John Darnielle describes Master of Reality in the voice of a fifteen-year-old boy being held in an adolescent psychiatric center in southern California in 1985. The narrator explains Black Sabbath like an emissary from an alien race describing his culture to his captors: passionately, patiently, and lovingly.
John Darnielle is the singer and songwriter otherwise known as the Mountain Goats.
[T]he focus of Darnielle's fans has always been on his lyrics and
the stories contained within them. Now he's stepped off the stage
and sat down at is typewriter to deliver Master of Reality, his
first novel and a stunning piece of rock criticism and
appreciation. Readers are likely to come to Master of Reality from
a variety of backgrounds. Some will come as Mountain Goats fans
wanting to see Darnielle tackle a novel, others as Black Sabbath
fans wanting to read about a favorite album. Some will simply be
fans of the cult-popular 33 1/3 series, which has now grown to
dozens of books, yet kept its level of quality very high.
Hopefully, there will be others who will pick it up as novel first,
because it truly is a first-rate story, full of moments that will
pluck at your heartstrings as you're brought back to the moment you
first fell in love with a piece of music, when an album provided
not just the soundtrack to your life but also the meaning behind
it. If, by some strange chance, none of this happens, well, you're
probably going to at least dust off your old Sabbath vinyl, and
there's nothing wrong with that either.
*NewPages.com*
[Darnielle] straightjackets the essence of Black Sabbath where 40
years of music musings and cultural damnation have failed.
*Austin Chronicle*
Total affection for, and strong identification with, music is a
cross-generational experience, and though the motivation behind the
33 1/3 series meshes nicely with a post-Generation X obsession with
the minutiae of personal experience, it's also immediately
accessible to anyone who's ever written favorite lyrics on her
algebra notebook. While nostalgia runs thick in Darnielle's book
(the nature of the series essentially demands this), there's a
greater point about music and memory to be found in Roger's story.
Indulgence in the memory of intense feelings can be strangely
comforting, and perhaps even necessary. Or, as Roger puts it: 'It
doesn't have to mean that to everybody, and it means more no matter
what...
*The L Magazine*
Darnielle, singer and songwriter for the much-loved band The
Mountain Goats, cuts right to the chase in his short novel, the
blunt, direct tone of his adolescent protagonist Richard Painter
perfectly encapsulating the enduring appeal of metal's great
progenitors. It's all about the Mighty Riff when it comes to
Sabbath; everything else is secondary, and while one could easily
make a case for at least half a dozen albums that deserve the 33
1/3 treatment, the riffs that define this particular album are, to
echo young Roger's sentiment, unfuckwithable.
*Popmatters.com*
Mountain Goat John Darnielle's off-stage literary proclivities are
no secret, which makes us all the more excited for his first novel,
a paean to Black Sabbath's Master of Reality. The book is the
latest in Continuum's 33 1/3 series ultrasmart series of elegant,
pocket-size appreciations of rock albums as diverse as the Beatles'
Let it Be and My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. Darnielle unpacks the
classic, riff-erific album as a scrabrous series of diary entries
written by a teenager in a Southern California mental institution.
Those curious to see the budding rock critic off-stage or who are
simply bonkers for Sabbath are advised to check out this
reading.
*New York Magazine*
Written keenly and with great generosity.
*Idolator*
Darnielle-- who worked as a nurse in a mental hospital and
presumably met quite a few smart, lost kids like Roger-- speaks to
the soul-damaging aspects of locking up problem teens and offers a
piece of music criticism that illuminates the edifying qualities of
heavy metal.
*Pitchfork feature "Our 60 Favorite Music Books"*
John Darnielle is the single constant behind the group the Mountain
Goats and arguably the most rewarding lyricist working today.
Taking into account his prolific wordsmithery ("Laugh lines on our
faces / scale maps of the ocean floor") and affinity for horror
both cinematic and literary ("Heretic Pride," the most recent
Mountain Goats album, has song titles naming Fu Manchu creator Sax
Rohmer and H.P. Lovecraft), it shouldn't come as a surprise that
he'd contribute to Continuum's "33 1/3" series of short books
pegged to iconic albums. But "Master of Reality" departs
brilliantly from the typical "33 1/3" format, not just by choosing
fiction over criticism or recording history, but in its structural
gambits and unwavering sense of purpose.
*Los Angeles Times*
I'd like to give a special shout-out to John Darnielle's book about
Black Sabbath's Master of Reality, published as part of Continuum's
33 1/3 series of album-themed books...If you like the band, you'll
like this book. If you like intense young-adult takes like The
Perks of Being a Wallflower, you'll like this book. No matter what,
by the end, you'll be racing to purchase Master of Reality, which
is a beautiful thing.
*USA Today, PopCandy*
Forget the other 33 1/3s, this belongs next to The Catcher in the
Rye.
