"Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other."
--H.P. Lovecraft, The Silver Key
I've heard it referred to alternatively as hair metal, glam metal, sometimes by the less charitable, butt rock. Whatever.
I've come to love it.
It really all started with Quiet Riot's Metal Health, which made history by becoming the first metal album to reach no. 1 on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart. Then you had Pyromania and Shout at the Devil and it was on. Dudes with big hair and tight pants playing heavy but radio friendly-ish heavy metal, dominating the air waves circa 1983-91.
Dokken is one of the best examples of this sort of thing. Their first album, 1983's Breaking the Chains, was considered a commercial flop, and they needed a big sophomore effort. They got it with Tooth and Nail, released in September 1984. It had several strong tracks, "Alone Again" probably the most popular and recognizable, but I like this one best.
God I love these ridiculous videos... zero subtlety, near zero artistry, zero fucks given.
I've come to love George Lynch. He's an incredibly talented guitarist who writes killer licks and makes this band what it is. Guitar-forward, great hooks, great for blasting as you drive down the seaside in a convertible Iroc-Z or Camaro Z28.
You might be seeing a bit more of this type of music on Metal Fridays through September, for reasons that will soon become clear.
Can sword-and-sorcery be quiet, thoughtful … philosophical?
Not typically … but Robert E. Howard was anything but typical.
If you want to know why Howard lasts while so many of his barbaric descendants have not, gaze into "The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune."
But not too closely. You might not be able to rip your gaze away.
***
“Mirrors” starts with an epigraph by Edgar Allan Poe, placing the reader into the proper headspace for the story to come. Poe wrote stories of psychological disorientation and spirals into madness.
The stuff of “Mirrors.”
Not much actually happens plot-wise. Kull is king but unsatisfied with reality, weary of life, and unable to hear the sea-songs of Atlantis of his youth. It has the same melancholy, disenchanted feel of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Silver Key” (Feb. 1929 Weird Tales), even though Howard wrote the story considerably earlier and that could not have been an influence. Must have been something in the inter-war air.
A slave girl with an ulterior motive recommends Kull seek out Tuzun Thune, a wizard who holds the secrets of life and death. And he does.
But this story isn’t about plot, or character. It’s theme, the exploration of life itself, and how strange and ephemeral this thing called “reality” is. When you get right down to it the relationship of reality and consciousness are incredibly complex, and uncertain, prone to dissolve if you look at them too closely.
Is there reality if no one is there to observe it? Does the observer therefore create reality? And if so, can we create and inhabit worlds of our own making, every bit as “real” as this one?
Howard frames this strangeness through Thune and his probing questions. When Kull asks the wizard if he can create wonders, Thune replies, Is it not a wonder that flesh obeys the thoughts of our mind? That we can talk with the dead by talking with another person—who are already dead because they were born?
Skeptical of slippery sophistry, Kull nevertheless accepts Thune’s offer to gaze into his mirrors. And there finds the origins of man, a “dream of the gods,” and learns the truth of mankind’s ephemeral existence, that all our glories will fade like smoke on a summer sea.
Kull is soon lost in a hall of mirrors that seem real but may be a metaphor for his own tortured and bewildered metaphysical thinking.
Is his world real, or the world inside the mirror real?
Does it matter, if reality is only in our heads, the product of our highly individual consciousness? Is life merely a dream?
The line between fantasy and reality blurs as Kull himself begins to fade; he threatens to vanish entirely into the world in the mirror until his Pict friend, Brule the Spear-Slayer, kills Tuzun Thune and shatters the glass.
But this is no heroic finish. Unease remains. Kull is left to ponder, was it Thune’s witchery changing him to mist, or had he stumbled on to a secret? Maybe there are worlds beyond worlds, ones we can access.
Conan would famously reject such mirrors and place his gaze firmly upon this world. He scorns such bottomless and possibly destructive philosophizing (“Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me."). Perhaps both he and Howard came to discover that the only truth we can ever truly know is our own.
Though even Conan’s words can be interpreted with ambiguity; after all he never admits he knows the truth, only that he will let others brood upon its nature, and that the illusion is real, to him.
A few additional notes
“The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune” originally appeared in the September 1929 Weird Tales and has been reprinted and adapted widely since. In print, too numerous to mention, but some notables include Skull-Face and Others (Arkham House, 1946), The Coming of Conan (Gnome Press, 1953), and King Kull (Lancer, 1967).
