Black Sabbath's Master of Reality

"Black Sabbath are of fundamental importance in developing many of the elements of what metal music became, and they’re also a band that is still adored to this day, as well as being a direct influence on some metal genres, particularly Doom Metal. John Darnielle’s book is very different to the two academic books before it. It’s part of a series of short books on particular albums, in this case Master of Reality , which is an album I adore and one of the reasons why I got into metal in the first place—but his response to it is not through non-fiction but through fiction. The narrative is of a teenage American boy who has been institutionalised, against his will it seems, for mental illness. He starts off with a lot of anger, and as he spends more time there, we learn his narrative about himself and where he came from. Black Sabbath’s album is interwoven into that as both a symptom of how he feels but also a solace. I think it captures a particular kind of engagement, both adolescent and not, with metal – the way that particular bands can express anger and bitterness at the world, and alienation from it, but also provide a degree of comfort. John Darnielle gets that. The book also shows that responding to music through writing is a very difficult art, and fiction is a great way of doing it. I don’t think he’s trying to make a wider point that heavy metal attracts people with mental health issues, although some people do make that claim. Early studies of metal in the eighties were very problematic in that they often associated metal with some kind of deviance, or at best as an expression of a wider dissatisfaction with society. As my own research has shown, while sometimes that is the case, more often it’s not. So this book just depicts the life of a particular kind of metal-obsessed teenager. No book, least of all fiction, has to represent all possible types of experience."