Black Sabbath's Master of Reality

33⅓ Main Series #56

by John Darnielle

Black Sabbath's Master of Reality has maintained remarkable historical status over several generations; it's a touchstone for the directionless, and common coin for young men and women who've felt excluded from the broader cultural economy. John Darnielle hears it through the ears of Roger Painter, a young adult locked in a southern California adolescent psychiatric center in 1985; deprived of his Walkman and hungry for comfort, he explains Black Sabbath as one might describe air to a fish, or love to an android, hoping to convince his captors to give him back his tapes.

Genres: Music, Fiction, Novels, The United States Of America, Novella, Literary Fiction, Realistic Fiction

110 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

John Darnielle (/dɑrˈniːl/, born March 16, 1967) is an American musician, best known as the primary (and often solitary) member of the American band the Mountain Goats, for which he is the writer, composer, guitarist, pianist and vocalist.

Source: Wikipedia.

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘It was like a S.W.A.T. team kicking out windows inside my head.’

We all have that one album we knew intimately in our teenage years. The one album you knew every word, wrestled with every lyric. The one album you could hear even the notes deep in the mix inside your mind when you thought of it in silence. For me that album was Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps, an album that sent me on a lifelong journey of guitar playing and harmonica blowing, but for teenage Roger locked away from all he loves in a mental health facility in 1985, that album was Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality. Who is the master of your reality musician John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats asks in his novella, Master of Reality. Who controls what you think and do? Who decides what is real? Raging against the nurses and doctors and feeling hopeless without access to his tape collection, Robert pens his thoughts on his treatment and favorite music in the journal he is made to keep. Darnielle creates an nuanced and layered story that is part music criticism and part introspective mourning for a lost adolescence and spins it out in a way that really speaks to the sore spots inside us all. The magic of this story is the way it focuses on the way the music makes Roger feel, being more a catalog of emotional resonance even when band biography comes up. It’s about what Black Sabbath meant to him. Swinging hard, yet peppered with humor and infused with a deep empathy for those who struggle through this world, Master of Reality is an engaging novella that fans and even complete strangers to the band—such as myself—will find to be a moving meditation on the power of music to heal and give hope.


Black Sabbath

While I’ve never been a music biography reader, I’ve always been curious about the 33 ⅓ book series where the submission call was to write about your favorite album in a literary way. I was thrilled to finally read one when this became our bookclub read for December, even more so as I am a big fan of John Darnielle’s band, The Mountain Goats. I’ve seen them several times and their lyrics often speak to me. I’ve avoided his novels, worried if I didn’t like them enough it would spoil that magical spell his songwriting has had over me, but I was pleased to say this only made me appreciate him more. As a former nurse on a psychiatric wing in a hospital, Darnielle writes from the heart and dedicates this book ‘to all the children to who I ever provided care, in the earnest hope that your later lives have brought you the joy, love, and freedom that was always yours by right.’ It makes me pause and consider that the Gary (‘fucking Gary’) to whom Roger is writing—and raging against—may in fact be party Darnielle himself, conflicted over having been a player in a mental health system he critiques. Either way, the emotions feel authentic and hit hard here.

‘I don’t do sports, but with Ozzy I feel like I understand the concept of the home team crowd.’

For Roger, Black Sabbath and Ozzy speak to him in a way where ‘it’s like, I know that dude,’ and because ‘only Black Sabbath sounds like exactly what my friends and I might have done if we’d had the equipment.’ Darnielle certainly empathizes, having recorded his early tapes after his shift, mostly solo, wanting the equipment for a full band and fuller sound. But this also approaches the way musical idols in our youths are often people we want to be like, or feel like they would hang out with us. He acknowledges that even Ozzy wasn’t the character he played on record and stage, and considers ‘how important it can be to really be free to pretend.’ He sees Ozzy as someone like him, troubled but wanting so badly to keep going and make something of himself. ‘That’s why Black Sabbath are special. They aren’t rags to riches. They are just rags. All they have is themselves, but that’s turned out to be enough.’ We all hope that we can be enough.

