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f you know John Darnielle from his albums (released under the nom de rock The Mountain Goats), you know the man has a way with words. A born storyteller, his empathy and nuanced sense of character are obvious in concept albums like 2002's collapsing-marriage masterpiece Tallahassee. That he would end up a writer of prose was perhaps inevitable. His first book, Black Sabbath's Master of Reality, is the odd man out in Continuum Books' 33 1/3 series. Each book covers a specific great album in whatever way the author sees fit; most are memoir or criticism, but Darnielle is the only writer thus far to tackle his subject via fiction. Master of Reality is the journal of Roger Painter, a teenager trapped in a Southern California psych ward in the mid-'80s. Desperate to recover his Sabbath albums from the nurses' station, he fills page after page with analysis of — and admiration for — the Birmingham quartet.

Only a fifteen year old can muster this kind of fandom-bordering-on-fixation, and I should know — my own high-school journal is about ninety-percent concerned with Iron Maiden. As a metal obsessive and former psych-hospital worker himself, Darnielle understands kids like Roger better than most. His conceit illuminates not just Sabbath's classic album but the sweet, unhappy soul of a kid who loves it. It's not just an clever way to write about heavy metal — it's a true feat of compassion. — Peter Smith

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We agree that Sabbath Bloody Sabbath is the best Ozzy-era album, right?
It's certainly the proggiest! I don't think that's really the best one, no. I mean, if you're going to argue that anything tops Paranoid, it's either got to be Master of Reality or Volume IV. Not that I don't dig SBS, but it's kind of the artsy Sabbath in a lot of ways.

How long have you been nursing this concept for? It's a really ingenious way to write about Sabbath.
I just came up with it when pitching season for 33 1/3 came around. Everybody, I guess, likes to engage in the highly productive parlor game of kvetching about what 33 1/3 hasn't gotten around to yet, and my hobby horse is metal, and I thought, "Fuckin' how is it even possible that there're all these indie touchstones and nothing really heavy at all?" I mean, there's Zeppelin and the MC5, classic loud rock for sure, but I mean heavy, you know? Which kind of begins with Sabbath, or maybe Blue Cheer. And I thought about pitching stuff that was lots heavier, but I thought, one, I came late to most of it except for Celtic Frost and Megadeth, and two, you got to get Sabbath out of the way first. Then you can get to death and thrash and black metal.

It seems like "The Best-Ever Death Metal Band in Denton" could be the epigraph for this book — i.e., "When you punish a person for dreaming his dream, don't expect him to thank or forgive you." Am I misinterpreting?

The Mountain Goats (John Darnielle, right)

Well, yeah. I mean, that's a song [that's about] kids in treatment, but "kids in treatment" isn't really a generic descriptor — "kids in treatment who love heavy music" isn't even a functional generic. That song is about kids who get sent away because teachers are afraid of the morbid pictures they're drawing on their notebooks, kids who get pigeonholed for no good reason at all, other than that adults are stupid. Roger gets sent to treatment for standard adolescent family-dynamics stuff, then gets sent further down the line because he can't work the system in the private hospital. He isn't just locked up for no reason. So, no, I think they're pretty different cases, but I would say that, because I spent years working in these kinds of places, situations that'd look quite similar from the outside look real different to me.

Roger likes Born Again because nobody else does — it's like a secret between him and the band. I feel like I've had that obsession with about a dozen "forgotten" albums by great bands. Do you have any favorites in that mold?
Sure, who doesn't? My Bloody Valentine's Isn't Anything is the first one that comes to mind, though it's hardly forgotten, just the not-as-big-a-deal-to-everybody one; I think there are loads of people who prefer it to Loveless. I do always take an interest in stuff that comes after the flood, so to speak — books or albums by authors or bands that come after they're perceived as having peaked. Genres, too, come to think of it — like, right now I'm listening to death metal, which is a scene that sort of ran out of gas a long time ago. I think with Born Again and with genres that have had their moment of public interest, it's like there's this extra element of unraveling that adds a lot. Sabbath is super-interesting this way because they just kept on making records, even when the majors weren't interested in them any more and they ended up on I.R.S. Records. It's like, there are few bands as committed to staying in the game as Black Sabbath — they just weather the storm and keep right on playing and wait for people to come back around to them.

