Black metal is a form of metal originating in Norway in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It de-emphasized the knotted, complex riffing of the then-popular death metal bands in favour of a more simplified type of movement. The early stuff – De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, In The Nightside Eclipse, Under A Funeral Moon, Carpathian Wolves, etc. – built monuments to the bitter Scandinavian winter out of tremolo-soaked guitar, relentless blastbeats, ultra lo-fi production, and vocals that alternated between the screech of a demon and the howl of the wind over a churning field of snow. There is a disturbing documentary called Until The Light Takes Us that chronicles those early days – the madness, the jealousy, the flirtation with fascism, and the vicious streak of pagan-nationalist church burning. For further information, see it.
The aesthetic trappings around the scene were cheesy-Satanist at best and outright Nazi at worst; it failed to catch on much in America beyond finding a home in certain curious circles. Half a decade later, though, Americans began to create their own mutation on Norwegian black metal. Bands like Wolves In The Throne Room, Weakling, and Nachtmystium absorbed the lessons inherent in the sound and left out the immature, arson-obsessed, murdery parts (and, largely, the corpsepaint). Wolves In The Throne Room, as an example, replaced the violent, viking-inspired paganism of the Norwegian bands with a more “back-to-nature”, Cascadian-inspired paganism.
Deafheaven isn’t a black metal band, though.
Per se. Deafheaven isn’t a black metal band per se. Back in the earlier part of this decade, there were a couple of bands that adopted the aesthetics of black metal and amalgamated them into a larger musical philosophy: Liturgy and Deafheaven. Both bands amalgamated the blastbeats, simplified guitar lines, and howling vocals of black metal, but they took them in different directions. Liturgy frontman Hunter Hunt-Hendrix spun out a complicated philosophy he called “Transcendental Black Metal” and used the aesthetic as support for his academic work. Deafheaven skipped out on the philosophy and blended the black metal influences with the widescreen gaze of post-rock to discuss class issues, loneliness, and longing. Both were heaped with critical praise, and both were disparaged by black metal purists who derided the bands as not being “true kvlt” enough (many with their tongues in their cheeks, but a large number without). What both did, however, was not “rip off” black metal for gain, but recognized the vanishing point between black metal and shoegaze. Both styles blur the proceedings to the point where the entire song seems to shift for melodic movement, rather than any particular instrument. Everything blends into one defining line, and that line becomes the entire artistic moment.
Both bands have released the all-important followup album in 2015. Liturgy’s The Ark Work came first, and it arrived in a fury of confused reception and crumbled expectations. The Ark Work featured MIDI preset keyboards, hip hop influences, and a general lack of care for what people loved about Aesthetica, their breakthrough album. Reviews were extremely mixed; while I normally am a champion of noisy, difficult albums, The Ark Work felt more like Hunt-Hendrix intentionally trolling his audience rather than forging out a bold artistic statement.
New Bermuda, however, succeeds massively where The Ark Work failed. The album builds upon Sunbather and adds more shade and colour to the mix. On top of the existing mixture of black metal, shoegaze, and post-rock, they add in piano passages, guitar breakdowns straight out of the playbook of The World Is A Beautiful Place And I No Longer Want To Die, Slayer-esque death chugging, and in a couple of places guitar solos that sound as though they could have been lifted whole and breathing out of latter day Metallica albums. It expands out of where they came from to embrace a fuller noise-metal experience; rather than stick to their niche, Deafheaven goes more cinematic in the pursuit of their muse.
Much like Sunbather, New Bermuda examines some fairly heavy ideas that manage to be relatable for the great broad middle of the listening audience. The opening track “Brought To The Water” deals with growing up out of your early 20s and falling into the hypnotizing routines of adulthood. “Where has my passion gone,” he asks, “Has it been carried off by some / Lonely driver in a line of fluorescent light?” Shortly after he acknowledges that “A multiverse of fuchsia / and violet surrenders to blackness now / My world closes it’s eyes to / sex and laughter.” “Luna” looks at the suburban L.A. wonderland imagined in Sunbather‘s “Dream House” and examines how it turned from dream to nightmare; “I’ve boarded myself inside, I’ve refused to exit / There is no ocean for me / there is no glamour / Only the mirage of water ascending from the asphalt / I gaze at it from the oven of my home.” “Baby Blue” and “Come Back” seem to discuss the nature of notoriety and the endless hard cycle of critical acclaim and popular cynicism and it is here that the real intent of the album becomes clear. George Clarke – the main songwriter for Deafheaven – has realized that being in a popular band is a lot like being stuck in the depressing adult cycle of work; the dreams he sought for himself turned out to be even more trapping than the relative poverty he’s left behind. There is no end in sight for this (“I imagined the overcome and fell to my knees / Before the endless truth of instability and futility” he howls on “Come Back”) and so, on the final track, “Gifts For The Earth”, he throws himself into the “waves of the icy seas” which stand in direct cooling contrast to the shimmering mirages and oppressive ovens he writes of back on “Luna”. It’s at once startling, depressing, freeing, and absolutely understandable.
“This isn’t black metal!” the purists will cry, gnashing their teeth and wailing, and that’s sort of the point. Deafheaven has moved themselves completely beyond that pigeonhole trap of being a “black metal band” and has embraced all of the styles that blur and bludgeon and tug movement gracefully through the entire instrumental wall. It isn’t black metal, it isn’t shoegaze, it isn’t post-rock or post-metal. It’s Deafheaven, circa 2015, and it’s a triumph of both heavy music and noise.
Repentless is a Slayer album. People who know the band know what I’m talking about. It’s a lot like when Bad Religion put out New Maps Of Hell. You knew exactly what you’d be getting going into it and you weren’t disappointed. With Repentless that means that particular Slayer death metal sound: machine gun drums, rapid-fire riffs, and Tom Araya’s hateful bark punctuating everything. The difference is that there’s no Jeff Hanneman, who died in 2013 of cirhossis of the liver. There’s also no Dave Lombardo, who was fired three months before Hanneman’s death, reputedly as the result of a disagreement with the band’s pay structure. Hannemen was one of the band’s principle songwriters, and Lombardo gave the band their signature drum sound. If there is any justice in this world, Repentless will be Slayer’s last album, and that’s okay.
Araya and guitarist Kerry King (and, I guess, the bassist) make a good stab at a classic Slayer album, and for the most part they hit the right notes. Gary Holt plays well on the drums but can’t match Lombardo’s infernally inspired pummeling. King tries to substitute more modern squeal-noise for Hanneman’s nimble-fingered solos, but it was the breaking free of those solos that made classic Slayer songs such headbanging masterpieces. This is Slayer, limping and bleeding but still possessed of a hideous vitality, a rotting half-life still capable of terrorizing but not for much longer.
Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats are as The Sword were – a Sabbath-worshipping doom metal band with a serious case of the groove. Where The Sword have moved on to allowing other Seventies hard rock icons into their sound, Uncle Acid have chosen to stay the course. If you caught Mind Control two years ago, The Night Creeper will seem instantly familiar, and this can be good or bad depending on your thoughts on recycled Sabbath riffs and rotted psychedelic atmosphere. Even if you’re getting tired of bands reappropriating classic rock, however, there’s a lot to like about The Night Creeper. This is serious head-nodder music; the band can mine a groove like very few other bands, and they can manipulate the flow like masters. When “Inside” starts bouncing after the hazy dream-inducement of the title track, you’ll start jumping up and down without even realizing it. It’s “Slow Death”, though, that brings the creepy horror film vibe to it’s peak, with it’s atmosphere of dread fueled by a musical space that is not often found in Uncle Acid songs.
What it comes down to is this: if you haven’t soured on hard rock riffs after all of these years, then The Night Creeper is right up your alley. Otherwise, take a pass.
Once upon a time there was an ancient civilization that spanned the earth. For millenia there was peace and prosperity, but then a schism occurred. This schism lead to hatred, hatred lead to war, and with the advanced technology of this global empire, war lead to total annihilation. Out of the twisted, radioactive scars of this apocalypse emerged a new form of life: Lemmy Kilmister, Scourge of God, Avenger of All That Is Metal.
Seriously, though, Motorhead has been a force in metal forever. The tour only stops long enough to record a new album and then it’s back on the road, bringing their signature barrel-roll of sound to every part of the world that will let them in. Like AC/DC, Lemmy and Co. haven’t changed up their sound much in the 38 years since their debut. Unlike AC/DC, Motorhead haven’t gotten depressingly cheesy with their later albums. If anything, they’ve become more bombastic, more visceral – just check out the intro to “Victory Or Die” and tell me you don’t want to go around busting your head through the wall and swilling whiskey. Sorry! It’s vodka now, “for health reasons“. As usual, there are a couple of songs that break up the cavalry charge of rock and roll: “Fire Storm Hotel” goes more for a groovier type of rock, something like one of their Eighties anthems (“Killed By Death”, maybe?), while “Till The End” adopts a more dirge-like tone that serves as the only moment that portrays the idea that Lemmy might actually be getting old. The best part of the album, however, (aside from that opening), might just be the ending track, a drum-heavy, cut-you-up cover of “Sympathy For The Devil” that is so much better than the Guns ‘n’ Roses cover that they’re not even on the same planet.
It’s impressive that this band is still going all in nearly forty years after their inception. Lemmy needs a cane to walk around and has been told that he needs to lay off the sugary stuff, but he’s still on the Endless Tour, melting faces from one end of the globe to the other. Their studio work in 2015 is nearly indistinguishable from their work in any other decade, in a good way. Lemmy’s going to go ’til death, and let’s hoist a glass to toast that this may be a long, long way off.
Legacies are tricky things for bands to maintain. Styles change, viewpoints go in and out of fashion, and there are bands (like The Who) that seem to swing on a continuous pendulum between being cool and being what my mother once called “fogey rock”. Some groups, like the Stones or the Boss, avoid having to keep up with their legacies simply by never stopping the active musical phase of their career. Some groups, however, cast such a wide net of influence that their presence can be felt in a distributed network of power, divided out over a legion of bands who reinforce and reproduce their sound. If Foucault had ever written about rock ‘n’ roll bands, he would have been fascinated with the legacy of Black Sabbath.
There are whole genres of music dedicated to the output of the Birmingham hard rock pioneers. “Doom Metal” is just another way of saying “we play the slower Sabbath songs with deeper distortion on the guitars.” “Stoner Rock” is just another way of saying “we play the faster Sabbath songs and you can pry our tube amplifiers away from our cold dead hands.” This is not to say that bands within those genres can transcend their influences and become something greater; Sleep began as a band of blatant Sabbath worshippers and ended up as #2 in the stoner/doom pantheon. Queens Of The Stone Age began with fusing their love of Sabbath riffs with clipped, breezy desert phrasing and ended up being every rockist’s go-to band of choice.
Then there’s The Sword. The Texas band has been blazing a trail of their own for several years now, getting on to most people’s radars with their well-regarded third album Warp Riders and then keeping the Sabbath Dream alive by peaking on the Billboard 200 at #17 with 2012’s Apocryphon. This sort of success tends to bring a band like The Sword to a crossroads: you can either continue to double-down on the Tony Iommi riffs or you can try to diversify. There are problems with both – contempt through familiarity vs. alienating your fanbase for potentially little growth – and that’s probably why the band uses High Country to walk a line between doing both. The album is largely Sabbath-inspired hard rock riffs, but there are moments here and there where different moments of the 1970s surface. It boogies in places. There are flourishes of psychedelic rock. Rather than being a rote re-do of the sludge-metal heroics of Warp Riders, High Country dials up some Hawkwind and Blue Oyster Cult and proceeds to party. It’s a sunnier and more open album than their previous efforts, and while it’s still indebted to the ghosts of the Seventies, it’s a path for progress that doesn’t require completely reinventing the band from the ground up. Thus, while it doesn’t quite achieve the heights of the past, it’s also much better than it could – should – have been. It sets the band up well to transcend the doomy Sabbath influence and forge something more lasting toward the stoner/doom canon – something like Sleep, or QOTSA, or even something like fellow Texans …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead: a mix of discrete influences that becomes something new.
Abyss is, at first blush, loud and crushingly heavy. This is, of course, not new territory for Chelsea Wolfe; the L.A. singer-songwriter has claimed black metal, doom, drone, and dark ambient music as her influence since the very beginning. Compared to her last album, 2013’s Pain Is Beauty, however, it’s practically a doom metal album in its own right. A good deal of this is the presence of guitarist Mike Sullivan, whose post-metal group Russian Circles sets the standard for crushingly heavy guitar work. The very first moments of “Carrion Flowers” make for the most oppressive sounds Chelsea Wolfe has ever engaged in, and the way her dusky voice cuts through the thickness is a moment of sheer frisson. The album cover sets the tone perfectly: the singer falling into deep water, sinking beyond breath, light, and life.
