Master of Reality
By John Darnielle
If you’re picking up a 33 ⅓ book, you’re probably a fan of the album or band it features, the author themselves, or you like the series in general and want to expand your musical knowledge. Very rarely would you be looking for a fictional novella, but John Darnielle is not one to do things the way you’re supposed to. If you’re thinking “John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats?” you’d be right, but also John Darnielle of Wolf in White Van, Universal Harvester, and Devil House. Master of Reality was the first book Darnielle had ever written, and whether it influenced him to write his other books, or was simply the beginning of his authorial journey, is up to the man himself. Master of Reality was my first experience listening to a Black Sabbath album all the way through, and hearing it play while reading the book brought a clarity to every one of the rants scrawled in the notebook that narrates this book.
There were times when Master of Reality became more about the story being told than the album it was centering. Black Sabbath was ever present in the book, as it was in Roger’s life, but rather than learning about the band. you would be learning about what pushed Roger’s family to send him off to a hospital that felt more prison than healthcare. After you’d hear a heart wrenching, all-too-familiar story, he would launch into the importance of this album against one of Sabbath’s others, or break down why the order of songs matters so much. More than a book about the band, this was a book about being a fan of the album, about being in community with other people through music. Outside of the music, Darnielle wrote about understanding your mental health better than anyone with a medical degree, because you can prescribe albums to calm you down in ways pills never could.
The book jumps halfway through, right when the teenage dirtbag narrative gets tiring, and Roger introduces himself as an adult. His life is different, but his relationship with the music of Black Sabbath has stayed the same. He picks up where he left off in describing the importance of the album, while updating the audience of his entries about his life post-institution. Darnielle could have written a static stand-in for the listener/reader, he could have written a non-fiction entry in the series about what the music scene was like when this album came out. What makes this story so unique is Darnielle’s ability to create a complicated character who goes through the gauntlet of life and still has scars to show for it.
Darnielle is so clearly a fan of the music he’s writing about. I know from being a fan of his that his personal history is similar to that of his narrator. Making it still more impressive that he didn’t just write a pretentious tirade in support of his favorite album, while tearing apart the cultural institutions that resulted in the setting of Master of Reality for so many teenagers during that era. You don’t have to like his music to be a fan of his writing, just as you don’t have to enjoy Black Sabbath to get something out of this edition of 33 ⅓.