What works so well is they way the story focuses on the feelings bestowed by music, the experience of it all. Darnielle captures his own message that ‘it’s not emotions but the aftereffects of them, or a memory of them, or imagining what it might be like to really let them out.’ Interestingly, at one point he pairs the phrase that Roger ‘lost control’ with his outburst being a way to ‘assert some kind of control,’ and in a way this reflects the loud, chaotic music: it is a highly choreographed chaos of sounds and letting out the emotions is how the musicians and listeners find a way to feel in control of them. I enjoy how he doesn’t put the music all on a pedestal, criticizing Ozzy’s voice at times, admitting his lyrics ‘sounds like he’s saying his piece before he really thought it through,’ and even admitting he dislikes 3 songs on the album. It’s all really heartfelt and honest, and it really works and is infectiously in awe of the band. I’ve never been a fan, and even appreciating these songs in a new light won’t make it enter frequent rotation of listening, but even so this book really took hold of me.

‘The real message the hidden message is that we are the ones who are making better days.’

The hospital is written as a threatening place that is more about restraint than aid. Roger knows his music helps him. The music ‘pulled me gently out of real life and transported me somewhere else, which was what I felt like I needed most in the world.’ Without it, he spirals. The second half of the novella, written 10 years later in diary entries sent to Gary again (‘fuck you, Gary’ reflects on the irony that his music was looked down upon because of the dark themes and imagery. The hospital pushed religious overtones in everything and Roger writes incredulously ‘Ozzy was one of you guys! He was on your side the whole time, but you wouldn’t even listen to him to find out!’ It’s a rather beautiful dive into the lyrics, which he sees as redemption, giving oneself to Jesus, finding hope in the darkness:

‘Peace, peace, peace, happiness, happiness, happiness. That was the message that Master of Reality came to spread….But some of us who are desperate to find this message end up finding it in places where the tones are really dark and the images are explosive and scary, and when we say that we found the secret of love in some sticky lightless place, we get punished. Which ends up happening a lot of times, because we keep digging around in the places where we know love is…we learn not to mind getting punished if we can just keep what we found on the way to the punishment.’

It is a tragic tale, one where the punished come to only find purpose through punishment, only feeling alive through pain when they so badly want to feel joy. There is a solidarity with people who feel that way here, all set against the backdrop of 1980s State Institutions that seem to swallow young souls up forever in a maw of darkness kept hidden from the world. ‘So I felt sad for you,’ Roger writes to Gary, ‘because you haven’t ever stood in the shadow of a volcano and lived to tell about it.’ His hardships have made him stronger and able to appreciate the life he has left to live, bearing scars that show the harsh journey to be where he is in the second half writing in 1995.

‘I’m 26, but I’m not ready for m 16-year-old self to be dead.’

The aspects of grief and mourning in this novel are gripping. Roger mourns the lost years of adolescence, stuck inside a State Institution until he finally turns 18 and is thrown out to fend for himself without many resources. By reading his old diary and listening to music, he is trying to recapture that 16 year old emotion but finds it eludes him. ‘Maybe that younger person died when he became this older person, and now when I’m feeling his emotions and sharing his rage, I’m really just mourning his death.’ Music is a shortcut to dredging up old memories and feelings. With some songs I can taste the air and weather of the day it first meant something to me. It is a eulogy to time now gone, and Darnielle captures this in introspective tragedy through Roger laying his past self to rest, buried inside him with a funeral dirge of metal guitars fuzzing alongside the hard rhythm of a drum.

‘So we look up to Black Sabbath—to what we remember of them, in my case. Even after we’re grown up, we do. Always.’

Short but powerful, John Darnielle’s Black Sabbath excels at capturing the feeling of a favorite band. Wedding music criticism to a harrowing story of surviving your own mental health and a system that doesn’t seem to be helping, this is a stirring novella that will have you getting out your headphones and revisiting the songs that speak loudest to you. Music can heal and comfort, it can excite you and make you dream big, and often I find it is the closest thing to a magic spell we get in this world. Darnielle understands this, and his depiction of it will rock the stadium of your heart.