Unlike many of her influences, however, she manages to expertly balance oppressive heaviness with passages of lighter (though no less eerie) folk work; “Iron Moon” is the standard-bearer for this, shifting from the pound of sledgehammer guitars to fingerpicked strings and vocals with ease and a deftness of which a thousand grunge bands from two decades prior could only dream. “Maw” and “Crazy Love” focus more on the quieter parts, outlining a masterful interplay between acoustic instrumentation and the singer’s emotive voice. She even manages, on “Grey Days”, to incorporate programmed drums without having it sound out-of-place, or like bad Evanescence. It’s gothic-tinged rock done correctly, without angst or pandering to the over-makeup’d karaoke set.
Abyss takes Chelsea Wolfe’s music to a new, heavier level that plays up her influences while still keeping the proceedings firmly in her own camp. At times it feels as though the music is creeping out of your speakers to surround you, and smother you in darkness. Rather than go over-the-top in this, like many of her influences, she keeps her music agile, dynamic, and always interesting.
Metallica is the starter pack of metal. Every 14 year old kid in the free world with darkcore inclinations and a penchant for marijuana gets introduced to Metallica, by their friends, their older siblings, their parents, and in some early-starting families, possibly even their grandparents. They’re sufficiently edgy without actually possessing any edge, and they’re about as subtle as a hammer in the face (even in their quieter moments), so they’re perfect for raging balls of horomones. All their friends will love them, too, so they’ll be a common link in that outcast group of proto-stoners gathering around the smoking pit outside your local high school. One of those kids will be disdainful and claim that “real metal” lies in the death and black underground. While that kid is right, they’re also kind of annoying.
When they got together, though, way way back in 1981, Kiss and Deep Purple were about as heavy as widely accepted mainstream rock got. Sure, you had your Black Sabbaths and your Judas Priests as well, but they weren’t really “mainstream”, in the way you think of them now. Hell, even punk rock was a strange and scary type of music back then, the sort of thing social outcasts, junkies, and psychos in back alleys and dank underground clubs listened to. Nowadays every frat kid slaps on his Vans and goes out to Warped Tour, but back then (to paraphrase Social Distortion) if you listened to punk rock you were likely to get your ass beaten by frat kids. Metal had a similar type of distinction. If you listened to bands like Venom, or Saxon, or Metallica’s favoured Diamond Head, you were a greasy stoner lurking in shop class, ready to die in a drunken car accident or to become a petty criminal. The long, unwashed hair and penchant for leather likely did not help in this regard.
So, in that fabled year, James Hetfield, son of Christian Scientists, answered an ad in The Recycler for a guitarist who could jam on some New Wave of British Heavy Metal – specifically Tygers of Pan Tang, Diamond Head, and Iron Maiden. The man who placed the ad was Lars Ulrich, the Danish son of a pro tennis player and godson of jazz legend Dexter Gordon. Ulrich had first been introduced to the power of rock and roll at the age of 9, when his father had used one of his five free passes to take his son to see Deep Purple in Copenhagen. By the time he came to America, at the age of 17, he’d already been playing drums for five years. Somehow, despite this early start, he’s never quite figured out how to play them well. Ha, I kid. Sort of. Hetfield and Ulrich began jamming and eventually reached out to find a lead guitarist. When I say “eventually”, what I really mean is “because Lars asked the founder of Metal Blade Records if he could record a song for their upcoming Metal Massacre comp without actually having a band first”. The guitarist they found was Dave Mustaine which, as anyone familiar with Mustaine knows, was a colossal mistake. They also needed a name, of course, so Lars stole one. Literally. A friend of his was starting a metal zine and had two names picked out: MetalMania and Metallica. Lars told his friend that Metallica was a terrible name in order to turn around and nick it for his band. Intellectual property theft is okay as long as you’re the one doing the theiving, right Lars?
Still, they recorded a song (“Hit The Lights”) and found a regular bassist in Ron McGovney. They recorded a demo called Power Metal, which of course nowadays is the term for cheesy heavy metal about dragons but back then probably sounded pretty cool. After cutting the demo they stumbled across a righteous dude by the name of Cliff Burton, who was playing bass in a local band. Out went McGovney, in went Burton, and they would record a couple of further demos, including the famous tape-cassette circuit favourite, No Life ‘Til Leather. Right Lars, trading music for free is only cool if you’re benefiting from it. Finally a concert promoter by the name of Johny Zazula would sign them to his nascent Megaforce Records and the band would move to record their debut.
KILL ‘EM ALL (1983)
★★★★
Look at the back of this album. Look at it. These guys are basically kids. The acne hasn’t even left their faces yet. They’re so amped up on their own youth and it comes across in the recording. This is mile-a-minute heavy metal that would, a year later, be termed “thrash metal” by Kerrang!. Hetfield’s voice hasn’t really come into it’s own yet, more of a strangled yelp than the Danzig-esque sing-shout he was going for, but I’ll be damned if there isn’t still a huge amount of power in it. If you’re looking at the back of it, you’ll also notice that Kirk Hammett is there, and not Dave Mustaine. The reason for this is that, while the band was in Rochester, NY recording the album (which was to be called Metal Up Your Ass, charmingly enough) Mustaine’s alcohol and drug addictions, as well as his penchant for being a complete belligerent asshole, became too much for the band to bear. Now, think about this for a second. This is a band that has been nicknamed “Alcoholica” and is legendary for the amount of booze they’ve ingested over the years. For a band of complete alcoholics to kick out Mustaine for being too drunk should tell you a little something about Dave Mustaine. Mustaine would go on to cry endlessly about this ‘betrayal’ for the rest of his career, despite his finding fame and fortune with his own band, Megadeth. Hammett terk his jerb, stole all his guitar work, and on and on. The first part of most of the solos are Mustaine’s work, of course, but Hammett trained under guitar wunderkind Joe Satriani and proved himself more than capable of filling the role.
As for the album itself, it and Slayer’s Show No Mercy are the birthplace of thrash metal. Technically precise riffs, blazing guitar solos, relentless energy. The band veered away from their contemporaries, however, by embracing a more punk rock-like attitude towards the lyrics at the same time as they nicked the speed and attitude from it. Check out something like “Hit The Lights”, “Jump In The Fire”, and “Seek and Destroy”, and compare it to what Slayer or Iron Maiden (or, Christ, Mercyful Fate) were singing about at the time. The band appealed to stoner kids who weren’t D&D nerds too, which gave them an important edge over their mystical, fantasy-obsessed brethern. Still, there is something exhausting about the album; that relentless energy flags a bit when you’re no longer cruising on horomones and there’s little to break up the album dynamically, aside from a moody Cliff Burton bass solo partway through. Plus, those drums. I’m pretty sure you could replace Lars Ulrich with a well-programmed drum machine and no one would tell the difference. Still, it did it’s job, and it provided a solid foundation for the quantum leap of their second album.
RIDE THE LIGHTNING (1984)
★★★★★
If the rating didn’t clue you in, here’s the thing: I LOVE this album. Unequivocally. As far as thrash metal goes, it’s the tops, with Reign In Blood coming in a close second (and this album’s follow-up coming in third, natch). This was a massive reinvention of what Metallica could accomplish, an admission that they were the best thing to ever exist in heavy metal. Classical flourishes, harmonized leads, melodies, actual choruses, and, in “Fade To Black”, their first and best power ballad. Themes. There are themes here beyond Kill ‘Em All‘s dicta of “Bang The Head That Doesn’t Bang”. Most of the songs here deal with events spiralling out of one’s control, whether through nuclear war (the thrash epic “Fight Fire With Fire”), capital punishment for a crime you didn’t commit (“Ride The Lightning”), the horror of modern war (“For Whom The Bell Tolls”), suicide (“Fade To Black”), being “Trapped Under Ice”, “Escape”ing…I mean, you get the idea. “Fight Fire With Fire”, “For Whom The Bell Tolls”, and “Creeping Death” are the metal classics; “Fade To Black” starts off as a minor key ballad and gets blown wide open by Kirk Hammett’s masterful electric soloing; closing number “The Call of Ktulu” is a blown-out full-blown instrumental epic that signalled that this was a band that could conquer the world. Hell, even Ulrich’s drumming is passable, although the sheer fury with which Hetfield carries the rhythm work probably helps in that regard. Hetfield once said of this album that “You have 18 years to write your first album – and six months to write your second”. They spent those six months well.
MASTER OF PUPPETS (1986)
★★★★★
Master of Puppets is Metallica’s last truly great album. Look at the release date and think about that for a second. Three years into their career, 28 to go. Oh boy.
This is the consensus pick for best Metallica album, aside from the drunken yahoos who pick the Black Album. The reason is that this is the apothesis of their abilities. They would get more intricate on their next album, but there are of course some…problems…with that album. Master of Puppets is eight tracks of forward-thinking headbanging thrash metal, with a majestic sense of dynamics. The theme here is power and control: Drug addiction, madness, ordinary soldiers at war, evangelical religion. “Battery” is the greatest thrash metal song of all time that isn’t “Angel of Death”. “Master of Puppets” is eight minutes of instantly recognizable fist-in-the-air metal. “The Thing That Should Not Be” and “Welcome Home” are a welcome dynamic shift, adding a creepy, eerie vibe to the proceedings that makes the atmoshpere. “Disposable Heroes”, “Leper Messiah”, and “Damage, Inc” are lethal slabs of explosive guitar work. “Orion” is a sad note on the album, as it features some sublime work from Cliff Burton. While on tour for Master of Puppets in 1986 (with Ozzy Osbourne) the band would get into a bus accident in Sweden and Burton would die. You will notice that they didn’t make a truly great album after Burton’s death. I don’t think that this is a coincidence. Burton was a master, a great bassist with eclectic taste in music that drove the innovative part of the band’s career. After he left, that innovative soul left them, and they slowly ossified into the walking cliche they are today. He left behind a legacy of great music, and his presence would be sorely missed over the following 28 years.
…AND JUSTICE FOR ALL (1988)
★★★★
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh where’s the bass? I’ve often wondered if this wasn’t the band’s ultimate gesture of disresepct for their new bassist, but longtime producer Fleming Rasmussen attributed it to his not being present during the mixing process. Still, the album sounds weird. The tone is dry, sterile, with clicks for drums, thin guitars, and no bass. Newsted recorded his bass separately from the band and it was mixed into the same frequency with Hetfield’s guitar. Still, for all of that, this is the album that proves that Metallica can play this shit sideways. These are lengthy, intricate songs that, if they were produced properly, would be the absolute pinnacle of thrash metal. This is progressive thrash, the kind of thing that had both punk and metal bands sitting up and taking notes on. It was also the mainstream world’s first real look at the band; perennial crowd favourite “One” had a music video made for it, and it got some serious play on MTV courtesy of Headbanger’s Ball. In terms of themes, it was heavily political, painting a picture of an America where justice had been sold to the highest bidder, warmongers ruled over all, and the government was in collusion with moneyed intersts. Twenty years later, in an interview with German-language television network 3SAT, Hetfield would try to claim that the band was apolitical because “politics and music, at least for us, don’t mix”. Ha, good one James.
This album is also totally to blame for the way I wrote songs when I was 14-15. Everything had to be modular, with airtight riffs, and there had to be at least two guitar solos in the course of every song.
METALLICA (1991)
★★★
This album is the 800 pound gorilla of the hard rock world. It’s sold 30,000,000 copies worldwide, including the super-fancy Diamond level of sales from the RIAA in the U.S. It’s a staple of every rocker, from acne-scarred thirteen-year-olds to grey-hairs convinced that they still rock hard. Ask any long-haired, vacant eyed adolescent male about their favourite albums and this will be listed. You’ll hear a certain inflection when they talk about it as well: “The BLACK album”, as though the cover sums up all the light-eating qualities they ascribe to the album. It’s become a fetish amongst a certain demographic, a beacon for a time that was less complicated and more rock ‘n’ roll.
Unpopular opinion time: it’s also shockingly mediocre.
