Black Sabbath's Master of Reality

[T]he focus of Darnielle's fans has always been on his lyrics and the stories contained within them. Now he's stepped off the stage and sat down at is typewriter to deliver Master of Reality, his first novel and a stunning piece of rock criticism and appreciation. Readers are likely to come to Master of Reality from a variety of backgrounds. Some will come as Mountain Goats fans wanting to see Darnielle tackle a novel, others as Black Sabbath fans wanting to read about a favorite album. Some will simply be fans of the cult-popular 33 1/3 series, which has now grown to dozens of books, yet kept its level of quality very high. Hopefully, there will be others who will pick it up as novel first, because it truly is a first-rate story, full of moments that will pluck at your heartstrings as you're brought back to the moment you first fell in love with a piece of music, when an album provided not just the soundtrack to your life but also the meaning behind it. If, by some strange chance, none of this happens, well, you're probably going to at least dust off your old Sabbath vinyl, and there's nothing wrong with that either.