3.75/5

[mayfly wake · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book absolutely devastated me. I was sobbing pretty much the entire time, and a book hasn't done that to me since the end of Where The Red Fern Grows when I was 9 years old. I don't want to give any plot details away in case you read it. But I have to tell you something, so you do buy it and read it and so John gets the money he deserves for this, and so I can get these feelings out somewhere. Even though it's a book about an album by a band I barely know any songs by, it is far more than that. Do not let the Black Sabbath theme deter you from this book, because it almost did for me and I am so grateful now that I was able to let that go and allow myself to immerse myself completely in a very dark time in a character's life, including its soundtrack, and the underlying feelings and motives for this darkness. It is from the point of view of a teenager who is committed in a psychiatric facility and his feelings of alienation and anger during that time. I am not an eloquent enough writer to critique or even describe something of this depth and emotionality, but it hit me so viscerally. It took out my capacity for anything but anger and despair thinking about my past and forced my eyes wide with the sheer shock of salt being rubbed into a recently opened wound. There have been times, very recent times in fact, when I have thought that music was the only thing that actually makes me feel good. There was a time before I could even voice that but the feeling was still there. I hate to be all "Oh man, I totally relate to this book, I feel alienated all the time" because who doesn't? But right at this time in my life, when I am feeling very very alone and afraid that I will fuck up somehow and end up losing myself to a place like this and that I will never be who I want to be, this book is tearing me up inside. I just deleted a lot of this post because it was getting far too personal, but somehow, in a way that a lot of his lyrics have also done, John Darnielle has given voice to feelings that I have bottled up inside for time immemorial and something inside has shifted. Maybe a kidney.

[Mariel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Master of Reality by John Darnielle (of The Mountain Goats, whom happen to be one of my favorites but that's neither here nor there) is part of the 33 1/3 music series which highlight seminal music works, written by connected people (or just big names. The Sonic Youth chick doubtfully had part in making David Bowie's Low). This is a story so it is much more enlightening musical experience like going to a concert and feeling good vibes (good meaning anything that matters, not necessarily happy or lifted up) rather than reading a meaningless musical review like "trippy happy hoppy doppy soppy pop infused with jamba samba rythms perfect for drinking in your favorite coffee house in the South of France". Or "Yes I did it! I was there!" ass-patting with the occassional good tidbit you've gotta look over their big head to glimpse. John Darnielle is not the guy to write that kind of a book. It's music blood pumping through your veins, all or nothing passion and means everything matters. (It's probably a good idea to not get this if you want behind-the-scenes stuff.)
This was a great book for me to read when I've been writing lots of (pretty crappy) reviews on goodreads. It's about loving that special thing that meant so much to you and not tearing it down with criticism. (I'd hate to do that to myself. I don't have enough favorites as it is. But then I'm also too scared to reread very old favorites so...) Even if I fall short (read: suck) at expressing why I love something, this kinda review is what I'd strive for. Laid bare love in that lying there in the dark and someone on the music player gets it.

My day was like the lines from this book, anyway, so I was also thinking of it 'cause of that.
"When you punish a person for dreaming his dream, don't expect him to thank or forgive you." I wanted to say it to someone today but I was too depressed to bother.
"Good things never last, bad things never die." (There's a Destroyer lyric in their song 'Rubies' that is similar to this. Now it's playing in my head I'll have to look it up to get it right before it is stuck in my head and I can't think of anything else. "All good things must come to an end. The bad ones just go on forever.")
I don't know that much about Black Sabbath outside of my younger days. My brother had a Sabbath phase in his tween years, as did my mom. When the school was "concerned" about it she stuck up for him. Roger wouldn't have had a hard time for loving Sabbath with us. (If only the same treatment was extended to me. I was constantly told to be "normal" without any kind of guidance what that normal was even supposed to be.)
"It doesn't have to mean that to everybody, and it means more no matter what..."

[Jonathan Ashleigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

For what this was, it was a great read. I can't imagine any other 33 1/3 book came close to this as a narrative as the goal was describing an album. But, if you want to read a journal of a young troubled teen, I encourage you to check out The Sorrows of Young Mike. It may not involve a medical ward, but it goes to dark places just the same.

[Melanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A few things to know:

1. In the 33 1/3 series, published by Continuum, assorted writers, critics, rockers, and others write about various "classic" albums--older classics like The Velvet Underground and Nico, newer classics like In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Sometimes these small books are works of fiction inspired by the albums, or track-by-track examinations of the music or lyrics, or obsessive explorations of the mythology behind the band and/or the nature of musical fandom.

2. John Darnielle is the man behind the Mountain Goats. He's spent the past, like, very nearly two decades making alternate-universe folk songs: songs about people and the horrible or beautiful things we do to each other and ourselves. He's also written extensively about music at Last Plane to Jakarta. Additionally--and this biographical tidbit is maybe important when thinking about the book at hand--he used to work as a nurse in some sort of psychiatric care facility.

Okay, the scene thus established:

This is the story of Roger, a teenager who's stuck in a psychiatric center for miscellaneously troubled youth, and he's been ordered to keep a journal, which he recognizes is a bullshit thing to demand of someone, forcing them to spill out all of their feelings to help them "get better" but then taking the journal away every night and using the supposedly personal stuff revealed in the journal against them at every opportunity. All Roger wants--aside from being able to return to his normal life on the outside, which even he recognizes wasn't all that normal or even enjoyable--is to get his Walkman and his tapes back. He begins to write about this in his journal, and to write in particular about Black Sabbath's Master of Reality, in the hopes that he can make his tormentors understand that keeping music away from him is exactly the opposite of what he actually needs, if the goal of this enterprise is indeed to make him "get better."

It's also the story of Roger, ten years later, writing a series of letters to the same guy who read his journal all those years ago and decided that Roger needed to be transferred to the state facility with all the other really desperate cases.

And then, too, it's the story of how music can give us what we need, even if we're damaged, or if we're living in a damaged place, or if we know that no one else can understand who we are or how we hurt. It's about finding hope and peace "in places where the tones are really dark and the images are explosive and scary."

If you're a fan of the Mountain Goats, you're probably familiar with "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton." This book is a worthy companion to that song, and it's hard to read this without thinking of Jeff and Cyrus and their death metal ambitions:

Jeff and Cyrus believed in their hearts they were headed
for stage lights and leer jets, and fortune and fame.
So in script that made prominent use of a pentagram,
they stenciled their drumheads and guitars with their names.

This was how Cyrus got sent to the school
where they told him he'd never be famous.
And this was why Jeff,
in the letters he'd write to his friend,
helped develop a plan to get even.

When you punish a person for dreaming his dream,
don't expect him to thank or forgive you.
The best ever death metal band out of Denton
will in time both outpace and outlive you.

Hail Satan!

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yeah, fuck you, Gary!

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think the strongest testimony I can give for this book is that I've never had any interest in listening to Black Sabbath before, but this book made me desperate to listen to Master of Reality immediately.

An unusual entry in the 33 1/3 series, which are usually nonfiction essays about specific albums, John Darnielle's book is a young-adult novel told via letters from a teenage patient in a psychiatric hospital to one of the staff members there. He's been instructed to keep a journal, but the staff read what the patients write, so he decides that he's going to write his entries about how much he loves Master of Reality and why the staff really need to give him his Walkman and tapes back. Over the course of his journal, his entries move from open hostility to a surprisingly confessional tone (given the audience he's writing for). The whole thing has that wide-eyed, earnest feel of Catcher in the Rye or The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

If you've ever loved a record so much that you memorized all the lyrics and felt like every song was about your life, Roger's impassioned entries about Master of Reality will make immediate sense to you. I think what works particularly well about this book is that Roger doesn't focus on the things that make him different from the reader (we get only the dimmest hints of why he's even in the hospital - he and his stepfather didn't get along, and there's a fleeting reference to a suicide attempt) but rather on that sense of what it means to love and relate to a work of art.