The band pushed the reset button after …And Justice For All, trading in the intricate, sprawling progressive thrash they’d perfected for much slower tempos and much more introspective lyrics. That slower BPM is the biggest problem with the album – it thuds and plods in more places than is strictly comfortable, and while some of the riffs stand the test of time too many others seem content to crawl along and get by on the weight of Bob Rock’s production. It comes off like the band made a conscious decision to change their sound up but flubbed the delivery because they weren’t really sure how to play slowly and menacingly. “Enter Sandman” has a classic riff, but “Sad But True” ages badly, marred perhaps too much by Kid Rock’s sampling years afterwards. “Holier Than Thou”, “The God That Failed”, and “My Friend of Misery” are clunkers unless you are wrapped in a cloud of either heavy nostalgia or adolescent hormones. “Don’t Tread On Me” brays senselessly, echoing the Gadsen flag’s slogan without any sort of real bite and unwittingly becoming an anthem for the American Tea Party’s reactionary politics twenty years later. “The Unforgiven” still holds up well – that spaghetti-western guitar line still gives me chills to this day – but “Nothing Else Matters” has become somehow even more boring nearly a quarter-century later. It’s the sort of song that screams class to people who think tuxedo t-shirts are the height of formal wear, a pseudo-profound ballad that untold numbers of teenage couples have had their first dance (vertical or horizontal) to since it was first released. I have heard any number of Metallica defeners get belligerent about how the song is this complicated icon of how worshipful Kirk Hammett is as a guitarist, despite the fact that its oh-so-stately opening measure could be finger-picked by a monkey with a lobotomy, and the fact that he still can’t play his way out of a pentatonic scale.
Still, there are classic hard rock songs here: “Enter Sandman”, “The Unforgiven”, “Wherever I May Roam”, “Through The Never”, and “Of Wolf and Man” all stand up. This counts for five songs out of the twelve on display, of course, but it’s better than a lot of their hard rock contemporaries could manage. Does that fact alone mean it deserves its legendary status? God, no. Forcing themselves to slow down and play something besides progressive thrash was an interesting decision, but they fumbled it. Stacked against the rise of college alt-rock and the decaying forces of Sunset Strip glam-metal, it was a beacon of heavy music that caught a fire amongst disaffected adolescents. This fact – that the album was in the right place at the right time – tends to cover up the more glaring bits of cringe that runs roughshod through the album. Put simply: the album is truly great only through consideration of nostalgia.
LOAD (1996)
★★★☆
“Oh my god Trevor, did you really just rate Load better than the Black Album? They went grunge! They cut their hair! They betrayed their trve kvlt rvvts! RHUBARB! RHUBARB!”
To be fair, a change had to be made. The band had reached the apex of their take on New Wave of British Heavy Metal by 1988 and there was simply nothing left to be done without devolving into self-parody. With Bob Rock at the helm and a newfound focus on mid-tempo traditional biker metal (a la Judas Priest) Metallica found worldwide success despite all of the leaden problems I outlined above. After touring the shit out of their Black Album they finally released a follow-up five years later and took a lot of heat for it. The problem, of course, was that they had found mainstream success in 1991, before Nirvana, with a set of wooden, stodgy heavy metal numbers that were honestly pretty awkward to bang your head to. By the time Load came out in 1996 grunge was over; Kurt Cobain had been dead for two years and the specter of Creed was not far off. Metallica tempered their trad-metal with a bit of swing – southern rock and the bluesier side of Black Sabbath – but so had everyone else. To the clueless ninth-grader and his old-school rockin’ uncle of 1996, it sounded at first blush as if the band had forsaken true metal for a kick at the Stone Temple Pilots/Pearl Jam can. The fact that they had cut their trademark long metal locks in the interim did not help matters. I had long hair in the ninth and tenth grade. When I finally cut it short in the eleventh grade, one of my best friends accused me of “going Metallica” – which is how deep the betrayal went in the high school stoner subculture.
The facts, though, tell a different story. Load was an album that followed directly from the Black Album, although a distance of eighteen years is helpful in realizing this. The songs are just as heavy as anything off of the Black Album, but they’re played mercifully looser, with more swing and a bigger spark of life. A song like “Struggle Within” or “Holier Than Thou” is wooden and uncomfortable; a song like “Ain’t My Bitch” or “King Nothing” coils and strikes with grace. The band takes chances, with lengthy side closers “Bleeding Me” and “The Outlaw Torn” eating up minutes and combining a bluesier approach to guitar playing with crushing choruses that evoke actual emotional intensity. This intensity is helped along by Hetfield’s focus on introspection when it comes to his lyrics; he’s still nowhere close to being the world’s greatest poet but the lack of cheese that infested the Black Album is a welcome change. Even the token ballad is miles beyond what had been offered five years previous; while “Mama Said” is not in the same league as, say, “Fade To Black”, it beats out “Nothing Else Matters” by virtue of that same emotional connection that Hetfield achieves throughout Load. It also serves as a great reminder of country music’s place in the history of hard rock. The main problem with the album is the lengthy running time; at nearly 80 minutes (they filled the capacity of a compact disc) it gets a bit exhausting, although the next year would show why cutting it back would have been impossible.
Load makes one thing clear: there are really two Metallicas. One started off with a young, brash, awkward album that told everyone within earshot that this was a thrash metal band. The other started off with an older, more conservative awkward album that proclaimed the band to be the epitome of traditional heavy metal. The second Metallica would be much more scattershot.
RELOAD (1997)
★★☆
As the name implies, Reload is made up of the leftovers of the Load sessions. The band had recorded so much material that it was able to make two very lengthy albums out of it. That Reload is not quite up to the same standards as Load is perhaps inevitable, since it’s populated by the B-list side of the sessions, and a lot of the songs could easily have been left comfortably in the vault. “Devil’s Dance”, “Better Than You”, and “Slither” crawl on for far longer than they need to. The cringe factor returns to the lyrics, notably on tracks like “Bad Seed”, “Carpe Diem Baby”, and “Fuel”. At the same time, “Fuel” features a great guitar solo, a future-ready melody that sounds like it was lifted whole out of a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk video game. “The Memory Remains” is a stellar southern rock gothic, featuring a spine-tingling vocal melody from Marianne Faithfull. “The Unforgiven II” is largely unnecessary but at the same time it’s a testament to the power of big gestures and bigger guitars. “Low Man’s Lyric” employs a hurdy-gurdy to craft the band’s most eclectic ballad to date, and the closer “Fixxxer” is an epic crunch-fest that rivals Load‘s “The Outlaw Torn”. Besides those tracks, however, the band rehashes the southern rock groove that lay at the heart of Load, only with less success and more repetition.
GARAGE, INC (1998)
★★★★☆
Metallica has always had a sweet spot for covers. Their 1984 “Creeping Death” single featured a Diamond Head cover that would become part of their regular repertoire, and 1987 would see them release the fabled $5.98 EP, whose five covers are reprised on this compilation. Following the Load/Reload releases, the band retreated to the garage to record a full album of covers, and to compile the covers they’d released for various singles. The result is really the highlight of the post-1988 era, an album where the band lets go and plays with abandon. Garage, Inc. introduced a generation of stodgy adolescent fans to bands that they might otherwise never have been exposed to: it’s where I found out about Discharge, Nick Cave, the heavier side of Blue Oyster Cult, and where I gained an appreciation for early Mercyful Fate. Their version of the classic Skynyrd ballad “Tuesday’s Gone” gets a little long-winded, but their take on Bob Seger’s road-weary “Turn The Page” is spot-on. The second side compiles the “Creeping Death” single, the $5.98 EP, the “Harvester of Sorrow” single (where we all learned to appreciate Budgie), the b-sides to “Enter Sandman” and “The Unforgiven”, and a quartet of hard-hitting Motorhead tracks that close out the album in a big way. It’s a good reminder that the band were fans before they were world-spanning rock stars, and it helps to put their career into perspective.
S&M (1999)
★★★★
Jason Newsted’s final album with the band was a live effort, a pairing of Metallica and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Metal has always had a fascination with orchestral suites and classical composers – witness the entirety of symphonic black metal – and there has always been a parallel tendency to think in terms of large pieces. With Metallica in particular, Cliff Burton had been a big fan of classical composition, including Bach, and the album’s conception was in a way an homage to his memory. The actual execution is a bit hit and miss; the classic thrash metal songs pair well with a symphonic accompaniment, especially set opener “The Call of Ktulu” and the ever-popular “For Whom The Bell Tolls”. Some of the tracks fall a bit flat even with accompaniment: “Devil’s Dance” is still a clunker no matter how many strings you pile on, and “Hero Of The Day” seems strangely diminished. “Nothing Else Matters” comes off much better than the original, however, as the orchestral accompaniment adds in the meat that the original was missing. The album included two new tracks, neither of which are particularly essential. “No Leaf Clover” got some radio play after the album was released, and “- Human” was included in NHL 99, but of the two only the former is still played in concert. All in all S&M shows off the power of the band live, especially with the boost brought by the orchestra; as far as live albums go, you can do a lot worse.
ST. ANGER (2003)
★★★
St. Anger is a confusing record, largely because it’s trying to be a lot of different things at the same time. It’s the first album without Jason Newsted, who left in 2001 due to some personal issues and the band’s rigorous touring schedule. Around the same time, the original recording sessions for the album came to a screeching halt after James Hetfield entered rehab for addictions to alcohol and other substances. Even after Hetfield returned to the group, the band faced internal problems (the kind you get when your band consists of two assholes and a wishy-washy lead guitarist) and hired a personal coach to help them get over themselves. These group therapy sessions (as well as the album recording sessions) would be recorded and later form the basis for the metal therapy documentary Some Kind Of Monster. The film is really only worthwhile for one scene, the one where Dave Mustaine cries about being kicked out of Metallica way way back in the 1980s. The album itself is an attempt to play catch-up with the metal world, which had moved on past heavy groove-rock by the time the 21st Century was underway. It’s notable that the tempos on St. Anger are much faster than anything they’d recorded since …And Justice For All, although the riffs are nowhere near as complex as that watershed point. Instead, the band sort of speed-strums through the fast parts while Lars wails on the drums in a manner which can be best summed up as a clatter. Literally: he forgot to tune a snare in the recording at one point, discovered that he liked it, and decided to record all of the drums as though he were playing a gigantic metalworks, or a bunch of copper pipes. I made jokes back in 2003 that he’d taken inspiration from Stomp. The problem with all this is that there’s no real definition to the speedier parts of the songs – it’s all fierce attitude without craft, and it’s only the dynamic downshifts that really save the songs from being second-tier thrash metal. There’s also a notable lack of guitar soloing, as though Bob Rock and Ulrich/Hetfield decided that guitar solos weren’t cool anymore because the kids weren’t playing them, and in my mind the songs tend to suffer somewhat from a lack of orgasmic release that the solos usually provided. It’s not anywhere near as bad as Brent DiCrescenzo made it out to be, though, and while it’s not the best album the band ever did I actually prefer it to most of the rest of the Bob Rock era. The fanbase, of course, thinks differently; people really dislike the album, which I find a little confusing because it’s not actively offensive for any particular reason. Some of it may be backlash for the band’s hypocritical stance on P2P sharing and the Napster debacle, but I think that a lot of it can be summed up by the fact that metal fans are fucking weird.
DEATH MAGNETIC (2008)
★★★★☆
It’s tempting to call Death Magnetic a comeback, because that’s really what it feels like. It’s a definite break with the era that came before, and it’s telling in the two people who aren’t present for the recording. Bob Rock, the producer who helmed them from the Black Album through to St. Anger, was replaced by Rick Rubin, who of course not only produced a slew of great hip hop albums (including some definite comebacks) but also kept Slayer on course for their career. Jason Newsted, who joined them before …And Justice For All and left just before the recording of St. Anger began, was finally, permanently replaced by Robert Trujillo. Rubin radically redid the band’s tone, scrapping the muddled, everything-in-the-middle production of St. Anger with a sharper, clearer style (albeit one that falls into the same ultra-compressed Loudness Wars problem as every other major label recording of the time). Trujillo’s presence seemed to spur the band to revist their musical direction as well. After spending nearly seventeen years following mid-tempo trad-metal that grew increasingly indistinguishable from heavy alt-rock, and capping it off with a stripped-down album of Slipknot-level riffs, Death Magnetic marks a return to the thrash metal stylings they last visited on …And Justice For All. The most notable signifier of this is the return of Kirk Hammett’s blazing guitar solos; the warp-speed fingering that rockets out of “That Was Just Your Life” is all the more mind-blowing for the complete silence that occurred on St. Anger.
My thoughts on the Bob Rock era are pretty clear, I think. To me it feels as though the band wandered through a wilderness from 1991-2003, chasing mainstream rock acceptability and arena rock crowds. Mid-way through the 21st Century, sober and at peace for the first time, it felt as though the band came full circle back to the music they made their name on in the first place. They were scarred, sure, but they’d learned something about shading, subtlety, and dynamics in those years as well that allowed them to take their burning thrash to the next level. A song like opening track “That Was Just Your Life” barrels along like they decided to cover Slayer, but “The Day That Never Comes” combines “Fade To Black”, “The Unforgiven”, and the ballad experiments they tried out on Load/Reload to great effect. It feels like a logical progression from 1988, and is a welcome addition to the thrash metal canon.