*Decibel Magazine*
Darnielle's novella is not only a touchstone in the series, it is a
powerful and potent book in its own right. Utterly compelling.
*Community Care, UK*
This is a masterly look at the corrosive emotion of youth, and the
invaluable solace that music gives. Read it, even if you'd rather
stick knitting needles in your ears than listen to the album in
question. Because its about you.
*The Big Takeover magazine*
This is not the first time Darnielle explores these dark waters. In
fact the text is a retelling, if not an extension of " The Best
Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton," the first track on the
Mountain Goats' 2002 album, All Hail West Texas. As both the text
and the song are meditations on the redemptive aspects of heavy
metal, the depravity of institutional authority and the refusal to
forgive, the reader who is familiar with either Darnielle's musical
work or Black Sabbath will find the text particularly
rewarding.
*enoughcowbell.com*
With his short stories masquerading as songs, John
Darnielle-founding member of the Mountain Goats-has crafted a wide
range of off-kilter characters. He continues this tradition with
Roger, a fifteen-year-old patient in a psychiatric hospital and the
protagonist of Darnielle's first book, a loving diary-style
exploration of Black Sabbath's Master of Reality, part of
Continuum's 33 1/3 series...Inspired by his real-life experiences
as a psychiatric nurse (and love of all things metal), Darnielle's
literary debut is a fast, addictive read that also tugs on the
heartstrings of sensitive Ozzy fans.
*Exclaim magazine*
The Mountain Goats' John Darnielle Is Good At Writing! People love
The Mountain Goats because all their songs contain SAT vocab words
and are like little stories. So it's unsurprising that John
Darnielle can also work up some music-free compositions, like his
contribution to Continuum's 33 1/3 series of books inspired by
classic albums, a novel about Black Sabbath's 'Master of Reality.'
He also recently wrapped up a stint of guest blogging at Powell's
excellent blog, which is worth revisiting if you're curious about
his feelings about heavy metal (he likes it! and is very
knowledgable about it!). And if you live in New York, you can come
to a reading of the Black Sabbath book next Saturday at Housing
Works and witness his non-singing talents in person.
*MediaBistro's Galleycat*
Just like Black Sabbath throws big rocks at subtlety and Roger's
manifesto-journal channels anger towards the mental health
establishment, Darnielle's book obliterates the sterility of music
criticism. I imagine him reading reviews of his work and building
up all of this disdain, deciding finally that he's going to do it
better. Ultimately, Master of Reality critiques criticism itself,
an institution that encourages us to thrash apart the art of others
- without offering any blood of our own.
*Tiny Mix Tapes*
’Master of Reality’ is no straightforward critical assessment of
Black Sabbath’s album, a sludgy doom-rock classic. It’s fiction
that peels thrillingly off into music writing. The book is written
from the point of view of a teenage boy in a mental hospital who
explains why Black Sabbath and its lead singer, Ozzy Osbourne,
meant so much to isolated kids like himself. It’s about how rock
music can express not only liberating joy but, conversely and
perhaps more importantly, also speak to bottomless misery and pain.
The book is funny, too. Its narrator observes that you never feel
that you might hang out with Robert Plant, the Led Zeppelin singer,
at a video arcade. But Mr. Osbourne, “he sounds like the guy who
changes your quarters".
*The New York Times*
Darnielle wrote his entry in the 33 1/3 series (slim, hip
flask-sized volumes of criticism focused on individual albums) on
Black Sabbath’s Masters of Reality as a novella, an impassioned
riff on identifying with art from the perspective of an
institutionalised teenager.
*Junkee*
Darnielle spent his early teens feverishly typing 'awful' short
stories and collecting rejection slips from sci-fi magazines before
turning to poetry and then songwriting. His interest in prose only
revived years later when he began writing music criticism and
considered submitting a proposal for Continuum’s 33 1/3 series
about classic albums. Master of Reality, his 2008 novella named
after Black Sabbath’s 1971 album, takes the form of diary entries
written by an institutionalised teenage heavy metal fan, who finds
solace in extolling the virtues of Sabbath ... the novella form
allowed Darnielle to play with timeframes and expand on what the
songs only implied.
*The Guardian*
There are several 33 1/3 titles that mix fiction and criticism,
with varying degrees of success. Of them, John Darnielle’s novella
about Master of Reality may be the best. Drawing on his experience
as a psychiatric nurse before he found a steady day job with the
Mountain Goats, Darnielle approaches the album through a fictional
character—a patient who is keeping a journal of his therapy
sessions. What could have been a gimmick instead proves both
critically engaging and emotionally harrowing, as the lively,
angry, intelligent narrator voices his rage and confusion through
his love for Ozzy.
*Pitchfork*
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