TOME DEAF

Wizards, demons, monsters, and yes, hot sex with burritos…it’s in there. Revolver presents the most important books in heavy metal.

By Brandon Geist
Illustration by Cojo

As the popular stereotype would have it, metalheads are all knuckle-dragging Neanderthals who wouldn’t know a book if it hit ’em in the moshpit—and yeah, some of us are. But the truth is that many headbangers are just the opposite: total fucking nerds. And when we’re not trolling eBay for the debut 7-inch from that new Malaysian thrash band or trying to decide which obscure black-metal tee to wear to the Celtic Frost show tonight, we like nothing more than curling up on our parents’ couch with a good book. It might not sound like a very hard-rockin’ pastime, but when said tome is full of demons, dragons, druids, and/or drug-addicted insectoid aliens, it definitely is. No wonder then, that ever since Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath laid the foundations of metal—and did so with songs that heavily referenced the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, and Aleister Crowley, among other scribes—loud, crushing music has continually found great inspiration in that quietest of places: the library. So here, for your reading pleasure, we present a few of the rock-solid volumes that have left a mighty imprint on the history of metal.

Moby-Dick; or, the Whale
(1851)
by Herman Melville
As anyone who’s read a metal mag in the last five years knows, Mastodon’s 2004 breakthrough opus, Leviathan, was based on Herman Melville’s phonebook-thick novel about peg-legged Captain Ahab and his obsession with the white whale that claimed his appendage. But the Mastodudes are hardly the first—or last—hard rockers to pay homage to literature’s most famous cetacean: Led Zeppelin did it in1969 with the drum-heavy instrumental “Moby Dick”; progcore newbies Secret & Whisper have titled their debut Great White Whale; German funeral-doom trio Ahab have been doing it since their formation in 2004; and even Gallic riff-beast Gojira joined the party in 2006, putting a pasty “mastodon of the sea” (albeit a space-traveling one) on the cover of their breakthrough album, From Mars to Sirius.

The Soft Machine
(Olympia, 1961)
by William S. Burroughs
Before his death in 1997, Beat writer/junkie/gay wife-killer William S. Burroughs collaborated with everyone from Ministry (on the “Just One Fix” single and video) to Kurt Cobain (on the 1992 EP The “Priest” They Called Him), and his cut-and-paste, stream-of-insanity prose style has influenced such out-there lyricists as Pig Destroyer’s J.R. Hayes and Meshuggah’s Tomas Haake. But it was with his mindbender of a novel, The Soft Machine, that Burroughs made his single biggest impact on hard rock by, according to some scholars, coining the very phrase heavy metal. The book (which was culled from the same manuscripts as his most infamous work, Naked Lunch) includes the character “Uranian Willy, the Heavy Metal Kid” who was addicted to actual heavy metals. In his next novel, Nova Express (1964), Burroughs extended the concept to loud, addictive music (“With their diseases and orgasm drugs and their sexless parasite life forms…The Insect People of Minraud with metal music”), and then eight years later, as the legend goes, rock critic—and Burroughs fan—Lester Bangs quoted the term in an interview about Black Sabbath. The rest, as they say, is history.

The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band
(HarperEntertainment, 2001)
by Tommy Lee, Mick Mars, Vince Neil, and Nikki Sixx; with Neil Strauss
The alcohol-, drug-, and bodily fluid–soaked autobiography of the dukes of debauchery, Mötley Crüe, may not have inspired any metal songs, but it has inspired many a sexually and chemically deprived teenager to pick up a guitar, start a band, and hit the road on a quest to match their heroes’ hedonistic exploits. A virtual how-to manual for living fast and dying young (though the Crüe have all somehow dodged death long enough to stage their own dreaded old-guy reunion), The Dirt is responsible for the way every modern sleazecore outfit from Avenged Sevenfold to Escape the Fate comports itself on the road—which means the book is to blame for so many cases of band-member puking, overdosing, and STDs that we recommend reading it only with latex gloves and a surgical mask on.

Blood Meridian; or, the Evening Redness in the West
(Random House, 1985)
by Cormac McCarthy
As Revolver contributor Brent Burton pointed out in the Washington Post last year, Western writer Cormac McCarthy has become one of heavy music’s favorite authors, hailed by the likes of Neurosis’ Scott Kelly and Isis’ Aaron Turner. Though best known for No Country for Old Men (and, before the 2007 film adaptation of that, for the novel-cum-Matt Damon flick All the Pretty Horses), his 1985 masterstroke, Blood Meridian, is perhaps his most significant work to today’s experi-metallists. Cited as a primary influence by Sunn O))) guitarist Stephen O’Malley (who says that McCarthy’s “long-form descriptive writing and lack of punctuation” inspired him to “try other structures” in his music) and Earth main man Dylan Carlson (his band’s 2005 album, Hex: Or Printing in the Infernal Method, is based on the novel), the book tells, in brutal, hallucinogenic prose, the story of a mid-19th-century gang that hunts and scalps Indians along the Mexican border, and it’s darker and weightier than most metal bands could ever hope to be.