LULU (2011)
★★
Lou Reed and Metallica. What, exactly, were people expecting? Lou Reed didn’t give a fuck anymore by this point. He said in an interview for the album’s release that he’d chased away any fans he’d had with 1975’s Metal Machine Music, and that he was doing music mainly for fun by 2011. Lulu is a messy album, but it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. It’s more of a work of art than a piece of commercial music, and this sort of thing usually makes people angry, because most people don’t really get art, and those that do are not normally in Metallica’s target audience. So, there’s the thing. It’s a set of songs originally written for a play called Lulu, which amalgamated two German plays. This alone will make the typical acne-riddled Metallica fan’s eyes glaze over. It comes off as metal-backed poetry, kind of like…well, like Lou Reed collaborating with Metallica. The real problem is that most of the songs come off as two different songs layered on top of each other; the execution is clunky, and in the end I think that the outcome is alright, but Metallica was probably the wrong band for the project. Fun fact: the recording sessions were apparently fairly relaxing except for one moment where things got so intense that Reed challenged Lars Ulrich to a “street fight”. That’s the kind of stuff you would get into when you hung around Lou Reed enough. At the time of the album’s release, many said that it was the end of Metallica, a final joke that would kill off the band. People take this stuff way too seriously. Interestingly, critics like Robert Christgau opined after Reed’s death in 2013 that the album hadn’t gotten enough love; avant-garde mag The Wire gave it their #9 spot on their year-end best-of list. As divisive as anything you’re likely to find in modern mainstream music, Lulu shows the fault lines where music-as-art butts up against music-as-entertainment.
HARDWIRED…TO SELF-DESTRUCT (2016)
★★★★
Eight years after Death Magnetic and thirty years after Master Of Puppets, Metallica found themselves back on the road they had left twenty years prior – only this time they weren’t alone. When Death Magnetic came out the metal world was largely dominated by metalcore groups like Avenged Sevenfold and Five Finger Death Punch or melodic death bands that bordered on metalcore (Killswitch Engage, Lamb of God, In Flames). By 2016, though, thrash had made a comeback of sorts; bands like Municipal Waste, Power Trip, and Iron Reagan were making noise like it was 1982 all over again and in comparison it’s hard not to see Metallica as going grey. Sure, they brought the riffs to this double album. Hetfield brings the growl (and, unfortunately at times, also brings the grunge-esque howl we all hoped he’d left behind in the early 00s). Hammett, despite having lost 250 riffs he’d earmarked for the album when he’d lost his iPhone, brings off-the-cuff squalling guitar leads that complement rather than interrupt. Lars…does his thing. Still, the band seems to have slowed a step, which is expected and, honestly, would have seemed odd otherwise.
Despite the alleged slowdown, this is still very much the equal of Death Magnetic as the finest Metallica album since …And Justice For All. If it loses half a star over it’s predecessor, it’s likely because two albums of continuous heavy riffing starts to get overlong, and because Hammett’s presence is diminished from the previous album. Still, if you have the longing for those heady old riffs from days gone by, you can do a lot worse.
The alternative revolution, and later the internet, have made it difficult to remember those heady days before “Smells Like Teen Spirit” invaded the radio and the rock world shifted towards punk rock for ever more. When the Melvins formed, in 1983, REM was putting out its first album for a Gen X audience going off to college for the first time. The first wave of punk had petered out, a victim of its own excesses. The metal underground was spinning up both it’s thrash varieties (Metallica, Slayer, Venom, et al.) and the Sunset Strip pop variety (Motley Crue and friends). The nascent Pacific Northwest scene was just forming high school bands and banging out Black Sabbath riffs in grungy basements and garages. Amongst these, of course, were the Melvins, named for a particularly obnoxious supervisor at a Thriftway in their hometown of Montesano, WA. They shared their scene’s love of 70s hard rock but tempered it through the grinding, off-kilter noise-riffs that were featured on Black Flag’s My War album. As far as local scene bands went, they became minor-league famous by the time Ratt was making it big and attracted a following of stoners and miscreants, first and foremost their sometime-homeless roadie, Kurt Cobain (who claimed the Melvins as his favourite band – and why not, he ripped them off enough). Cobain, of course, would go on to slay the hair metal bands with a single album and usher in the post-Boomer era of rock ‘n’ roll, and the Melvins would get briefly caught up in that wave of mass major label signings. By 1997 magazines like Guitar World were referring to them as part of the unfortunate wave of “boomerang bands” that went from major labels to indie labels when they failed to sell millions of albums, but the band has had incredible staying power over the years, putting out a slew of albums that have been all over the map when it comes to ambient doom-drone, sludgecore metal, chunky classic rock, and a thick filter of weird humour. What follows is a guide to their studio albums, eschewing their live albums except for one key recording.
Six Songs (EP) (1986)
★★★☆
The earliest Melvins collection straddles the line between snarling punk rock and Black Sabbath worship. Matt Lukin plays bass here, predating his more ‘famous’ days in Mudhoney. Had anyone been paying attention (beside the Seattle underground anyway) they would have seen the way forward for hard rock: you didn’t need cheesy high-pitched vocals about Satan and you didn’t need pretty riffs. What hard rock really needed, circa 1986, was garage-recorded grime – something thick, sludgy…grungy. The term would become synonymous with the early 90s but what it really boils down to is what Osborne, Crover, and Lukin show off here: a gripping mixture of Master of Reality and My War.
Gluey Porch Treatments (1987)
★★★★
By 1987 most heavy bands were either Sunset Strip Crue-wannabes or engaging in speed wars in the thrash metal underground. The Melvins, on the other hand, were playing damaged Black Flag riffs at Black Sabbath speeds with gobs of off-kilter vocals courtesy of Buzz “King Buzzo” Osborne. Their debut album ups the ante on the previous year’s EP, sounding like it has a bigger recording budget solely through the typical cost-cutter of the Seattle underground: cranking the volume up until it won’t go further. Two of the songs were rewrites of tracks from Six Songs, and a third (“Leeech”) was a cast-off Green River song the band had fallen for. Part of the writing credit on that track would go to Mark Arm, who would nab bassist Matt Lukin shortly afterwards to form Mudhoney.
Ozma (1989)
★★★☆
After switching out Matt Lukin for Buzz’s girlfriend Lori Black (daughter of Shirley Temple) they decamped to San Fransisco and began tinkering with their sound. The heart of the band on Ozma is still that careening, chunky sludge, but there are moments of further experimentation here and there. “Oven” has a moment that is just drums and Osborne shouting, with some muted guitar serving only to emphasize Crover’s pounding. “Let God Be Your Gardener” starts off almost clean, in comparison to everything else they were up to, and “Revulsion/We Reach” features chimes and weird feedback. The Kiss cover (“Love Thing”) though an instrumental slice, shows an influence on the other side of Osborne’s voice: it’s a bit Ozzy Osbourne, to be sure, but it’s also a lot of Gene Simmons love filtered through the belligerent shout of Henry Rollins.
Bullhead (1991)
★★★★☆
As the alternative revolution began to break over the radio, the Melvins lengthened their songs and deepened the sludge. Whereas their first two albums would feature a large number of tracks, inflated by several under-2-minute sketches, Bullhead trims the track list down to eight songs with only two clocking in at less than three minutes. The opening track, the nearly nine minute glacial “Boris”, gave the Japanese noise rock band its name. It also features a great last-minute breakdown that shows off exactly how deliciously unhinged Buzz was (and still is). While contemporaries like Nirvana and Pearl Jam were busy cutting the bongloads with Boston and the poppier parts of the Kiss discography, the Melvins were doubling down on their ice-covered pummeling. There’s more Ozzy than Rollins on here: witness a track like “Ligature”, which approaches the haunting, soaring aspects of the best of Black Sabbath much more than their earlier albums. “It’s Shoved” should sound familiar to anyone who owns a copy of In Utero while at the same time proving Black’s worth in the band (she would leave shortly after). Bullhead is an intimidating slab of a album, a thick album that holds its own as a doom rock classic.
Lysol (“Melvins”) (1992)
★★★★☆
Following a 1991 European tour, the joining of Joe Preston on bass, and three simultaneous solo EPs, the band recorded Lysol. It would prove to be their last album on Boner Records and the first record of the drone/doom movement of the 2000s (Sunn O))) foremost among them). Bullhead may have been a slower, denser album than either Gluey Porch Treatments or Ozma, but Lysol slowed everything down into a near-singularity. “Hung Bunny” – the first third of the album – draws out rumbling guitar noise and punctuates it with spectral moans. The rest of the album grinds on slightly faster, but not by much. In amongst everything are another pair of covers, Flipper’s “Sacrifice” and Alice Cooper’s “The Ballad of Dwight Fry”, both of which the band wrestle into submission. The band had to alter the name of the album when the actual Lysol brand complained about the use of their trademark; black tape was originally used to cover the name on the side of the album art but eventually they took it out entirely.
Houdini (1993)
★★★★★
While the band was busy making strictly non-commercial drone metal, their former roadie was busy becoming the Voice of a Generation. As sales of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice In Chains drove a new revolution in rock ‘n’ roll, hungry major label executives began to scour these bands for compatriots and influences to fuel continued growth. One of the odder choices was, of course, the Melvins, although after Kurt Cobain declared them his favourite band their move to major was likely a foregone conclusion. Signed to Atlantic Records for a three-album deal, they attempted an album that was true to themselves, despite their expensive new surroundings. Early production efforts with Cobain grew futile as the Nirvana frontman fell deeper into his heroin addiction, and Osbourne and Crover basically recorded and produced the album themselves. It returns to the same sort of stuff they were peddling on Bullhead – crushingly dense sludge-metal – but the budget is bigger and every instrument hits like a punch in the gut. Even the Kiss cover (“Goin’ Blind”) grinds like the grungiest song ever recorded. Tracks like “Honey Bucket” and “Set Me Straight” lurch like a seasick sailor into punk territory while “Hag Me” and closing track “Spread Eagle Beagle” drive it back home into the drawn-out noise drones of Lysol. “Sky Pup” adds a bass-heavy, bouncy air to the proceedings, showing some more of that Alice Cooper influence that hides beneath the monolithic sludge at times, and along with “Pearl Bomb” showed willingness to experiment with their sound. It’s hard to pick a prototypically “Melvins” album, but Houdini is pretty close.
Prick (1994)
★★
Released on Amphetamine Reptile and titled backwards in order to get around their Atlantic contract, Prick is an album that can be succinctly summed up by King Buzzo himself: “Complete and utter nonsense, a total joke”. Prick was an outlet for weird experimental noise, fiercely non-commercial even by Melvins standards. New bassist Mark Deutrom doesn’t really get up to much as it’s pretty much a colletion of noise, jokes, feedback, country-twang sketches, and field recordings of buskers in the London Underground. Originally to be titled “Kurt Kobain”, the band changed the name to Prick at the very last minute due to Cobain’s suicide. “Larry” and “Rickets” are the only traditional songs on Prick, and both are quite rewarding. Beyond them, however, this one’s for collecters only.
Stoner Witch (1994)
★★★★☆
The band’s second album for Atlantic widens their scope quite a bit. Right from the get-go the band adds more melody than they’d shown in their entire career to date, brought to a heady life by the addition of Garth Richardson (GGGarth) as producer. “Queen”, “Sweet Willy Rollbar”, and “Revolve” all strike out for hard rock territory rather than the sludge-noise they’d perfected on Houdini. “Goose Freight Train” brings all of that to a halt, bringing up a creepy ‘stalking you through the deserted streets’ vibe instead. “Roadbull” features schizophrenic dynamic shifts and a moment that achieves a spaghetti western version of glory. There are plenty of noisy moments on Stoner Witch – especially epic meltdowns like “At The Stake” or “June Bug”, or the pure art-noise bleeding into uptempo riffing of “Magic Pig Detective” – but the album really showed a band that was willing to push the envelope of their sound regardless of what their label might have wanted.