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read a bunch of the 33 1/3 series over the last couple of years, and I've enjoyed all of them to varying degrees, though some more than others. This book, though, may be better than all of the ones I've read before. It's only about 100 pages long, so really more of a novella than a proper book, but it manages to combine the more character driven fiction/memoir elements of some books in the series with the straight up detailed reviewing of others, and in so doing, become superior to both approaches on their own.

"Master Of Reality" is told from the point of view of Roger Painter, a high school student who has been committed by his mother and stepfather to a mental institution. He's either just turned 16 or is still not quite 16 yet, and he's the sort of kid who has spent a lot more time skipping school and smoking weed in his basement than he has doing any sort of studying. His crude journal entries make this obvious. See, the book is his journal, which he's forced to keep by the employees of the mental institution where he's staying. He knows they read his journal, so he's unwilling to write anything of substance in the journal. At first, his entries are just expletive-filled tirades, but after a few days of this, he switches tactics and starts trying to convince the man reading the journal, Gary, to give him back his Walkman and tapes. He swears to Gary that the tapes will make him feel better than any pills or therapy could, and that he'd really be ok if he could at least listen to Black Sabbath's "Master Of Reality", his favorite of all the tapes he has with him. This leads to enthusiastic if rough and uneducated descriptions of how great "Master Of Reality" is, in which Roger dissects each song and explains why they're so important to him.

But before he gets through the entire album, the journal ends, only to be picked up 10 years later by the now-adult Roger, who leads a solitary existence working as a restaurant manager and living in the tiny apartment in a beat-down part of town that his restaurant wages earn him. He's just broken up with his girlfriend, and in going through all of his stuff in order to move out of their shared place into his new solo apartment, he found his old journal from his time in a mental institution, where he apparently stayed until his 18th birthday when they had to let him out. He decides to write a letter to Gary, and tell him all of the things about Black Sabbath and about Roger himself that he never got a chance or had the words to explain back when he was younger. The earlier parts of the book are affecting, depicting as they do the emotional struggle of a kid locked in a mental institution on a very visceral level. If anything, though, this later section is even more affecting, as Roger has matured enough to learn how to express himself more accurately and more in-depth. I don't want to go too into the adult Roger's attempts to fully explain himself, as I fear it will spoil the ending, but I did think that he (and John Darnielle, the actual author) hit upon a powerful and important truth about why it is that teenagers--and adults--who don't fit in with their peers and with mainstream society often turn to music that appears outwardly negative for solace.

I had heard, when I first read about this book, that it was a sequel to "The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out Of Denton", a song by Darnielle's band, The Mountain Goats. Having now read the book, I would say that this is true in a spiritual if not literal sense. Both "Master Of Reality" and "The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out Of Denton" explore the topic of misfit kids finding solace in angry and negative music. However, "Master Of Reality" goes far more in depth on the subject, and it's the kind of book that I'd hope anyone could understand. For me, I felt like it allowed me to understand something about myself that I'd never really been able to comprehend. I would like to think that I could also loan this book to someone like my dad, who never seemed to get me when I was a teenager, and maybe it would help him understand who I am and where I'm coming from, and why I'm into the things I'm into. That said, I doubt it would work out that way. My dad would close his mind to the concepts discussed in this book the same way he closed his mind to my Slayer and Black Flag records when I was growing up. But if you are someone with an open mind, if you have found yourself wondering over the years why you or people you care about might find some really positive inspiration in music that seems outwardly negative, abrasive, and anti-social, you should really read this book. John Darnielle has answered some important questions about fundamental subjects within it. I feel that reading this book enriched my life, and it would probably enrich yours too.

[Nora · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have an impulse disorder. And there is a strong possibility my "average joe" OCD is not so average, but more like the bizarre and skittish neighbor who riffles through your trash at night. Anyway. Once I heard more about this book- I had to have it. I slept a fitful night, awoke sore and impossibly crooked, and knew that before Saturday was over I would have this book in my possession. I succeeded- if you call continuing to indulge my disordered habits success. Now, I read.