Inferno
(Some fateful year in the early 14th Century)
by Dante Alighieri
The first canto of Dante’s Divine Comedy (the other two are Purgatorio and Paradiso), Inferno takes readers on a tour through the nine circles of hell, each more torturous than the last—and, really, what could be more metal than that? Not surprisingly, hordes of headbangers have been inspired by the surprisingly readable medieval classic, including power-metal heroes Iced Earth (check out their 16-minute-plus orchestral epic “Dante’s Inferno”), chaoscore crushers Zao (their 1999 record, Liberate te ex Inferis, spans hell’s first five circles), and Brazilian thrashers Sepultura (whose 2006 concept album, Dante XXI, is a modern retelling of the whole Divine Comedy—but all the good songs are in the Inferno section). There’s even an annual metal fest named for the thing—Oslo, Norway’s Inferno Festival—which, ironically, takes place during one of the least infernal weekends of the year, Easter.

At the Mountains of Madness
(1931)
by H.P. Lovecraft
The horror master’s definitive work, this 1931 novella about Antarctic explorers who unearth the ruins of an ancient civilization and awake a long-dormant evil, describes, among other terrors, the winged, octopus-headed Elder God Cthulhu and the book of the dead, Necronomicon. Both are key players in the Lovecraftian mythos, which has inspired more metal than any set of legends other then Tolkien’s and the Vikings’: The Metallica songs “The Call of Ktulu” and “The Thing That Should Not Be,” for example, both grew out of Jaymz and Cliff’s fascination with the Rhode Island–born writer’s “cosmic horror,” and Morbid Angel guitarist Trey Azagthoth (né George Emmanuel III) takes his stage surname from an especially powerful daemon in the Necronomicon. Likewise, Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Mercyful Fate, Cradle of Filth, Nile, Immortal—the list goes on and on—have all proven their love of H.P.’s craft with their own headbanging homages.

The Satanic Bible
(Avon, 1969)
by Anton Szandor LaVey
It’s probably no accident that, just a year after an upside-down-cross-wearing former carnival organist named Anton LaVey penned The Satanic Bible, introducing his Church of Satan and its individualist philosophy to the immediately panicked masses, the debut album by a band called Black Sabbath, which featured an upside-down cross in its liner notes, roared up the rock charts. Satanism and heavy metal have been intertwined ever since. Imagery like the inverted cross, as well as the pentagram and the goat’s head—which have virtually become metal clichés—are rooted in LaVey’s work, and a long lineage of extreme-metal bands—and their members—take their monikers from The Satanic Bible’s list of “Infernal Names” (like Behemoth, Beherit, Samael, Marduk, Euronymous, and Fenriz, among others). Yet while the occasional hard rocker, like Marilyn Manson and Alkaline Trio’s Matt Skiba, actually sign on to the Church, most “Satanic” metallers seem content to adopt only its trappings while pushing their anti-Christian, if not particularly Satanic Bible–informed, messages. In fact, as Reverend David Harris, a member of the Priesthood of Mendes and host of Internet radio show Satanism Today, told Norway’s Imhotep webzine in March, most “Satanic” metal bands “are clearly not practicing Satanism, but are instead practicing devil worship…If you’re setting fire to churches, you are certainly an asshole, but you’re no Satanist.”

Liber AL vel Legis
(1904)
by Aleister Crowley
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” The most quoted of Aleister Crowley’s many catchphrases and one of metal’s guiding tenets, the saying comes from Liber AL vel Legis, otherwise known as The Book of the Law, which the Lucifer-loving magickian allegedly “received” while in Cairo, Egypt, in 1904, from his “secret self,” an entity he called Aiwass. Since then, the occult text’s wisdom has been received and passed along by a who’s who of heavy metallers—from Marilyn Manson (who references a line from it on Antichrist Superstar) and Mudvayne (who do likewise on The End of All Things to Come) to Carcass (on Swansong) and DevilDriver (on their self-titled debut).
Of course, the cult of Crowley extends way behind this one book: The self-proclaimed “Great Beast” has inspired Ozzy Osbourne (see the song “Mr. Crowley”), Phil Anselmo (who used the pseudonym-made-in-hell Anton Crowley for side projects like Necrophagia and Viking Crown), Tool’s Danny Carey (a collector of Crowley first editions), Celtic Frost (the title of their 1985 album, To Mega Therion, means “the Great Beast”), and, maybe more than anyone, Led Zep guitarist Jimmy Page—who bought the dude’s fucking house.

The Lord of the Rings
(Houghton Mifflin, 1954, 1955)
by J.R.R. Tolkien
Marauding orcs, dueling wizards, armies of the dead…really, the question isn’t “What’s metal about The Lord of the Rings?” but “What isn’t?” From Zeppelin (who name-drop Gollum on “Ramble On”) to just about every black-metal band (Burzum, Gorgoroth, Ephel Duath, Morgul, etc., all take their names from Tolkien’s trilogy) to absolutely every power-metal band and self-described “Tolkien metal” band (see Battlelore and Summoning), heavy music simply wouldn’t be same if that tweedy British university prof and devout Catholic J.R.R. hadn’t tapped into some deeply repressed inner headbanger and penned these three books to rule them all.

The Bible
(Long, long ago)
Not surprisingly, the single most important book in the history of the world is also the single most important book in the history of heavy music. It’s given every Christian metal band words to live by, and just about every other metal band words to riff, roar, and rebel against. Even if only to—in the immortal words of Rage Against the Machine—”know your enemy,” it’s a book well worth reading.