Stag (1996)
★★★★☆
The sitar that opens up “The Bit” shows the way for this album: that old Melvins crunch, now with more *stuff*. Check out the horns and the scractching on “Bar-X The Rocking M”, or the trippy-as-hell middle of “Buck Owens”. Hell, check out Buzz’s mild-as-milk singing on “Black Bock” or “Skin Horse” for a real trip-out. This is the same guy that sang “Hooch” three years prior. Even a lengthy stomper like “Goggles” doesn’t follow the same tried-and-true sledgehammer path of Bullhead or Houdini; these are more like sludge tracks for the thinking person, full of weird deviations and odd nooks and crannies. On tracks like “Sterilized” and “Lacrimosa” they take the ambient drone-metal ideas they brought to Lysol and update them, adding in more of everything – more ambiance, more creepily unfocused vocals, more crashing, glacial drum hits. Stag is a wildly experimental album – probably too experimental for Atlantic, who dropped them after the album was released. After signing the band in hopes of finding the next Nirvana from a list of Cobain’s favourite bands, an album that was about half burbling, creeping noise-drone and weirdness was probably a bit too much to bear.
Honky (1997)
★★★
“Mombius Hibachi” was the first Melvins song I ever heard (on late-night MuchMusic), and as far as introductions went I could have done a lot worse. On an album that’s easily as weird and experimental as Prick, it’s one of the few tracks that kicks out the atmosphere that they were going for on Stag. It’s willfully noisy but compelling for that. “They All Must Be Slaughtered” is reminiscent of the opening drone of Lysol; “Lovely Butterfly” is the reimagining of their sludge metal through overdriven noise-bursts; “Air Breather Deep In The Arms Of Morphious” draws out an ambient drone and bisects it with a distorted, fuzzed-out mid-section and coda. The funniest moment is “Laughing With Lucifer At Satan’s Sideshow”, which amalgamates everything that must have been said to them by coked-out record execs during the Atlantic era. Taken all together it’s the most experimental album in the Melvin’s canon, and amongst the most divisive.
The Maggot (1999)
★★★☆
The end of the 20th Century brought the Melvins onto Mike Patton’s Ipecac Records and their sound back to something approximating the halfway mark between Houdini and Stoner Witch. There are still weird ambient moments (like the first couple of minutes of “Manky”) but for the most part The Maggot is a return to the sludgy metal that they made their name on in the first place. It doesn’t hit as hard as Houdini, it doesn’t have that classic snap like Stoner Witch, and it doesn’t have the out-there experimentalism of Stag, but it holds it own. It forms the first part of a trilogy along with the next two albums, which were released as a packaged vinyl trilogy some time afterwards.
The Bootlicker (1999)
★★★☆
The second part of the band’s 1999 trilogy is a much more subdued affair than its predecessor. The songs come off much more like alterna-rock pieces than they do the stomping sort of sludge the Melvins made their name on. The guitars are muted, the drums are produced very quietly, and Osbourne’s whisper-singing takes up a lot more sonic space than his molten howl ever did. The bass is mixed very high, giving tracks like the sprawling “Let It All Be” and “Mary Lady Bobby Kins” a propulsive feel that comes off as a more mature version of their distorted dynamic leaps on Stoner Witch. The Bootlicker brought back the experimental side of the band that had been mostly missing on The Maggot (especially when you take into account the closing track, “Prig”), and affirmed them as not only the Gods of Metallic Stomp, but also as a peachy-keen laid-back stoner rock band as well.
The Crybaby (1999)
★★★★☆
And just like that the trilogy went from weird to completely out-there. The Crybaby is a mixture of cover songs and original material and features a heavy guest list. The album kicks off with 70’s teen heartthrob Leif Garrett singing on Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. Given the band’s history with former roadie-turned-generational touchstone Kurt Cobain, and Garrett’s history as a commercial unit, is this some sort of a meta statement? Who knows. The cover is pretty faithful, for what it’s worth. Elsewhere, the band covers the Jesus Lizard with David Yow (who also shows up later on with an Osbourne collaboration), Hank Williams with the man’s grandson, Foetus, Bliss Blood, label head Mike Patton, and Merle Haggard on a particularly inspired version of “Okie From Muskogee”, also featuring Hank Williams III. As eclectic an album as you’ll find in the band’s catalogue, it also ranks among their best.
Electroretard (2001)
★★☆
A sort of odds-n-ends collection, a post-Trilogy stopgap. One out-there experiment in back-masking, three covers (including Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive”) and four reworkings of older Melvins material from the Gluey Porch Treatments/Ozma/Bullhead era. In other words, largely inessential and useful only for completists.
Hostile Ambient Takeover (2002)
★★★★
The 21st Century found the Melvins forging their own way through the changing music world by weilding a spiked sledgehammer. Their first proper album of the century found them straddling a line between the molten sludge they’d become known for on tracks like “[untitled]” and “The Fool, The Meddling Idiot”, and intricate, proggish tracks like “Dr. Geek” and “Little Judas Chongo”. The “The Fool, The Meddling Idiot” features an ending that bursts open into electronic work that resembles EDM on bad opiates. “The Brain Center At Whipples” evolves into an orgy of speed and crunch. The real hostile ambient takeover is saved for the sixteen minute closing track, “The Anti-Vermin Seed”, which meanders along in a low-frequency thud for ten minutes before blossoming into one of Buzz Osbourne’s best vocal takes.
Pigs Of The Roman Empire (2004)
★★★☆
With the Melvins’ dabblings with variants on industrial and ambient music, it was really only a matter of time before they hooked up with Brian Williams, the Welsh dark ambient pioneer better known to the dregs of society as Lustmord. The results are pretty much as you’d expect: Melvins sludge mixed with industrial-tinged ambient stretches. The centrepiece is of course “Pigs Of The Roman Empire”, a 22 minute piece that follows a lumbering sludge riff through moaning, abandoned vistas. “The Bloated Pope”, “Pink Bat”, and “Safety Third” are Melvins-oriented riff-fests while the rest of the album (especially the opening and closing tracks) are exercises in the creepy mood-building that Lustmord is best known for. As far as collaboration albums go, you can do a lot worse.
Never Breathe What You Can’t See (2004)
★★★
Another collaboration album, this time with punk legend Jello Biafra, and the first album that really finds the band playing second fiddle. After witnessing the Dead Kennedys “reunion” (which, after long years of acrimonious lawsuits, happened without Biafra at the mic) the Melvins approached Biafra about doing an album. There is no sludge on display here; the Melvins put together a snarling punk rock record that sounds a lot like what Biafra’s later band, the Guantanamo School of Medicine, would sound like, which in itself is a lot like what a modern Dead Kennedys would likely sound like. The star of the show is Jello Biafra, and the success of the album lies directly in what you think of him. Fans will find a lot to like; detractors will find little to recommend here.
Sieg Howdy! (2005)
★★★
The Melvin’s second album with punk rock political firebrand Jello Biafra combines some leftovers from the Never Breathe What You Can’t See sessions, a couple of remixes from that same album, and a couple of covers. The first of the latter is “Halo of Flies”, a favourite Melvins cover that was performed the first time Biafra saw the Melvins play live. The other is an updated rework of the classic Dead Kennedys screed “California Uber Alles”, which rails against the recall campaign that placed action star Arnold Schwarzenegger in the governor’s mansion. The end result is pretty much the same as Never Breathe What You Can’t See, albeit with some interesting tweaks on older material.
Houdini Live: A Live History of Gluttony and Lust (2006)
★★★★
I don’t normally include live albums in these discographies because they’re often stopgap albums, meant to keep the band’s name out there while they tour or fight over how the next album is going to sound. They’re rarely satisfying and they’re often quite disappointing (Hold Steady I’m looking in your direction). Every once in a while, though, something either iconic or completely out-there comes along and I’ll have to mention it. Case in point: A Live History of Gluttony and Lust. There are other live Melvins albums, and they’re all okay, although not really essential. ALHGL turns the concept on its head though, in much the same way as Type O Negative’s Origin of the Feces once did: it’s a live album without an audience. The album captures the band playing their iconic Houdini album live to an empty warehouse. Why? Who knows. For that matter, who cares? Houdini was an album crying out for a visceral live treatment, and the band delivers amazingly. Just find a small room, roll in a keg full of cheap beer, invite some friends over, and crank this album to the maximum volume. Bam. Instant Melvins show.
(A) Senile Animal (2006)
★★★★
The revolving door that is the bass position for the Melvins revolved again for A Senile Animal, but with a slight difference. Instead of replacing the departing Kevin Rutmanis with yet another disposable bassist, the Buzzo and Crover decided to join forces with Jared Warren and Coady Willis of Big Business, giving the 2006 lineup of the Melvins not just a bassist but a second drummer. The outcome is a sort of return-to-form, Stoner Witch-style, featuring a blend of metallic sludge riffing and classic rock arena anthem making (“Civilized Worm” especially seems like a slowed-down Deep Purple, or maybe classic-era Cheap Trick). “Civilized Worm” actually shows off the strength of the double drummers, ending as it does in a landslide of drum sticks, and the intricate prog-level rhythms of “You’ve Never Been Right”, “Blood Witch”, and “The Hawk” all point to the idea that having a second drummer does not necessarily mean that you’re self-indulgent. “A History of Bad Men”, meanwhile, reprises the best ideas off of Houdini as a headbanging epic, and “The Mechanical Bride” lurches along like the best of Bullhead. Easily the best Melvins album since Stag.
Nude With Boots (2008)
★★★★
Nude With Boots continues in the same vein and lineup as A Senile Animal. The focus here is definitely on the classic part of classic rock, with the ghosts of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath seemingly everywhere (check out the beginnings of “The Kicking Machine” and the title track for emphasis on this point). There is nothing here to really distinguish it from A Senile Animal, except maybe that the sound is even crunchier than it was two years prior. It touches all the right notes from their heyday, Bullhead-through-Stoner Witch, with some truly crushing moments, such as the dual-drum highlights of “The Savage Hippy” and “It Tastes Better Than The Truth”. This is Melvins stripped down to the basics: no Lysol-esque doom/drone interludes, no hostile ambient takeovers, no weird detours into multi-instrumental jamming. Hard, whalloping riffs that sound heavier than compressed lead, like god intended.
The Bride Screamed Murder (2010)
★★★☆
It could be argued that the Melvins get bored every three albums. Stag was certainly their most experimental Atlantic album; The Crybaby was the most out-there of the trilogy albums, and The Bride Screamed Murder is the oddest of the albums with Big Business as the rhythm section. Songs like “Evil New War God” and “Pig House” are classic sledgehammer Melvins, to be sure, (well except for the whistles that carry out the latter), but there are tracks like opening number “The Water Glass” that marry strange call-and-response vocals to strident marching band arrangements, “My Generation” that melts the Who classic into molten metal, “Hospital Up” which ends in a free jazz freakout, and the acapella version of “Peggy Gordon” here called “P.G. x 3”, which is amongst the more haunting versions of a Canadian folk song ever to be recorded. While it’s not as eclectic as either of of their previous “third albums”, it was the most out-there the band had been since 2002.
Freak Puke (2012)
★★★★
Out goes Big Business, in comes Trevor Dunn to take over bass duties, albeit with an acoustic standup bass. This “Melvins Lite” lineup produced an album that moved away from the back-to-basics Melvins/Big Business records and moved on to a sprawling, acid-damaged sound that took the lumbering sludge and added in atonal strings, proggish arrangements, and a more harmonious set of melodies. It’s alternately spacey and scuzzy, often within reaching distance of back-to-back songs, like the transititon from “Holy Barbarian” to “Freak Puke”, or the cracked-out Baroque art-damage of “Inner Ear Rupture” moving into the stomp of “Baby, Won’t You Weird Me Out”. The best is saved for last, of course: Paul McCartney cover “Let Me Roll It” is characteristically bludgeoning, and serves as a nice toss-up for the lethal freak-out of the closer, “Tommy Goes Beserk”. Not the highwater mark by any means, but a solid effort for a band on their umpteenth album.
Everybody Loves Sausages (2013)
★★★☆
The Melvins have always thrown covers into their albums and live sets, but Everybody Loves Sausages is the first full cover album the band has released. The track list is wide-ranging, including classic touchstones like David Bowie, Queen, and “Black Betty”, poppier choices from the Kinks and Roxy Music, a cut by underground metal pioneers Venom, and a nod to the 80s art-punk scene of their youth through The Jam and Throbbing Gristle. The results are all over the place. Queen’s “Best Friend” is largely unnecessary, consisting of a straightforward reading of the vocals backed with a broken circus synth, and “Black Betty” is just a slightly more breakneck version of the Ram Jam cover, but Mudhoney’s Mark Arm adds a sneering spit to The Scientists’ “Set It On Fire” and the mile-a-minute take on “Attitude” kicks the Kinks original up and down the street. The full cover of Bowie’s epic “Station to Station” is also an interesting reading, adding feedback and existential dread into the coke-disco original. It’s stylistically all over the place, and for a cover album that’s okay.
