KING DIAMOND - Highly Strung Page 4
By Martin Popoff

"The story is so different from any other puppet story you might have heard, about puppets being alive. It's created in a way where you get the deep explanation for 'How is this possible?' It goes through a ritual, that The Puppet Master... his wife has been out killing homeless people and taking them back to the cellar under the puppet theater. The way they prepare the things... he has these rituals he does where he exchanges the soul of the person they kill, with a demon, and that demon gives back a different kind of soul that goes into the organs of the human being, and preserves them. And if you inject the blood of that victim - because they are very careful to preserve the blood of the victims - you can almost reanimate the skin, you know? And the way they build these puppets, they don't use the internal organs, but they do use eyes and ears and the hair, fingers, fingernails, the skin, from arms and legs or whatever, which they sew onto the puppet skin. And once the human skin is stretched out over and sewn onto this puppets arm, for instance, when you inject the blood, for about one hour, it'll be working. And if you teach these puppets how to... you can actually do that, teach them how to stretch the skin and how to contract their skin. It's very difficult at the beginning but they get better and better and you can get small movements out of them. It's almost as if this skin works as exterior muscles. And the eyes become the center of the thinking process. Of course they see with their eyes still, during that hour, but it's like the mind goes in there. And in the story something goes wrong. It's essential for how the story progresses, that the Puppet Master... it's difficult to jump into the middle of the story. You heard it, but you might not have had the lyrics."

And with that, you should be suitably seduced. To get the rest, pick up the album, which, King claims, contains enough in the lyrics alone for you to gather the gist of what becomes the man's "most gruesome story yet." And for elucidation, catch King Diamond on tour now, out with the mighty Entombed, the two creating a double bill of which legends are made.