Just when I expected the book to be a sort of coming-to-forgiveness/understanding narrative, it ended on a note of un-forgiveness/defiance. I really liked that. Were you ever temped to go for a more feel-good ending?
I don't really remember, to be honest. The day I finished writing the book came as a big surprise to me. I wasn't working from an outline, I was just sort of barreling happily forward and seeing where I ended up. And then that last entry started to go where it was going, and it felt real to me. It felt like what that person would say and feel, and where he'd go right before signing his name. I think it'd be pretty dishonest to put a "but everybody's just great" ending on a story about how careless adults fuck up somebody's adolescence.

Given that you worked in a hospital for teenagers for a couple years, would I be wrong to project a certain level of self-critique in the depiction of the therapist, Gary, as clueless and uncaring? Do you think Roger's anger is justified?

"Don't Break the Oath" would be some kick-ass last words.

Well, the thing is, Gary's a pretty invisible character. At one point, I started to write his responses to Roger as part of the book, and then I realized that Roger isn't really in a place where he's going to even be hearing Gary, so what would be the point of that? We only see Gary through a pretty heavily filtered lens. Why does he send Roger to State? Because Roger broke into the nurses' station. Sending him to a more restrictive level of care is sort of the only thing he can do at that point. What's he supposed to do: end up with a sixteen-year-old dead body on his hands, explaining to the parents, "Well, I would have sent him to a more protective environment, but that would have really pissed him off"?

Gary as a character is largely a product of Roger's imagination — Roger is a little too self-absorbed to tell us what Gary 's actually like, or to find out. At the same time, though, yes, absolutely, I think the system fails kids like Roger, and ruins their lives — when you're working for that system, you try to do such good as you can, but the amount of good you're going to be able to do is limited by how poor the system itself is, and that trade-off gets pretty painful to make. You can only spend so long dreaming of reform before you get pretty jaded.

You were a music-obsessed kid yourself, but you were more of a prog-head than a metalhead. When did you get into metal?
When I was fifteen or sixteen, I think. I got a couple of Iron Maiden albums. There was a level of ironic interest at first, but Number of the Beast will take your ironic distance and incinerate it. That shit was crucial.

What's your favorite non-Sabbath metal album? And while I'm geeking out, do you think the Dio years count as "real" Sabbath?
Sure, Dio counts as real Sabbath. So does Gillan, I think. Really, the whole story of Iommi carrying the brand name forward even through stuff like Seventh Star is just a great story. It's like "Black Sabbath" is something so monolithic and iconic that it's bigger than any of its members or than all of them put together. Favorite metal album, I don't know. I don't really do favorite albums, but Don't Break the Oath and The Erosion of Sanity and Transilvanian Hunger are the first three I think of when I hear the question. If I was in front of a firing squad and the only way out were to answer the question, it's Don't Break the Oath for sure, but this is partly because if dudes were bent on shooting me anyway, "Don't Break the Oath" would be some kick-ass last words.

What's next for John Darnielle? Are you considering another novel? Cause this one was awesome.
Thanks, man! Yeah, I'm actually working on another one. I've been kind of conflicted about it, because its protagonist is also a kid who's into metal. When I was starting it, I thought, "Do you really want to set yourself up like this?" But then I thought, actually, part of the problem with the way society treats people like the Master of Reality narrator is in thinking of all kids who're into metal as if they were all the same — in reducing individuals to types, which they're not. So I thought it'd be better, if trickier, to start out with a story that looks similar, but whose differences will become pretty obvious after a chapter or two. So that's what I'm working on right now. It's a much uglier and harder story I'm telling though. It is keeping me up at night, which is fun, if irritating to my wife.  

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To order Black Sabbath's Master of Reality: 33 1/3, click here.

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