’re all here. It’s a table of contents that comes as a pleasant surprise.

The selections themselves are eclectic and uneven. Short stories and excerpts from novels, some of the pieces stand well enough on their own, while others are unsatisfying and too brief samples from larger works. The excerpts from Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues, Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides and Hornby’s High Fidelity, for example, all introduce intriguing characters and then cut them off in mid-situation, leaving the reader yearning for more. This is, perhaps, great incentive to go out and get the complete novels from which these pieces are drawn, but it makes for frustrating reading when all you’ve got on hand is your copy of The Best in Rock Fiction. Other times, the cut-and-paste approach works well, such as in the excerpt from Doyle’s The Commitments, in which band leader Jimmy Rabbitte interviews a potential saxophonist, the legendary Joey “The Lips” Fagan. Doyle’s dialogue has such perfectly self-contained fire that even reading two or three pages of it is a joy.

The selections in The Best in Rock Fiction come at rock n’ roll from a couple of different directions. The first is an attitude of pure reverence: rock n’ roll as legend-maker, emotion-generator, pure primordial force. For the writers in this camp, it is enough to write about rock music;. Their goal is to capture a bit of the rock n’ roll magic on the page, to try, as ill-advised as it might be, to explain its power to a reader who might be unfamiliar with the force of rock. That’s how we get something like the excerpt from Madison Smartt Bell’s Anything Goes, in which a bass player who lacks self-confidence (don’t they all?) fakes his way through a set during which he is forced to play lead guitar. It’s all about being up on stage and jamming, and for a reader who isn’t predisposed to get off on rock writing, it’s dry and thin. The same is true for Bill Flanagan’s A&R, a book about a record executive. These pieces rely for their punch on the assumption that the reader has already bought into the myth of rock n’ roll, and if that assumption should prove false, the writing falls flat.

Other selections in the volume, however, take a different approach. These selections aim to poke holes in, or at least poke fun at, the whole idea of rock n’ roll as the stuff of legends and musical demigods. These pieces know how silly their subject matter is, and even if these writers have a fair amount of respect and affection for rock n’ roll they aren’t going to let the music, the musicians or, especially, the fans off the hook too easily. In this category are High Fidelity, Hornby’s bittersweet love story about a loser who happens to own a record store; Alexie’s Reservation Blues, about a struggling Native American rock band; and Doyle’s The Commitments, the story of a promising R&B group from Dublin’s poor north side. All of these writers - and their characters - love rock n’ roll, really love it, but there’s something sad and dangerous in their complete devotion to a genre of music and its heroes. That darker side of rock idolatry comes particularly clear in the excerpt from Don DeLillo’s apocalyptic White Noise, in which two college professors, one a scholar of Hitler Studies, the other a proponent of Elvis Studies, make frightening comparisons between their respective subjects.

That brings me to a complaint about the collection: Elvis shows up too much. Whether he’s copied by a young impersonator in T. Coraghessan Boyle’s “All Shook Up,” thinly disguised as a character named Leroy in Mark Childress’s Tender, masquerading as a young auto mechanic in Robert Dunn’s Pink Cadillac, or serving as a sign of the end of the world in DeLillo’s White Noise, Elvis is omnipresent in these selections, and one might argue that he’s given just a bit too prominent a place in this particular construction of the rock mythos.