Tres Cabrones (2013)
★★★☆
Thirty years in to this weird experimental sludge metal band, Dale Crover switches to bass so that original drummer Mike Dillard, who left the band in 1984, can take over the kit. Calling themselves “Los Melvins”, the band redo a bunch of songs they’d written way back at the beginning in 1983, throw in some traditional tunes (“99 Bottles Of Beer”, “In The Army Now”, “Tie My Pecker To A Tree”), a cover of The Lewd’s “Walter” and half a cover of The Pop-O-Pies “Fascists Eat Donuts”. It’s a fun sort of reunion album, it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and it fits together an integral part of the original Melvins story that often gets lost in their improbable rise and fall from a major label recording contract.
Woah, I was about to close up shop for the night and then found out that integral Slayer co-founder Jeff Hanneman died today of liver failure. He’d been battling necrotizing fasciitis for some time and it is unknown at this time as to whether the two were related.
Slayer is one of those bands that transcend the genre they are a part of and become part of the cultural lexicon. After all, it is common wisdom that if there is a gathering of hippies growing dangerously out of control, you need to use Slayer to disperse them. Commonly found to be paired with the hook ’em horns gesture that signifies the love of metal, the name conjures up images of fast, brutal thrash metal. They (OK, along with maybe a scant few others) were the key guiding force behind the formation of death and black metal; it is hard – maybe impossible – to imagine the current, sprawling metal underground without them. Hanneman was arguably the man that brought the real intensity of hardcore punk rock to the world of metal; he favoured technical brutality and had the logo for the legendary Dead Kennedys emblazoned on his guitar. The line between the two milieus blurred considerably during his career, to the benefit of everyone involved. His work became a touchstone on both sides, and his influence is felt in all sorts of random places throughout the musical universe. So, in that spirit, here are five songs he wrote that changed the world of heavy music forever.
BANG YOUR HEAD.
“RAINING BLOOD” – From Reign In Blood, 1986.
The final track of the blistering, epoch-defining hardcore workout that stands as perhaps the finest metal album ever created.
“CHEMICAL WARFARE” – From Haunting The Chapel, 1984.
Speed-of-light thrash that borrows a name from the brilliant DK song of the same name. The sheer relentlessness of this song ensures its immortality.
“SOUTH OF HEAVEN” – From South Of Heaven, 1988.
A key indicator of growth in the Slayer canon – an eerie mid-tempo riff that slowly builds into a crushing finale.
“SEASONS IN THE ABYSS” – From Seasons In The Abyss, 1990.
That lengthy intro. That creepy clean riff behind all the crunching chords. That break that kicks the tempo in the ass and keeps it running. Close your eyes and forget your name.
“ANGEL OF DEATH” – From Reign In Blood, 1986.
This song is the aural equivalent of being pummeled by a flurry of body blows from a trained boxer – it’s probably the best metal song ever recorded, and it might just be the best kick-off to any heavy album ever recorded. It’s a fitting song to crank to 11 as you celebrate the life and times of a heavy music legend.
Factory towns are, by and large, not a terribly fun place to live. I’ve lived in more than a few, and believe me when I tell you that the curious intersections of sociology that occur in them have a tendency to wear you down after a while. Life there is as monotonous as the machines make it out to be; you get into a rut of the same old places populated by the same old faces. You go to the same bars, have the same drama, sleep with the same people. Pissed Jeans knows this life all too well. They come from Allentown, PA. You know, “Well we’re living here in Allentown/and they’re closing all the factories down/Out in Bethlehem they’re killing time/Filling out forms, standing in line”. It’s the existential ennui of such a place that lends the band the primal urge necessary to craft their brand of heads-down, cock-out torpedo rock. They exist in a similar sonic realm as Polaris winners Fucked Up, but where that band reaches for the esoteric, with concepts and operas, Pissed Jeans instead mostly just wants to follow the Stooges in terms of feedback, fucking, and getting fucked up. They succeed at this wildly; they can deftly balance rave-up bouncing garage punk (“Vain In Costume”, “Bathroom Laughter”) with Melvins-esque sludge (“Chain Worker”, “Male Gaze”). “You’re Different (In Person)” shows a deep love for the Jesus Lizard. It’s an album that seems to exist primarily to placate the fears of the nouveau aged who think the Nineties cornered the market on the Sabbath dream. It transcends these influences, though, with a deadpan sense of humour that sets it to an equal alongside the classics and a balls-out attack that makes it all seem curiously modern.
The instant USA Today bestseller by Chuck Tingle about what it takes to succeed in a world that wants you dead.
“Brilliantly bloody, wildly fun, and extremely scary, Bury Your Gays brings a sledgehammer down on tired tropes and makes a masterpiece of their guts.”―Rachel Harrison, national bestselling author of Black Sheep
Misha knows that chasing success in Hollywood can be hell.
But finally, after years of trying to make it, his big moment is here: an Oscar nomination. And the executives at the studio for his long-running streaming series know just the thing to kick his career to the next level: kill off the gay characters, “for the algorithm,” in the upcoming season finale.
Misha refuses, but he soon realizes that he’s just put a target on his back. And what’s worse, monsters from his horror movie days are stalking him and his friends through the hills above Los Angeles.
Haunted by his past, Misha must risk his entire future―before the horrors from the silver screen find a way to bury him for good.
One of the Best Horror Books of 2024 by Esquire!
One of the Best Books of Summer 2024 by Paste, HuffPost, Esquire, and Publishers Weekly!
Forgotten Sisters
Forgotten Sisters
Cynthia Pelayo (Thomas & Mercer)
A city’s haunted history and fairy-tale horrors converge for two women in an addictive novel of psychological suspense by a multiple Bram Stoker Award–nominated author.
Sisters Anna and Jennie live in a historic bungalow on the Chicago River. They’re tethered to a disquieting past, and with nowhere else to go, nothing can part them from their family home. Not the maddening creaks and disembodied voices that rattle the old walls. Not the inexplicable drownings in the area, or the increasing number of bodies that float by Anna’s window.
To stave off loneliness, Anna has a podcast, spinning ghostly tales of Chicago’s tragic history. But when Anna captures the attention of an ardent male listener, she awakens to the possibilities of a world outside.
As their relationship grows, so do Jennie’s fears. More and more people are going missing in the river. And then two detectives come calling.
They’re looking for a link between the mysteries of the river and what’s housed on the bank. Even Anna and Jennie don’t understand how dreadful it is―and still can be―when the truth about their unsettled lives begins to surface.
The instant USA Today bestseller from CJ Leede, author of Maeve Fly―a scorching and sweeping new novel about the end of the world as we know it.
One of Esquire and Vulture’s Best Horror Books of 2024 • A GoodReads and Publishers Weekly Editors’ Pick • An Indie Next Pick!
“A blistering, feverish ride through a uniquely American apocalypse.”―Chuck Wendig, New York Times bestselling author
A virus is spreading across America, transforming the infected and making them feral with lust.
Sophie, a good Catholic girl, must traverse the hellscape of the midwest to try to find her family while the world around her burns. Along the way she discovers there are far worse fates than dying a virgin…
“I’ve loved Maggie Thrash’s work for years, and Rainbow Black is going to set so many new hearts aflame—murder, intrigue, queer love, dark humor AND satanic panic? Welcome to the Maggie Thrash Fan Club, world!”—Emma Straub, New York Times bestselling author of This Time Tomorrow
For readers of Donna Tartt and Ottessa Moshfegh comes a brilliant, deliriously entertaining novel from the acclaimed author of Honor Girl. Rainbow Black is part murder mystery, part gay international fugitive love story—set against the ’90s Satanic Panic and spanning 20 years in the life of a young woman pulled into its undertow.
Lacey Bond is a 13-year-old girl in New Hampshire growing up in the tranquility of her hippie parents’ rural daycare center.
Then the Satanic Panic hits. It’s the summer of 1990 when Lacey ’s parents are handcuffed, flung into the county jail, and faced with a torrent of jaw-dropping accusations as part of a mass hysteria sweeping the nation. When a horrific murder brings Lacey to the breaking point, she makes a ruthless choice that will haunt her for decades.
As an adult, Lacey mimes a normal life as the law clerk of an illustrious judge. She has a beautiful girlfriend, a measure of security, and the world has mostly forgotten about her. But after a tiny misstep spirals into an uncontrolled legal disaster, the hysteria threatens to begin all over again.
Rainbow Black is an addictive, searing, high-octane triumph, an imaginative tour de force about one woman’s tireless desire to be free.
Twenty four years ago, Olive and Stacia went into the woods. Only Olive returned, with no memory of what happened. Now, Olive’s father has vanished, leaving behind research which indicates that he has found out what lives in the woods.
It wakes up every twelve years, taking only children. It has been doing so for at least two hundred years. And it is waking again.
Forced to return to her hometown, Olive finds her memories returning.
What she remembers from the days leading up to Stacia’s disappearance is magical, almost impossible to believe, but she knows that she must return to the woods–to face what lurks there, to save her father, and to find out what happened to Stacia.
“Beautiful, poetic, and gutting. Hollow Girls is a captivating novel that will lure you deep into the woods where magic and darkness entwine. There is so much heart to this story of friendship and blood where oaths and secrets continue to unravel until the very last page. Bring an offering to the Fae, and come along on this memorable journey.”
–Sara Tantlinger, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Devil’s Dreamland.
Winnie Campbell is sixteen and a burgeoning serial killer. Her father blames her for her mother’s death, dotes on her little sister, and executes increasingly cruel punishments meant to humiliate Winnie. As the punishments morph into torture, she begins fantasizing about regaining some semblance of power, eventually working through her rage by killing small animals.
When her violent games escalate and she accidentally kills an infant while babysitting, Winnie gets a taste of a power she doesn’t want to let go of. Her obsession with killing grows, and so does her fascination for Leigh, a girl that reminds her of her younger self.
Winnie wants to kill. She wants to die. She wants to be someone other than herself. And killing Leigh, a symbolic suicide, could be the key to her metamorphosis.
“A shocking and utterly harrowing examination of the creation of a murderer. Although Crushing Snails excels in many areas, this novel is perhaps most skillful at effectively illustrating the very human compulsion for violence and depravity. Murray’s excellent novel showcases the very human possibility of carnage—the horrifying prospect of brutality—when curiosity is sated and when we finally surrender to our most feral desires.”—Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke
“Masterfully executed and chilling to the core, Crushing Snails is a terrifying look into the darkest depths of the human mind and the ways in which monsters are formed. With the intensity level set to high, Murray draws you into complicity as you witness one girl’s spiral into obsession and depravity, culminating in a horrifying conclusion you’ll never forget.”—Kelsea Yu, Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of Bound Feet
“A nightmare of power and control, or perhaps even something more wayward. Crushing Snails is provocative and demanding, spiraling and unapologetic. Emma Murray is an exciting emerging voice in horror challenging what is normal and what is safe.”—Cynthia Pelayo, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Crime Scene
“Sick, twisted, and compulsively readable—Emma E. Murray’s Crushing Snails is a coming-of-age story that goes to dark and darker places, leaving me constantly hanging between two modes of thought: one-more-chapter and holy-fucking-shit.”—Carson Winter, author of The Psychographist
A woman checks herself into an insane asylum to solve the mystery of her sister’s murder, only to lose her memory and maybe her mind.
From the subversive voice behind The Phlebotomist comes a story that combines the uncanny atmosphere of Don’t Worry Darling with the narrative twists of The Last House on Needless Street
What would guilt make you do?
Hadleigh Keene died on the road leading away from Hollyhock Asylum. The reasons are unknown. Her sister Morgan blames herself. A year later with the case still unsolved, Morgan creates a false identity, that of a troubled housewife named Charlotte Turner, and goes inside.
Morgan quickly discovers that Hollyhock is… not right. She is shaken by the hospital’s peculiar routines and is soon beset by strange episodes. All the while, the persona of Charlotte takes on a life of its own, becoming stronger with each passing day. As her identity begins unraveling, Morgan finds herself tracing Hadleigh’s footsteps and peering into the places they lead.
The terrifying reality of The Redemption of Morgan Bright unfolds over the course of chapters told from the points of view of both Charlotte and Morgan, police interviews, and text messages.
Once there were four Lasco siblings banded together against a world that failed to protect them. But on a hellish night that marked the end of their childhood, eldest brother Shawn died violently after being dragged behind closed doors. Though the official finding was accidental death, Nathan Lasco knows better, and has never forgiven their mother, Stella.
