Devil In The Metal

So it's been a while since I've put anything up here. I know I've been forsaking my Illcon responsibilities (Illcon-sibilities?) but I wanted to make sure whatever I came back with was solid. And nothing seemed to jump out at me. Yeah, there are some good metal albums and weird conspiracies out there, but I wanted something really cool.

I was at the thrift store a while ago and something presented itself to me. It's not the cool thing I was looking for at all, the opposite really. A book so shitty looking that I couldn't not buy it. I was struck at first by the title - “Devil In The Metal” - along with a pentagram (though not inverted as most Satanists would have it) and the ever-popular 666. It bills itself as a tale of “murder, insanity, and terror in the music business” which basically makes it sound like a fictionalized extrapolation of every scare-tactic talk show from the late 80s that set out to convince the good, upstanding people of middle America that Twisted Sister existed to reap their childrens' immortal souls.

So I was gonna take one for the team, read this thing, describe it. But I just can't. It just looks so shitty. And I have a consistently growing pile of great books I need to get around to that I don't have enough time for. But I don't think it matters. You don't need to really read this book at all. All that's necessary are a few quotes to know the general gist of the thing. I genuinely feel that a fairly fleshed-out impression of the book's overall plot can be gleaned from a handful of these lines.

-"'Joo guys are the rock group, right?' the short, cute Brazilian prostitute asked."

-"'I'M A SLUT KILLER FOR SATAN!' Monty yelled, his voice cracking."

-"Porn queen, Satan's slut, get on your knees and fuck. Suck and moan and show your cunt and let the jiz run down your butt."

-"'What's 'Bloody Hell' mean?' Bobby Shapiro asked, smiling. 'Is that the English version of 'Oh Fuck' or something?'"

-"'Who's Norman Mailer?' one of the record company executives asked.

'Guy who wrote All In The Family, I think,' Bobby Shapiro said."

-"It was the type of hood an executioner would wear, except that it had white lines on it. It took Gil only a second to realize that the white lines on the hood Monty was wearing formed an upside-down cross."

-"He walked over to the homeless man and, with his back to the street, pulled out his gun. He had screwed a silencer on it. This was his chance to get another soul to serve him in Hell."

-"Della was looking into the barrel of the pistol, helplessly knowing that at any second a bullet would spew from the gun and rip her open like a cantaloupe."

-"Greg, could you please fuck me? I'm so excited from watching you pee I think I'm going to explode."

And so on. And from my willfully ignorant standpoint, I maintain that those quotes are enough, that not even reading the entirety of the text would answer the lingering questions. Is this book designed as some sort of weird Christian propaganda? Even skimming it turned up far too much anal sex and too many golden showers to make that likely. And if that's not the point, then who is the intended audience? It's far too ignorant of metal and Satanism to appeal to many fans of either, and far too lurid for the more moralistic of readers. Were the clumsy metaphors just the product of a bad writer, or does the author actually rip open cantaloupes? Who is the author? His or her website features only a cover image of this book with no further information. It's a thoroughly confounding work, one I'm glad I purchased and perused but happier still that I didn't spend more than about twenty minutes skimming and summing up.

                              
                      (What I imagine the author thinks metal sounds like)


Also, if anybody wishes to read this modern masterpiece, I'll mail it to you for the cost of postage (and considering that there's one on Amazon for $131.65 right now, this may be the deal of a lifetime.)