Famous authors, sorted by their ability to front a successful metal band

It’s often difficult to define the metal genre because it’s huge, encompassing hundreds if not thousands of subgenres that nerds spend hours discussing. And that’s metal’s dirty secret: At its core, it’s a genre by nerds, for nerds. Often, the lyrics come straight from fantasy novels or, in the case of grindcore bands, medical journals. Today, we judge famous authors based on how well they would be suited to front a metal band.

32. Bret Easton-Ellis

The worst goregrind ever put on tape.

31. Charles Dickens

Look, Dickens is the greatest novelist of the 19th century, we’ll admit that without a doubt. But that’s just not possible. Even his darkest novels are full of ingenuity and courage, qualities that only have a place in power metal (yuck), and Dickens was far too busy thinking up oddly appropriate names for his antagonists and Scrooge McDuck-style dipping into the sweet cash of serial novels and lectures to bother with tour planning or recording sessions. He has to make sure little Nell dies in the most absurdly melodramatic way at the end of The Curio Shop, there’s no time for any of that heavy metal nonsense.

30. John Milton

Milton can’t front a metal band; he’s too busy writing political tracts, promoting Puritanism, and then narrowly escaping execution by the reinstated King Charles II for the whole thing where he was an enthusiastic supporter of the beheading of Charles’ father in the 1640s. That’s a shame, because Paradise Lost may be the most metal book ever written. But Milton doesn’t want us to listen to metal. Milton wants us to think about sin and feel bad.

29. Jonathan Franzen

Franzen sometimes listens to folk black metal while birdwatching, and his general “damn kids today” worldview is definitely compatible with that of older metal artists like Gene Simmons and Glen Benton, but he’s more of a post-punk guy, and his Funeral Doom bandmates will be pretty confused if he lets them rehearse a song that sounds like Interpol.

28. John Bunyan

He wrote all of his best known works in prison and was an uncompromising culture warrior, so the comparisons to Burzum are inevitable and will haunt his band until they split up and/or kill each other.

27. David Foster-Wallace

Wallace was known for his social anxieties. I mean, he went on an all-expenses-paid cruise and barely left his cabin. So definitely a bedroom recording project. It’s going to sound like second-wave black metal at first, because of course Wallace can basically reproduce the basic sound of De Mysteriis dom Sathanas after listening to it for just an hour or two, but once that feels too nasty (even hideous), he switches to post-metal soundscapes. His insistence that anyone who hears his demo must also read his footnote-strewn artist statement was met with scorn from everyone except the members of Liturgy.

26. William Shakespeare

Shakespeare wrote about an equal number of comedies and tragedies, which means he’s willing to switch in an instant from the existential horrors of Macbeth or King Lear to the lighthearted craziness of As You Like It or A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In other words, he’s a fan of Cannibal Corpse, and even though he can’t even manage a decent hair whip to save his life, he’ll start his band any day.

25. Emily Bronte

Her band really hopes that the debut album’s atmospheric cover art, featuring misty moors and tormented lovers, makes up for the narrative muddle of the story, sorry, I mean the music.

24. Jhumpa Lahiri

Lahiri’s characters are usually neurotic nerds who drink fine wine, go to elite universities, read Gogol and Tolstoy for fun, and go to the opera. Her idea of ​​rebellion is usually listening to the Doors while drinking Budweiser on ice. Lahiri knows how to develop a dynamic character like no other, but she also thinks Metallica’s Black Album is “too intense” and would basically be the worst metal frontwoman imaginable.

23. William Wycherley

Wycherley takes nothing seriously. His most famous work, The Country Wife, is basically a five-act joke about impotence and adultery. Even when one character threatens to chop up his own wife’s face, it’s somehow engineered for laughs. Wycherley records a demo that most critics will diplomatically say sounds more like hard rock than metal, and then tries to launch a career as a stand-up comedian, which will also fail.

22. Ann M. Martin

When The Babysitters Club became successful enough that she could rest on her laurels and hire ghostwriters to write more episodes about a group of middle schoolers in an impossibly utopian Connecticut suburb, she thought, “Why NOT start a thrash band?” She’s still trying to learn the riff to “Hangar 18” and is beginning to regret spending five grand on a custom-made Jackson she affectionately calls “The BSC Bruiser.”

21. John Keats

He likes to call it post-hardcore, but anyone who listens knows it’s pure emo. The lyrics are technically flawless, but so self-pitying that even the guy from Dashboard Confessional found them “a bit much.”

20. Tom Clancy

An ungodly hybrid of the worst aspects (well, all aspects) of Five Finger Death Punch and Insane Clown Posse. Disturbing number of lyrical references to sniper scopes.

19. Samuel Richardson

First, he insists that every release must be a five-LP concept album. Second, all the lyrics are written from the perspective of teenage girls writing letters to each other, and later from the perspective of a guy in his twenties writing letters to his girlfriend about how he wants to seduce one of them. The musicianship is great, but the lyrics are just yuck.

18. Alexander Pope

As outlined in his poem “An Essay on Criticism,” Pope believed that practice and honed skill, not just emotional sensitivity, were the key to good poetry. So now he’s obviously in a tech-death band that plays in time signatures no one has ever heard of. He waits every day for a response from Colin Marston about whether his band, Vengeful Sylphs, will be opening for Krallice.

17. Judy Blume

The protagonists of books like Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret obviously have a lot of adolescent angst to deal with. Unfortunately, the most obvious place to go for this kind of thing is nu-metal in the style of Linkin Park or Slipknot. Judy’s band is a JNCO-clad wreck that sounds like a time capsule from 2001, but she has this kid named Farley Drexel who absolutely kills it on drums, and it honestly takes the whole project to a little new level.