Now two decades later, Stella promises to finally reveal the truth of what happened on The Day of the Door. Accompanied by a paranormal investigative team, the Lasco family comes together one final time, but no one is prepared for the revelations waiting for them on the third floor.
The final installment in the most lauded trilogy in the history of horror novels picks up four years after Don’t Fear the Reaper as Jade returns to Proofrock, Idaho, to build a life after the years of sacrifice—only to find the Lake Witch is waiting for her in New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones’s finale.
It’s been four years in prison since Jade Daniels last saw her hometown of Proofrock, Idaho, the day she took the fall, protecting her friend Letha and her family from incrimination. Since then, her reputation, and the town, have changed dramatically. There’s a lot of unfinished business in Proofrock, from serial killer cultists to the rich trying to buy Western authenticity. But there’s one aspect of Proofrock no one wants to confront…until Jade comes back to town. The curse of the Lake Witch is waiting, and now is the time for the final stand.
New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones has crafted an epic horror trilogy of generational trauma from the Indigenous to the townies rooted in the mountains of Idaho. It is a story of the American west written in blood.
“Simply put—and I do not say this lightly—Incidents Around the House is the most purely effective horror novel I have ever read.”—Neil McRobert, Esquire (Best Horror Books of 2024, So Far)
A chilling horror novel about a haunting, told from the perspective of a young girl whose troubled family is targeted by an entity she calls “Other Mommy,” from the New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box
“This book isthe monster that lives inside your closet.”—Grady Hendrix, New York Times bestselling author of How to Sell a Haunted House
To eight-year-old Bela, her family is her world. There’s Mommy, Daddo, and Grandma Ruth. But there is also Other Mommy, a malevolent entity who asks her every day: “Can I go inside your heart?”
When horrifying incidents around the house signal that Other Mommy is growing tired of asking Bela the question over and over, Bela understands that unless she says yes, her family will soon pay.
Other Mommy is getting restless, stronger, bolder. Only the bonds of family can keep Bela safe, but other incidents show cracks in her parents’ marriage. The safety Bela relies on is about to unravel.
But Other Mommy needs an answer.
Incidents Around the House is a chilling, wholly unique tale of true horror about a family as haunted as their home.
A chilling twist on the “cursed film” genre from the bestselling author of The Pallbearers Club and The Cabin at the End of the World.
In June 1993, a group of young guerilla filmmakers spent four weeks making Horror Movie, a notorious, disturbing, art-house horror flick.
The weird part? Only three of the film’s scenes were ever released to the public, but Horror Movie has nevertheless grown a rabid fanbase. Three decades later, Hollywood is pushing for a big budget reboot.
The man who played “The Thin Kid” is the only surviving cast member. He remembers all too well the secrets buried within the original screenplay, the bizarre events of the filming, and the dangerous crossed lines on set that resulted in tragedy. As memories flood back in, the boundaries between reality and film, past and present start to blur. But he’s going to help remake the film, even if it means navigating a world of cynical producers, egomaniacal directors, and surreal fan conventions—demons of the past be damned.
But at what cost?
Horror Movie is an obsessive, psychologically chilling, and suspenseful feat of storytelling genius that builds inexorably to an unforgettable, mind-bending conclusion.
A visceral and heartbreaking work of gothic horror about small town mysteries, local folklore and the things we leave behind when we’re gone, from the Bram Stoker Award winning author of Queen of Teeth.
What really happened to Cabrina Brite?
Ivory’s life changes irrevocably when she discovers the body of Cabrina Brite on the sands of Cape Morning, along with a mysterious poem. How did she die, and why does it seem she was trying to swim to Ghost Cat Island, the center of so many local mysteries?
Desperate to uncover the answers surrounding Cabrina’s death, and haunted by her discovery, Ivory begins to see the pale ghost of Cabrina, only to shake it off as a mere hallucination. But Ivory is not alone. Cabrina’s closest friends have also seen a similar apparition, and as they toy with occult possibilities, they begin to unravel the truth behind Cabrina’s death.
Because Cape Morning isn’t a ghost town, but a town filled with ghosts, and Ivory is about to discover just what happens when you let one in.
From New York Times bestselling and Hugo Award-winning author T. Kingfisher comes A Sorceress Comes to Call―a dark reimagining of the Brothers Grimm’s “The Goose Girl,” rife with secrets, murder, and forbidden magic.
*The hardcover edition features a foil stamp on the casing and custom endpapers illustrated by the author.*
Cordelia knows her mother is . . . unusual. Their house doesn’t have any doors between rooms―there are no secrets in this house―and her mother doesn’t allow Cordelia to have a single friend. Unless you count Falada, her mother’s beautiful white horse. The only time Cordelia feels truly free is on her daily rides with him.
But more than simple eccentricity sets her mother apart. Other mothers don’t force their daughters to be silent and motionless for hours, sometimes days, on end. Other mothers aren’t evil sorcerers.
When her mother unexpectedly moves them into the manor home of a wealthy older Squire and his kind but keen-eyed sister, Hester, Cordelia knows this welcoming pair are to be her mother’s next victims. But Cordelia feels at home for the very first time among these people, and as her mother’s plans darken, she must decide how to face the woman who raised her to save the people who have become like family.
Embark on a darkly humorous journey of reality TV meets the macabre. On the set of The Groom, a group of women must compete for the heart of Midwestern bachelor Tristan by spending a week in a haunted house. Divorcee Linda, resigned to her role as the show’s underdog, finds her resolve cracking when she begins to fall for fellow castmate Charity. Meanwhile, Sabrina, groomed by her witchy mother to deliver their family from poverty by marrying a rich man, sees winning the competition as her predestined path.
But after a shocking demise, the game takes a sinister turn. As the remaining contestants grapple with their desires for love and survival, they uncover dark secrets within and without the house’s walls. Trapped in a twisted new competition, they must confront their own demons or face elimination.
Sixty-three-year-old Los Angeles stoner, Hank Wallace, is just trying to get by and get high when he takes a gig distributing ads for a local company. But the job quickly turns into more than it seems. Hank begins hearing voices and experiencing strange visions while passing out the ads. Before he knows it, he’s fallen prey to his employer, a demon from another world.
Possessed by the demon, Hank absorbs nightmares from others living in his corner of LA. He becomes a conduit that feeds anxiety and dread to the demon. The nightmares pour in, but they aren’t enough. The demon requires more sustenance than the nightmares provide.
And the demon is in luck. Hank learns that his estranged sister, Carla, his only living relative, is terminally ill with cancer. He has steered clear of close relationships with family for decades, but he cannot avoid it any longer. The demon insists. Carla and her family’s grief is a siren’s call.
Hank drives to Sacramento bearing an invisible gift. The demon can erase their grief, but at what cost? Unless Hank can get his head together and snap out of it, the demon will consume every last one of them.
From New York Times bestselling horror writer Stephen Graham Jones comes a classic slasher story with a twist—perfect for fans of Adam Cesareand Grady Hendrix.
1989, Lamesa, Texas. A small west Texas town driven by oil and cotton—and a place where everyone knows everyone else’s business. So it goes for Tolly Driver, a good kid with more potential than application, seventeen, and about to be cursed to kill for revenge. Here Stephen Graham Jones explores the Texas he grew up in, and shared sense of unfairness of being on the outside through the slasher horror Jones loves, but from the perspective of the killer, Tolly, writing his own autobiography. Find yourself rooting for a killer in this summer teen movie of a novel gone full blood-curdling tragic.
In this “stunningly visceral” (New York Times Book Review) novel, a group of young men seek vengeance after one of their mothers is murdered in a Puerto Rican slum; STAND BY ME with a haunted, obsidian-dark heart.
One of B&N’s Best Horror Books of the Year
For childhood friends Gabe, Xavier, Tavo, Paul, and Bimbo, death has always been close. Hurricanes. Car accidents. Gang violence. Suicide. Estamos rodeados de fantasmas was Gabe’s grandmother’s refrain. We are surrounded by ghosts. But this time is different. Bimbo’s mom has been shot dead. We’re gonna kill the guys who killed her Bimbo swears. And they all agree.
Feral with grief, Bimbo has become unrecognizable, taking no prisoners in his search for names. Soon, they learn Maria was gunned down by guys working for the drug kingpin of Puerto Rico. No one has ever gone up against him and survived. As the boys strategize, a storm gathers far from the coast. Hurricanes are known to carry evil spirits in their currents and bring them ashore, spirits which impose their own order.
Blurring the boundaries between myth, mysticism, and the grim realities of our world, House of Bone and Rain is a harrowing coming of age story; a doomed tale of devotion, the afterlife of violence, and what rolls in on the tide.
From Gretchen Felker-Martin, the acclaimed author of Manhunt, comes a vicious new novel about a group of teens who must stay true to themselves while in a conversion camp from hell.
“A soaring, boundless ode to queer survival. It’s flat-out mesmerizing.”―Paul Tremblay, author of The Pallbearers Club
Something evil is buried deep in the desert. It wants your body. It wears your skin.
In the summer of 1995, seven queer kids abandoned by their parents at a remote conversion camp came face to face with it. They survived―but at Camp Resolution, everybody leaves a different person.
Sixteen years later, only the scarred and broken survivors of that terrible summer can put an end to the horror before it’s too late.
The fate of the world depends on it.
“Tense and frighteningly visceral, Cuckoo is a masterwork of body horror thrumming with high octane viciousness.” ―Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke
A woman builds her lover from carefully scavenged pieces and parts. A young girl is groomed for madness by one who loves her most. A neurodivergent boy organizes his life, and loss, by the ticking of a clock. And love can be the most splendid and destructive force in the entire world.
Love is a Crematorium and Other Tales is a collection of seventeen stories that are both bleak and beautiful, devastating and sweet. Enter the crematorium to experience grief, starlit nights, and gorgeous tragedy that make our souls burn from the inside out.
One of Paste Magazine’s “Most Anticipated Horror Books of 2024”
It’s about to get very dark.
Bram Stoker Award-winning author Laird Barron returns to the dark and dreadful with his fifth horror collection, which weaves sixteen weird tales into a mosaic of the bloody and the macabre.
It is in the darkest moments, during the loss of hope, that the language of crows is most clearly heard. The words are as menacing as piercing beaks, the events as perilous as a sea of black feathers. The corvid tongue spreads diabolical thoughts and devious visions.
Legend has it that crows prophesize offenses of the worst kind, their harsh tones are harbingers of horror. Collectively, crows are a murder, and they call out orders about their own name. The Language of Crows and other stories contains dark fairy tales, historical horror, and psychological horror in voices of the violent and the violated. It is a collection of witches’ spells, monsters’ murmurs, and voices within one’s head.
A brand-new collection of four intense, claustrophobic and terrifying horror tales from the Bram Stoker Award®-nominated and Splatterpunk Award-winning author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke.
THIS SKIN WAS ONCE MINE
When her father dies under mysterious circumstances, Jillian Finch finds herself grieving the man she idolized while struggling to feel comfortable in the childhood home she was sent away from nearly twenty years ago. Then Jillian discovers a dark secret that will threaten to undo everything she has ever known about her father.
SEEDLING
A young man’s father calls him early in the morning to say that his mother has passed away. He arrives home to find his mother’s body still in the house. Struggling to process what has happened he notices a small black wound appear on his wrist. Then he discovers his father is cursed with the same affliction.
ALL THE PARTS OF YOU THAT WON’T EASILY BURN
Enoch Leadbetter goes to buy a knife for his husband to use at a forthcoming dinner party. He encounters a strange shopkeeper who draws him into an intoxicating new obsession and sets him on a path towards mutilation and destruction…
PRICKLE
Two old men revive a cruel game with devastating consequences…
From legendary storyteller and master of short fiction Stephen King comes an extraordinary new collection of twelve short stories, many never-before-published, and some of his best EVER.
“You like it darker? Fine, so do I,” writes Stephen King in the afterword to this magnificent new collection of twelve stories that delve into the darker part of life—both metaphorical and literal. King has, for half a century, been a master of the form, and these stories, about fate, mortality, luck, and the folds in reality where anything can happen, are as rich and riveting as his novels, both weighty in theme and a huge pleasure to read. King writes to feel “the exhilaration of leaving ordinary day-to-day life behind,” and in You Like It Darker, readers will feel that exhilaration too, again and again.
“Two Talented Bastids” explores the long-hidden secret of how the eponymous gentlemen got their skills. In “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream,” a brief and unprecedented psychic flash upends dozens of lives, Danny’s most catastrophically. In “Rattlesnakes,” a sequel to Cujo, a grieving widower travels to Florida for respite and instead receives an unexpected inheritance—with major strings attached. In “The Dreamers,” a taciturn Vietnam vet answers a job ad and learns that there are some corners of the universe best left unexplored. “The Answer Man” asks if prescience is good luck or bad and reminds us that a life marked by unbearable tragedy can still be meaningful.