***
The story was adapted for Savage Sword of Conan #34 (Oct. 1978), with script by Roy Thomas and art by Mike Ploog. I have this. It’s pretty cool even though two of the pages are transposed. The images from this essay are taken from that.
It contains one of my favorite Howard passages, a prose-poetry which made Howard so special.
“There comes, even to kings, the time of great weariness. Then the gold of the throne is brass, the silk of the palace becomes drab. The gems in the diadem sparkle drearily like the ice of the white seas; the speech of men is as the empty rattle of a jester's bell and the feel comes of things unreal; even the sun is copper in the sky, and the breath of the green ocean is no longer fresh.”
This passage was heavily adapted for the screenplay of Conan the Barbarian (1982) and voiced by Max Von Sydow.
***
Is Kull a proto-Conan? You can make the case for yes and no.
Yes: Conan was borne out of a rewritten Kull story and so contains his literal DNA. Both are powerful, massive, untamed, fierce fighters, barbarian outsiders sitting uncomfortably on the thrones of civilized kingdoms.
No: Howard was in a different place in his life when he wrote these stories, and the characters are therefore different. Kull has his own distinct characteristics: Brooding, reflective, relatively chaste, philosophical, prone to dreaming. In his essay “Atlantean Genesis” included in Kull: Exile of Atlantis (Del Rey, 2006), editor Patrice Louinet shares some passages from letters to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith at the time of the writing of “Mirrors,” and they are rife with the same sort of philosophical/psychological inquiry.
***
Can a story about the nature of reality be categorized as sword-and-sorcery? I don’t want S&S minus the Clark Ashton Smithian-weird strain. And it’s got a warrior and a wizard in it.
I am a big fan of modern medicine. I like my car, I need electricity, I even (mostly) enjoy the internet. I could do without my television … but watching a good movie (on the DVD player) makes the glass teat worth owning.
I mourn the fields and sighing pines that are now condos, and the state of my attention before the omnipresent pocket screen. I miss the world pre-9/11, life in the middle before extreme political division. I miss local bookstores and reading culture, when everyone seemed to be holding a mass-market paperback.
I am not a purveyor of nostalgia, though nostalgia is genuine human emotion and has evolved with us for a reason. I do realize that we’ve come a long way baby, and even the decades of my youth—the 70s and 80s—had pockets of shittiness we’re better off without.
But I’m also not a blinkered techno-utopian.
I miss Google search before it became “enshittified” and definitely life before generative AI. Slop and outsourced thinking is a problem; not having a reliable way to know if something is true is worse.
Progress is just change, and change is sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Great things are gained with breakthroughs, something is inevitably lost along the way. There is no unseen digital hand, no Prometheus of circuitry and silicon, steering us ever forward to “better.” This belief is a myth.
The myth of progress does not only apply to technology. It applies to social progress, and the progress of a life.
As we grow older we gain wealth, wisdom, strength, autonomy, influence.
We lose innocence, wonder, malleability, potential. And if I’m getting dark, we lose everything at the end. Maybe we progress to some paradise of the afterlife, but there is no assurance there.
Unfortunately there is no magical formula for getting this balance right.
What can we do?
Slow the fuck down. Encourage and celebrate measured, incremental progress. Be thoughtful, as humans can be, and strive to make more of these changes the positive sort.
Be kinder, stop killing each other for a few minutes.
Celebrate our past, preserve and honor what is great about it.
Understand the tradeoffs that inevitably come with technology and efficiency and the sprawl of development.
Talk like adults about all this, rather than behave like children striving to win a game that never was one to begin with.
I realize I sound a bit like an old man shouting at clouds, without hope.
But I am hopeful we can figure this out, and discover the peace that comes with balance.
I also got in some quality time with my friend Tom Barber, who left me a mighty gift: 10 classic paperbacks, most published by Zebra in the 1970s, all with his cover art.
In return I gave Tom a ride on the pontoon boat on a beautiful, 10/10 afternoon.
Metal Friday typically steers away from bands that are hard rock/borderline metal (AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, etc.) with some exceptions. Or when Gordon Lightfoot died or I felt like talking about 80s KISS.
Not every Metal Friday is a song; sometimes I covered the metal news of the day, concert reviews, etc. With that in mind, here is your Metal Friday 100 post setlist; pretty good listening here IMO.