Lesson learned: Let the youth have their music. For the love of pete, just give them their walkmen, let them be crowned with headphones and enough battery power to last a few hours. Gary, Roger's therapist, is a real twit if you ask me.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this fictional spin on the 33 1/3 series. One of my pet peeves as a reader is fiction about music. I find more times than not it rings inauthentic. (yes, that has a ring). Clearly Darnielle (as a member of the band Mountain Goats) knows of what he speaks when it comes to music and being a fan of music, and this explains/recreates/captures what's its like to be a teenage fan and then a not-so-teenage fan of metal or dark music more than any other work of fiction I've read.

[Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

CW: mental illness, forced institutionalization, confinement, (moderate) ableism/R-slur, (minor) homophobic slurs, suicide attempt, suicidal ideation, (minor) eating disorder

I'm so obsessed with John Darnielle's writing that I read this without ever having listened to the album. Maybe I should do that at some point.
In my defense, I also started reading Darnielle having listened to only one The Mountain Goats song because the premise of Wolf In White Van was so appealing. (And now it's one of my favorite books and here we are.)

Anyway, this was so good - a very character-driven piece about the power of music, which successfully described a number of songs that I've never listened to before - while also being so deeply, deeply sad.

[Dane Cobain · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a short but sweet little book with a lot to offer, especially if you’re a Mountain Goats fan. John Darnielle is their lead singer, but he’s also a pretty decent little writer, as I already knew from Wolf in White Van.

This is part of a series from Bloomsbury that are homages to popular albums, and this one is the entry for Black Sabbath. Darnielle reflects the actual format of a vinyl here with a fascinating epistolary story told in two halves.

[Ric · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m not a huge Black Sabbath guy, but I do love The Mountain Goats so John Darnielle writing this one had me interested. And the way that it was written was really cool; like a journal from a kid in a psych ward to his therapist talking about his favorite album and his life. I loved how different this book was, and it was a quick and fun read.

[Rhi Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a cathartic little book. Talking about Master of Reality from the perspective of a teenager in a mental hospital, John Darnielle gets across so much about Black Sabbath, as well as the human condition. The narrator is so smart and compassionate and, above all, clearly not crazy. Using the all-encompassing way music can enrapture us in our teens to talk about an album is such a smart idea. RIP Ozzy

[Benny · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Darnielle just gets the human condition . Like how do u write like this I want to kirby suck his brain

[Nancy Benvenuti · Rating 4 out of 5]

You should’ve given him his tapes back, Gary!

[Maggie A · Rating 5 out of 5]

I laughed and cried and cried some more.
I don’t know much about Black Sabbath and I picked up this 33 1/3 knowing full well that this is different from others. I knew it was a fictional account of a teenager who loves the album and gets sent away to a psychiatric hospital. With John Darnielle’s own work experiences in that setting, I knew it would be written as both a fan of the album and someone who understands these kids. I loved it all. Fuck you all, go to hell.

[Constance Squires · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this in one sitting. This book nails it--the great, ineffable quality of music that is so hard to write about without abstraction or sentimentality. This book gets it down. From the opening sentence: "Fuck You All Go to Hell," Roger Painter's voice in this epistolary novel is immediately alive, raw, real, and reaching. Roger talks about his own sad life around the edges of trying to explain the genius of Black Sabbath's Master of Reality to his counselor in an adolsescent psych ward, and then ten years later when he's grown up but still thinking about what happened to him, what that counselor's inability to understand cost him. Roger really is talking about Sabbath--it's no mere metaphor; it's gorgeous analysis--and you love him the way you love anybody who can lose themselves in something just because it's beautiful, not because he has anything to gain by it. As simple and direct as the voice is, the stakes are as high as you could ask--he's trying to live, and his explanations of how rock makes that possible are soaring.I kept thinking of how the modernists believed art was the only consolation in a fallen world and how Roger would agree even though he would probably hate T. S. Eliot. I am kicking myself because I didn't read this in time to put it in the lineup this semester for the Rock and Literature class I'm teaching--but I won't make that mistake again. Master of RealityJohn Darnielle

