In an age of instant, high-quality, high-definition entertainment, books get a bad rap. And this isn’t entirely unjustified. Why would you want to read through pages of dense nonsense like David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest when you can play Fortnite, the sober equivalent of smoking meth?

Whether we like it or not, we live in a world where subtlety is dying. Fortunately, literature can be “extra” too, and if you like darkness, despair, and fantastical excess, these books can do immeasurably more for your soul than the corporate propaganda machines you spend most of your day on.

Elric of Melnibone Saga

The Elric of Melnibone saga is known for having perhaps the coolest cover art of all time. Elric, a chiseled, red-eyed, albino antihero seems as though he came into being well after Michael Moorcock dreamed him up in the late 1960s. The books virtually predicted the ‘80s and its long hair, leather jackets, and wild excess—though it might partially have caused the decade as we know it.

The books are far-reaching and complex, but the essence of the series is that Elric is an emperor of a place called Melnibone. Melnibone is a kingdom whose inhabitants are all borderline sociopaths, except Elric. His wife doesn’t quite get him, and he has to keep doing drugs to maintain the energy needed for the various adventures he gets himself into. Melnibone and its dragon army is both a source of longing and an epicenter of great evil.

Uncommonly, the audiobooks are actually well-narrated, so give them a listen if you don’t feel like reading.

The Elder Wyrm

Few books were written start to finish with the golden age of metal in mind. The Elder Wyrm is one such novel. It leans into several genres, including creature fantasy, dark fantasy, dark humor, and Norse fiction, but it never loses its sense of purpose.

In a world where petty and passive-aggressive magic-doers have supplanted both native “wyrms” as well as non-magical folk, the wizard’s underlings need to do everything they can to regain their place in the mortal realm. Their journey spans multiple continents and even dimensions of reality, and it’s engaging throughout.

Lord of the Rings

Lord of the Rings needs no introduction. It’s the very standard upon which modern fantasy rests. It’s about as metal as it gets, with orcs, living trees, ogres, wizards, and flying ring wraiths all comingling in a single world.

LOTR has influenced countless musicians, artists, filmmakers, and writers. Ever heard of Led Zeppelin? Robert Plant packed his songs with LOTR references. “In the darkest depths of Mordor, I met a girl so fair…” Things only progressed from there, and subsequent metal bands from Rush to Burzum to Numenorean all borrow heavily from the series.

Dracula

It’s easy to think that a book written in 1897 wouldn’t hold up today, but Dracula is immaculately written. It suffers less from pacing issues than many modern novels, so it's still worth your time. The whole thing is an early version of “found footage,” and the story is revealed through correspondence between the main characters.

The metalest passages involve Dracula creeping on Jonathan Harker and asylum patient Renfield showing his subservience to his dark master. Pay no heed to the boring 1931 movie—it strays from the book anyway. Dracula is as engaging as it gets.

Demons

Dostoevsky is known as a master of the human soul. Perhaps no other author has so powerfully conveyed the highs and lows of human existence. In Demons, you’ll get mostly lows, and they’re dark as hell.

This isn’t fantasy, and you won't find any legions of Mordor. Instead, Demons explores intellectual discontent in imperial Russia and the country’s gradual slide into socialist psychopathy. Given all that happened just after Dostoevsky died, I’d say he hit the nail on the head.

The Road

Cormac McCarthy loves darkness. But where his popular Blood Meridian, a Western epic, was almost comically overwrought, The Road manages to maintain an air of darkness without overusing fancy phrases like “beyond reckoning” or “blood red.”

The novel is elegantly written, and it takes you on a journey through a post-apocalyptic wasteland in which cannibals and self-interested parties compete with one another for diminishing resources. Even if you saw the film, the novel is well worth it.

Call of Cthulhu

Despite missing out on the movie adaptations of other horror giants, H.P. Lovecraft’s influence is everywhere. Video games, TV shows, and films especially draw from his worlds and concepts.

If you aren’t familiar, Lovecraft novels mostly center around a couple of basic ideas: 1. There are beings and civilizations far older than the world we know. 2. Malevolent forces from other dimensions or unknown places are waiting to enter our world. Call of Cthulu involves the first idea. A winged, octopus-headed beast has lain dormant in the ocean for ages and is now causing trouble. What could be more metal than that?

The Long Ships

Scholars are still debating whether the Vikings were really as brutal as our highly biased Medieval sources make them seem. Frans Bengtsson, author of The Long Ships doesn’t care about any of that. All he wants to do is to create a world in which running around Europe and stealing gold and women is cool. And he does this very effectively.

The book has some deeper meanings too, and it’s one of the best examples of dry humor in literature. Despite its age, it mocks world religions playfully, poking fun especially at the prudishness of Christianity. People are people, it says, and they want money and sex no matter what they believe in.

Conan the Barbarian

Conan the Barbarian is synonymous with the 80s and the 80s are synonymous with metal. Some remember Conan as little more than an excuse for Schwarzenegger to show his physique, and this is understandable, but many don’t realize that Conan was a great book series before JRR Tolkien had even put pen to paper on LOTR.

If the concept of a muscle-bound, sword-wielding hero seems a bit cliche, that’s because author Robert E. Howard established the cliche so powerfully that it dominates our popular consciousness even today. Tropes aside, the writing is accessible enough and free of unnecessary exposition. Conan’s world is fleshed out, though individual stories are short.

The Chronicles of Corum

Elric author Michael Moorcock loves weird creatures and different dimensions. If you too love these things, you’ll like the Chronicles of Corum.

The series begins with main character Corum witnessing the destruction of his people and the theft of their artifacts, which grant great power and serve as symbols of their culture. Seeking revenge and the restoration of his people, Corum heads on a quest to retrieve the artifacts and confront the forces responsible. Nothing groundbreaking here, but again, sometimes an often-copied source is better than hundreds of ill-devised offshoots.

And that’s it for today’s list. I haven’t listed everything you might consider metal, but I think we’ve covered most of the big ones while leaving plenty for a later post. For more metal music, art, history, and literature, keep browsing Metalblog.

The Most Metal Books of All Time