From New York Times bestselling author and Mountain Goats singer/songwriter John Darnielle, an epic, gripping novel about murder, truth, artistic obsession, and the dangers of storytelling. Gage Chandler is a true crime writer, with one grisly success - and movie adaptation - to his name, along with a series of subsequent lesser efforts that have paid the bills but not much more. Now he is being offered the chance for his big break: to move into 'The Devil House', in which a briefly notorious pair of murders occurred, apparently the work of disaffected 1980s teens. He begins his research with diligence and enthusiasm, but soon the story leads him into a puzzle he never expected - his own work and what it means, the very core of what he does and who he is.

John Darnielle describes Master of Reality through a fictional character, a fifteen-year-old boy being held in an adolescent psychiatric centre in southern California in 1985.John Darnielle describes "Master of Reality" in the voice of a fifteen-year-old boy being held in an adolescent psychiatric centre in southern California in 1985. Adolescents in treatment are often required to keep a journal, and they write letters by the dozens: to their parents, to their friends on the outside, to the nurses who confiscate their belongings, to the teachers back at school who've offered them an outlet for their creativity. Our narrator has arrived in treatment with a Walkman and some tapes that are precious to him, only to have them taken away on the ground that their content is part of his greater problem.His various writings, aimed mainly at getting his tapes and Walkman back, will explain how Black Sabbath differs from their Satan-worshipping popular image, and how Master of Reality is an overtly Christian album, which it is. Our narrator will try to explain Black Sabbath like an emissary from an alien race describing his culture to his captors: passionately, patiently, and lovingly. This album has a genuinely remarkable historical status: as a touchstone for the directionless, and as a common coin for young men and women who felt shut out of the broader cultural economy.It'd be hard to overstate Ozzy Osbourne's totemic status among adolescents in the early eighties. His public image, cobbled together by his audience from occasional mainstream press mentions and niche magazine coverage, made him a nearly perfect sponge for the aggressive feelings of frustrated young men around the world. To this audience, who continue to occupy a an enormous if ghostly position on the margins, the early Black Sabbath albums were accepted classics in a genre whose lack of real status only served to indicate its true value.This, for me, is one of the places where the music does its most interesting work: when it becomes a tool in the hands of its listeners, and when the process of explaining it becomes part of its essence. This was never truer than in the mainstream metal subcultures of the eighties, where album titles served as passwords to a more accepting world. "Master of Reality", from its Christian heart right down to its ultimately incomprehensible title, is the perfect candidate for illuminating these undersung passageways."33 1/3" is a series of short books about a wide variety of albums, by artists ranging from James Brown to the Beastie Boys. Launched in September 2003, the series now contains over 50 titles and is acclaimed and loved by fans, musicians and scholars alike.

A terrible event leaves Sean Phillips disfigured when he is only seventeen. In the weeks following the incident he creates an adventure game he calls the 'Trace Italian', where players awake in an apocalyptic America and make their way to safety across an irradiated landscape, decision by difficult decision. The years pass and Sean lives a quiet life enriched by his games. But when a pair of teenage sweethearts try to seek the Trace in the real world their actions prove fatal, and Sean is forced to confront the dangers of his creation and its origins in his own troubled past. A beguiling story of contingency, solitude and escape, Wolf in White Van is a heart-stopping debut from a musician and songwriter known for the transcendent power of his words.

From his small apartment in southern California, he orchestrates fantastic adventures where possibilities, both dark and bright, open in the boundaries between the real and the imagined. As the creator of "Trace Italian" a text-based, role-playing game that's played through the mail. Sean guides subscribers through his intricately imagined terrain, turn by turn, as they search out sanctuary in a ravaged, savage future America. But when Lance and Carrie, two teenaged seekers of the Trace, take their play outside of the game, disaster strikes, and Sean is called on to account for it. In the process, he is pulled back through time, toward the beginning and the climax: the moment of his own self-inflicted departure from the world in which most people live.

From the cult author of Wolf in White Van comes a horror- infused thriller set in a tiny Midwestern town; Clerks meets Cormac McCarthy. Jeremy works at the counter of Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa. It's the 1990s, pre-DVD, and the work is predictable and familiar; he likes his boss, and it gets him out of the house. But when a local schoolteacher comes in to return her copy of Targets, she has an odd complaint: 'There's something on it,' she says. Two days later, another customer brings back She's All That and complains that something is wrong: 'There's another movie on this tape.' Curious, Jeremy takes a look. And what he sees on the videos is so strange and disturbing that it propels him out of his comfortable routine and into a search for the tapes' creator. As the once-peaceful fields and barns of the Iowa landscape begin to seem sinister and threatening, Jeremy must come to terms with a truth that is as devastatingly sad as it is shocking.