[Andrew Horton · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Darnielle's 33 1/3 entry is the greatest YA epistolary novel I've ever read - it's head and shoulders above classics of the subgenre like "Dear Mr. Henshaw" and even "I am the cheese." It's a shame that the vast majority of readers and purveyors of YA won't even hear about it or give it a shot, as it's presented as a 33 1/3 entry (bite-sized books dedicated to covering classic albums) rather than a mere novel or even YA-marketed effort. But that doesn't change how ridiculously immersive, affecting, and emotionally raw the story is. Your narrator is a 15-year-old boy who's been committed to a correctional home/hospital by his parents, keeping a journal explaining why Black Sabbath's Master of Reality is his favorite thing on earth and why he so dearly wants the doctors to give him back his walkman and tapes. For any troubled teen who found solace in records (especially one particular record), the whole thing hits a little too close to home at times. Outstanding.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a huge fan of the album Master of Reality, so this book was a no-brainer. The fact that the author is also the mastermind behind The Mountain Goats made it a no-no-brainer. The fact that, unlike other books in the 33 1/3 series, this is a work of fiction where the main character is a disturbed youth in a mental facility who is obsessed with the album made it a no-no-NO-brainer for me. I found the book to be a completely original take on an already interesting series of books about specific albums and how they were made. Though I assume this is an anomaly within the series, I'm certainly looking forward to read more of these books. A book about the Slayer album Reign in Blood? Yes, please! A book all about the making of Devo's Freedom of Choice? Nerd, please!

[Samuel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to say, it's quite an odd experience to see John Darnielle describing someone else's music the way I would describe his.

This book is great, and perfectly captures being an angry, messed up teenager. The first part of the book is surprisingly quite funny, and the second part is devastatingly real. John Darnielle's brilliant way with words definitely comes across in his writing as well as his music, and the whole thing is very poignant, despite being very short. Don't be put off by the tacked on "Black Sabbath" theme - the book has very little to do with Black Sabbath, and I think anyone who loves music can relate to it in some way.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leave it to John Darnielle to subvert a series of masturbatory works of music criticism by instead writing a novella from the point of view of a suicidal teenager obsessed with a Black Sabbath album. If you are a fan of Darnielle's writing in the Mountain Goats, you will like this. If you like this, you will probably like the Mountain Goats.

[Bud Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This sums up the isolation and young awe of exactly what it was like when you were a teenager and music was personal (even though it was released on a major label and a million other people had the tape)

[Electric · Rating 4 out of 5]

A novella abot a young adult getting wrecked by the mental institutions system in the 1980ies and also very intense expanded liner notes on one of the best heavy rock albums of all time. A small and dark purple gem.

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly recommended! Not your average 33 1/3 book....

This one's more of a pamphlet, but it packs a punch...

[Richard Sanders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yet another book I would have been obsessed with in high school.

[Estefanía · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book goes by in a flash. I'm admittedly not a Black Sabbath fan, but I've adored John Darnielle's music and, shockingly more so, his writing. Universal Harvester absolutely blew me away and I've been dying to return to the lyricism and emotional gravity of his writing ever since. Master of Reality .. sneaks up on you. The protagonist is so clearly angry, so intensely young, but almost instantly I wanted to protect him- the way, I think, you want to hug someone when they're hurting and know that if you do, they're probably gonna shove you hard for the attempt. There is a moment's time jump in this novel that just devastated me. As someone who saw a family member experience just a measure of what this narrative depicts, I found this heartbreaking, honest, too authentic, almost. I'm a YA librarian and I read YA literature for work. I also work with teens. It's really, really easy to fuck up writing from a teenage POV, but the writing- the tone, the grammar, the turn of phrase- feels believable. It makes the ending portion of this novel especially difficult. You sense a lifetime has passed. You sense there's anger below the surface and tremendous mourning. I wanted, as the protagonist wanted, to wrangle the people responsible into a chair and shout at them, be heard, get an apology for the ways in which apathy and the failures of the mental health system ruin and devastate young lives in need of dignity and empathy. Such a great read.