King’s ability to surprise, amaze, and bring us both terror and solace remains unsurpassed. Each of these stories holds its own thrills, joys, and mysteries; each feels iconic. You like it darker? You got it.
A young queer man finds love at a magical clothing shop-and the courage to stand up to the homophobic cops. A witch who makes custom nightmares wonders why all her victims are connected to the Black Panthers-and who she’s really working for. A soon-to-be father encounters a mysterious hitchhiker who tries pulling him back to the days of his violent past. A brand-new vampire, freshly hired at the blood bank, delights in her heightened sexual desire and superhuman strength.
Cynthia Gómez’s debut collection is a magic-soaked love letter to Oakland, brimming with feminist rage. Its twelve stories center ordinary people-Latine, queer, working class-as they wield supernatural powers against oppression, loneliness, and dread.
Christi Nogle has established herself as a modern Ray Bradbury, this collection adds fantasy, slipstream, and fabulism to her canon.
One Eye Opened in That Other Place collects Christi Nogle’s best weird and fantastical stories. The collection focuses on liminal spaces and the borders between places and states of mind. Though you might not find a traditional portal fantasy here, you will travel across thresholds and arrive at other places and times that are by turns disquieting, terrifying, and wonderful. Get up close with the local flora and fauna, peruse the weird art exhibits and special shows, and consider taking a dip in the mossy, snail-filled tank of water. Make sure to bring your special glasses
This new collection will appeal to readers of Jeff VanderMeer, Charles Wilkinson, Steve Rasnic Tem, M. Rickert, Lynda E. Rucker and Stephen King’s novel Lisey’s Story.
The Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author returns with a new collection of literary horror and weird fiction that glitters with startling prose and tortured souls.
Invaginies is an invasion, it is a perception that is bodily and transcendent creating holes, paths, or pockets of alternate truth-and not always voluntary–enlightenment.
Every line sings and strikes like grotesque poetry of the possessed. With 17 disturbing tales exploring plagues, possessions, gender & corruption, set in apocalyptic eras not much unlike our own, Joe Koch brings the terrors of a postmodern world into vivid focus.
Haunting and beautiful, Koch takes their place among the great names of the weird like Brian Evenson, exploring the queer perspective in horror as Billy Martin and Clive Barker, and contemporary rising voice, Eric LaRocca.
Literary prose meets the grotesque in this collection of stories to galvanize lovers of horror and weird fiction. With a growing cult audience, this collection is sure to shoot to the top of readers’ tbr piles.
At a Halloween party in 1999, a writer slept with the devil. She sees him again and again throughout her life and she writes stories for him about things that are both impossible and true.
Lima lures readers into surreal pockets of the United States and Brazil where they’ll find bite-size Americans in vending machines and the ghosts of people who are not dead. Once there, she speaks to modern Brazilian-American immigrant experiences–of ambition, fear, longing, and belonging―and reveals the porousness of storytelling and of the places we call home.
With humor, an exquisite imagination, and a voice praised as “singular and wise and fresh” (Cathy Park Hong), Lima joins the literary lineage of Bulgakov and Lispector and the company of writers today like Ted Chiang, Carmen Maria Machado, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.
Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil includes: “Rapture,” “Ghost Story,” “Tropicália,” “Antropógaga,” “Idle Hands,” “Rent,” “Porcelain,” “Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory,” and “Hasselblad.”
A great next read for fans of Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties and V. E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.
Recommended reading by Chicago Review of Books, Electric Literature, The Kenyon Review, and more!
Zip up your human suit and set sail, imbibing every perspective you can
in order to perfect the persona.
Push to the outer edges. Document your travels, and forget to return.
There will be a test.
Learn what it means to be human.
Forget what it means to be human.
Learn what it means to be human.
Forget what it means to be human.
Do not panic.
BRAVE NEW WEIRD: The Best New Weird Horror, Volume Two encompasses the finest Weird speculative fiction published in (roughly) 2023. Edited by Alex Woodroe.
Table of contents:
Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas – Lullaby for the Unseen
Thomas Ha – In That Crumbling Home
Hussani Abdulrahim – The Library Virus
Patrick Malka – Show Me
Eirik Gumeny – A Balanced Breakfast
David Simmons – Food is Poison
Premee Mohamed – Quietus
Perfect Kiss Strickoll – punctum (o baked alaska for you i am a former american)
LC von Hessen – Transmasc of the Red Death
Simone le Roux – The Man Outside
KS Walker – River Bargain Baby
M.M. Olivas – The Prince of Oakland
Amitha Jagannath Knight – My Mother, The Exoskeleton
Rachael K. Jones – The Sound of Children Screaming
Judith Shadford – Endless Yearning
Daniel DeRock – Guest Opinion: We must take action regarding the [REDACTED] High School janitor
Geneve Flynn – A Box of Hair and Nail
Anemone Moss – Everything You Dump Here Ends Up in the Ocean
Karlo Yeager Rodríguez – Up In the Hills, She Dreams of Her Daughter Deep In the Ground
If books have no power, why are they trying so hard to keep them from people?
4,240 unique book titles were targeted for censorship or banning in 2023 alone.
Shadows in the Stacks was published to raise funds for the Books Unbanned Initiative through the Library Foundation SD. All proceeds from sales go to the Library Foundation SD.
This collection of terrifying tales was edited by Vincent V. Cava, James Sabata, and Jared Sage, with a foreword by Laurel Hightower, and features all-new stories from…
Kevin David AndersonZachary AshfordS.A. BradleyBridget D. BraveKel ByronVincent V. CavaClay McLeod ChapmanRebecca CuthbertAlexis DuBonJamie FlanaganDouglas FordEvelyn FreelingAi JiangLucy LeitnerJonathan MaberryJ.A.W. McCarthyTim McGregorJohn PalisanoJames SabataWilliam SterlingAlvaro Zinos-Amaro
Each limb tells a story. Every organ shares a secret.
A woman saves the leg of her dead child. A man leaps from soul to soul, trying to find a pure heart. Uteri wander, skin peels back, and human bodies liquify all over this world.
Slice into the anatomy of this collection to discover all the unseen horrors the human body can deliver.
Brand new stories from Alex Wolfgang, Ai Jiang, Mary Rajotte, Julie Sevens, Christopher O’Halloran, Sasha Brown, Bridget D. Brave, Taylor Ketterer, Demi-Louise Blackburn, Lindsey Ragsdale, Emma E. Murray, Johnathon Heart, P.L. McMillan, Rachel Searcey, Bryan Young, Kai Delmas, and David Worn, with a foreword from Paula D. Ashe.
Bury Your Gays: An Anthology Of Tragic Queer Horror
Bury Your Gays: An Anthology Of Tragic Queer Horror
Ghoulish Books
A manifestation of ecstasy, heartache, horror and suffering rendered in feverish lyrical prose. Inside are sixteen new stories by some of the genre’s most visionary queer writers. Young lovers find themselves deliriously lost in an expanding garden labyrinth. The porter of a sentient hotel is haunted within a liminal time loop. A soldier and his abusive commanding officer escape a war in the trenches but discover themselves in an even greater nightmare. Parasites chase each other across time-space in hungry desperation to never be apart. A graduate student with violent tendencies falls into step with a seemingly walking corpse. Featuring stories from Cassandra Khaw, Joe Koch, Gretchen Felker-Martin, Robbie Banfitch, August Clarke, Son M., Jonathan Louis Duckworth, M.V. Pine, Ed Kurtz, LC Von Hessen, Matteo L. Cerilli, November Rush, Meredith Rose, Charlene Adhiambo, Violet, and Thomas Kearnes.
It’s the question asked of any story about a haunting: why didn’t you just leave? But if accounts of people who have stayed in haunted houses are any indication … it’s never that simple.
In this book, you’ll find twenty-two all-new stories about the reasons people don’t leave scary situations-parents who stay in haunted houses to protect their children, convicts who literally can’t leave their prison, retail workers who need a paycheck even if it’s from a haunted workplace, trauma survivors suffering from agoraphobia, and more.
Featuring Shauntae Ball, I.S. Belle, Die Booth, Max Booth III, Christa Carmen, Raquel Castro, Alberto Chimal, Gabe Converse, Lyndsey Croal, Victoria Dalpe, Alexis DuBon, Corey Farrenkopf, Cassandra Khaw, Joe Koch, E.M. Linden, Steve Loiaconi, R. Diego Martinez, J.A.W. McCarthy, Suzan Palumbo, Tonia Ransom, Rhiannon Rasmussen, and Eden Royce. With illustrations by Luke Spooner, Yves Tourigny, and Yornelys Zambrano.
We Mostly Come Out At Night: 15 Queer Tales of Monsters, Angels & Other Creatures
We Mostly Come Out At Night: 15 Queer Tales of Monsters, Angels & Other Creatures
Running Press Kids
An empowering cross-genre YA anthology that explores what it means to be a monster, exclusively highlighting trans and queer authors who offer new tales and perspectives on classic monster stories and tropes.
Be not afraid! These monsters, creatures, and beasties are not what they appear. We Mostly Come Out at Night is a YA anthology that reclaims the monstrous for the LGBTQA+ community while exploring how there is freedom and power in embracing the things that make you stand out. Each story centers on both original and familiar monsters and creatures—including Mothman, Carabosse, a girl with thirteen shadows, a living house, werebeasts, gorgons, sirens, angels, and many others—and their stories of love, self-acceptance, resilience, and empowerment. This collection is a bold, transformative celebration of queerness and the creatures that (mostly) go bump in the night.
Contributors include editor Rob Costello, Kalynn Bayron, David Bowles, Shae Carys, Rob Costello, H.E. Edgmon, Michael Thomas Ford, Val Howlett, Brittany Johnson, Naomi Kanakia, Claire Kann, Jonathan Lenore Kastin, Sarah Maxfield, Sam J. Miller, Alexandra Villasante, and Merc Fenn Wolfmoor.
The Black Girl Survives In This One: Horror Stories
The Black Girl Survives In This One: Horror Stories
Flatiron Books
Be warned, dear reader: The Black girls survive in this one.
Celebrating a new generation of bestselling and acclaimed Black writers, The Black Girl Survives in This One makes space for Black girls in horror. Fifteen chilling and thought-provoking stories place Black girls front and center as heroes and survivors who slay monsters, battle spirits, and face down death. Prepare to be terrified and left breathless by the pieces in this anthology.
The bestselling and acclaimed authors include Erin E. Adams, Monica Brashears, Charlotte Nicole Davis, Desiree S. Evans, Saraciea J. Fennell, Zakiya Dalila Harris, Daka Hermon, Justina Ireland, L.L. McKinney, Brittney Morris, Maika & Maritza Moulite, Eden Royce, and Vincent Tirado. The foreword is by Tananarive Due.
Howls From The Scene Of The Crime: A Crime Horror Anthology
Howls From The Scene Of The Crime: A Crime Horror Anthology
Howl Society Press
A death row cell that recounts the dark stories of its inmates. An informant who consumes shards of crystallized skulls to see the past. A world where to speak of the dead is a violation of an unjust society’s rules. Heists, drugs, cults, detectives, murder, monsters, revenge.
Commit yourself to Howls from the Scene of the Crime, an anthology of crime horror laced with blood, secrets, and occult compulsions from some of the best established and emerging horror authors writing today. Featuring a foreword by Bram Stoker Award(R) winning crime horror author, Cynthia Pelayo.
Beyond The Bounds Of Infinity: An Anthology of Diverse Horror
Raw Dog Screaming Press
Welcome to a world of horror viewed through a kaleidoscope lens. Embark on a journey to untangle the writhing tendrils of human terror in a dimension where the possible and impossible blend-an unstable realm where comfort can be found in the coldest pits, and dark gods feast upon the sweetest suffering-where infernal sounds birth silent letters that drift along midnight shores and the unexplained lurks beneath crumbling urban structures. Step over the edge of what you think you know, and find yourself…Beyond the Bounds of Infinity!
Featuring stories by L. Marie Wood, S.A. Cosby, Jessica McHugh, and Mary SanGiovanni-alongside newer voices like Cassius Kilroy, Jessica L. Sparrow, and Vicky Velvet-Beyond the Bounds of Infinity offers a collection of weird fiction and cosmic horror stories that are diverse down to the cellular level. From Taíno folk horror to the horror of identity in a world that just doesn’t understand, from cozy to apocalyptic, and everything in between, let these authors show you what fear really is, and what it means to them.
