"The Death Metal Bible" Book Review

Is it the real deal? Or overrated? Read my review of "The Death Metal Bible: A Journey Through the World of Death Metal Brutality" and find out...

The Death Metal Bible Book.

I haven’t posted here for a while - since January, exactly -, and some of you may have been wondering why.

The reasons is that I had a ton of books I hadn’t read, and since I was on vacation anyway I figured why not bring a few with me. Turns out it was a good decision.

Among those books, of course, the only one that really interests us is “The Death Metal Bible” (not an aff link) by the “infamous” heavy metal author Antoine Grand. You can read this thread to find out why he is so “infamous” but that’s neither here nor there.

Having finally finished the book - not that I’m a slow reading, but it’s pretty long! - I can at last lay out my thoughts about it. Where to begin…

Is it a good book? Is it overrated? Or more generally, what’s it even about?

Yes. Kinda. Death Metal.

You can stop reading now (JK).

Those are the “short” answers, but they don’t really capture the full-depth of what I’m trying to express.

“The Death Metal Bible” is a book about death metal, and a fairly conventional one at that: it covers everything from the early days of Possessed, the proto-death metal band (actually speed metal but whatever), all the way to modern day Incantation, Disma and Morbid.

When I say “conventional” I don’t mean it as “derivative” or “generic”, I mean it’s actually a book that is properly structured from A to Z.

And while Antoine Grand has always been a superior (to average) writer, his tendencies to often go on semi-related tangents was, IMO, something that I didn’t like about his style. But hey, other people loved him for it, so what can I say.

“The Death Metal Bible” reads much more like a “normal” death metal book than an Antoine Grand rant, although the abundance of trivia and useful information is still there.

A lot of information isn’t “new” or “groundbreaking”, at least if you’ve been in the extreme metal scene for some time, but there are still very valuable gems in the form of exclusive interviews, snippets, and other obscure info you won’t find on Wikipedia (for example, the joint interview with Fenriz/Anders of Darkthrone/Cadaver about the early days of Norwegian black death metal is exclusive as far as I can tell).

The Death Metal Bible (Book Review).

So yeah, I’d recommend this book. It’s not the “must own” that people claim it is, but “The Death Metal Bible” is still a very solid book on the history of death metal. Much better than the other stuff you find on the Internet, or worse, in print.