[Gin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cosa fai quando ti chiedono di scrivere un pezzo su "Master of reality" dei Black Sabbath, per la collana dedicata alle pietre miliari del rock, e tu ti chiami John Darnielle e sei il leader dei Mountain Goats? Tiri fuori una storia e un personaggio inestricabilmente collegati all'album, per raccontarlo attraverso la voce di chi l'album l'ha ascoltato e riascoltato, e ne è stato salvato. Aggiungici che hai davvero lavorato come infermiere in un istituto per ragazzi fragili... e il quadro è completo.
Roger è un adolescente disadattato, incompreso e infelice, rinchiuso in una clinica a seguito di un tentativo di suicidio. Il medico che lo ha in cura, Gary, lo invita a scrivere un diario in cui riversare tutto ciò che prova e pensa, con la consapevolezza che i suoi pensieri più intimi verranno scrutati e sottoposti al giudizio insindacabile di Gary stesso, da cui dipende la possibilità di Roger di fare ritorno al mondo esterno. Dapprima scontroso e sfiduciato, senza mancare di sottolineare quanto chiunque lo circondi sia in realtà ipocrita e falso, pian piano Roger decide di sfruttare quest'occasione per comunicare davvero con Gary. E lo fa attraverso il linguaggio della musica. Il monologo si trasforma così in una specie di dialogo muto con un interlocutore che appare solo in maniera indiretta, attraverso il
resoconto del protagonista, il cui unico disperato desiderio è di riavere la cassetta (sic! siamo nel 1985) di "Master of Reality". Ed è descrivendo a Gary le canzoni contenute nell'album e le sensazioni che gli suscitano, consapevole che ogni parola scritta con totale sincerità verrà eviscerata, analizzata e giudicata, che Roger riesce ad affrontare un giorno dopo l'altro in un posto dove "a volte lo capisco che volete aiutarmi, ma il vostro sistema fa l'esatto opposto".
Un romanzo che è in primo luogo un tributo d'amore a una band, a un'epoca, all'adolescenza che non si è ancora pronti a lasciar andare del tutto.

[kieran ⋅˚₊‧]

john darnielle, the writer that you are.

captures really well how something like music can be a lifeline when you're a kid who feels like your whole life is messed up (my album equivalent to this is passion pit's gossamer), and also how the system that should fucking care about kids who are desperate for help fails them. fuck gary!!!!

That's what it is. That's what my morning was like: all of these real physical heavy positive vibrations, the soul of this tape. The fuzzy groove. The meaning of it all, if it has one: All love, all the time. Peace and happiness in every day. Peace and happiness with cow blood dripping from your hands, bright blood staining your fingerprints because you didn't glove up since you don't normally do prep work. Peace and happiness when you're making a list of everything that's wrong with the world and squinting your eyes tight trying to imagine your way out of it. Peace, peace, peace, happiness, happiness, happiness. That was the message that Master of Reality came to spread. It's the same message we get told about once a year at Christmas time, and we hear that we're supposed to carry the message with us all year long. But some of us who are desperate to find this message end up finding it in places where the tones are really dark and the images are explosive and scary, and when we say that we found the secret of love in some sticky lightless place, we get punished. Which ends up happening a lot of times, because we keep digging around in places where we know love is. We have our priorities straight. We learn not to mind getting punished if we can just keep what we found on the way to the punishment. Most of us eventually learn to love being punished after a while. It gets to where it feels good. If any of this is at all surprising to you, Gary, you should hand in your counselor's license.

[Big Al · Rating 5 out of 5]

You don’t necessarily have to be into Sabbath to appreciate this slim but powerful exploration of their album Master of Reality, as I believe this narrative could be of interest to anyone who passionately believes in the importance of music (especially for those enduring their turbulent adolescent years). While most books in the 33 ½ series read more like long-form essays that firmly belong in the non-fiction genre, Darnielle writes his volume as journal entries written by a troubled teenager who has just been institutionalized for mental health problems. The poor kid just wants to listen to his precious Sabbath tunes, but in a Cuckoo’s Nest kind of way the adults at the centre lock up his tapes and keep him from the music he so desperately needs to heal. His journal entries are passionate and raw indictments of the adults who have failed him, but also contain some righteous discussions of Sabbath’s Master of Reality.