How has Megadeth not made a Metal Friday? Let’s fix that now with what is probably their best song.
1.Valkyries, Blind Guardian
2.Light Comes Out of Black, Rob Halford
3.Jerusalem, Bruce Dickinson
4.Falling off the Edge of the World, Black Sabbath
5.NM156, Queensryche
6.Hail and Kill, Manowar
7.Welcome Home (Sanitarium), Metallica
8.Beyond the Realms of Death, Judas Priest
9.Raining Blood, Slayer
10.Left Hand Black, Danzig
11.The Evil That Men Do, Iron Maiden
12.The Clairvoyant, Iron Maiden
13.Night Winds, Parasite
14.Queen of the Black Coast, Manilla Road
15.Man of Sorrows, Bruce Dickinson
16.Satsuma covers Ratt's "Lay it Down" and Judas Priest's "Hellion/Electric Eye"
17.Take Hold of the Flame, Live in Tokyo 1984, Queensryche
18.Armageddon Clan, Battle Beast
19.The Hunt, Sepultura
20.Darkest Hour, Iron Maiden
21.Heart of a Lion, Judas Priest
22.Sing a Last Song of Valdese, Eternal Champion
23.Between the Hammer and the Anvil, Judas Priest
24.I, Black Sabbath (with incredible Conan imagery)
25.Judas Priest! … and Gordon Lightfoot?
26.British Steel on the docket tomorrow night
27.Defending 80s KISS (A Million to One)
28.Orgasmatron, Motorhead
29.Nativity in Black (Black Sabbath tribute album)
30.Master of the Wind, Manowar
31.Wild Child, WASP
32.Master of Puppets, Metallica
33.Necropolis, Manilla Road
34.The Crue, Poison, Def Leppard, Joan Jett
35.Emerald, Thin Lizzy
36.Ace Frehley lead guitar! (Fractured Mirror)
37.Blood Tears, Blind Guardian
38.Rockin’ Again, Saxon
39.Headless Cross, Black Sabbath
40.A very metal week: Judas Priest/Queensryche, Iron Maiden (Halls of Valhalla)
41.The Clansman, Iron Maiden
42.Sea of Red, Judas Priest
43.Thunder Road, Judas Priest
44.Flaming Metal Systems, Manilla Road
45.Theater of Salvation, Edguy
46.Bible Black, Black Sabbath
47.Top 5 Manowar Songs
48.Show Don’t Tell, Rush
49.Kill Devil Hill, Bruce Dickinson
50.Let it Go, Def Leppard
51.Beginning of the End, Meliah Rage
52.Stranger in a Strange Land, Iron Maiden
53.En Force, Queensryche
54.Caught in the Middle, Ronnie James Dio
55.Traitor’s Gate, Judas Priest
56.RIP to Canada’s finest singer-songwriter, Gordon Lightfoot
57.Edge of Thorns, Savatage
58.If Heaven is Hell, Tokyo Blade
59.Curse My Name, Blind Guardian
60.As Heavy as I’ll go (Sepultura, Slayer)
61.Worms of the Earth, Eternal Champion
62.Force of a Storm, Sumerlands
63.Orion, Metallica
64.The Battle of Evermore and the timeless nature of fantasy
65.Resurrection, Rob Halford
66.Start the Fire, Metal Church
67.Season of the Witch, Grave Digger
68.Where Eagles Dare, Iron Maiden (for Nicko)
69.Cold Sweat, Thin Lizzy
70.Sign of the Southern Cross, Black Sabbath
71.The Rage, Judas Priest
72.Cauldron Born, Born of the Cauldron
73.Sixteenth Century Greensleeves, Rainbow (RIP Ronnie James Dio)
74.Gods of War, Def Leppard
75.Powerslave, Iron Maiden
76.War Pigs, Judas Priest
77.Goodbye to Romance: Reflections on Black Sabbath, Back to the Beginning, and the end of the road
78.Mystification, Manilla Road
79.Hell on Earth, Iron Maiden
80.Bruce Dickinson at the House of Blues, Boston MA Sept. 11, 2025
81.Atom and Evil, Black Sabbath
82.Strange Ways, Ace Frehley
83.Of Blind Guardian and the Quest for Tanelorn
84.The Sentinel, Judas Priest
85.Stonehenge, Spinal Tap
86.Computer God, Black Sabbath
87.Judas Be My Guide, Iron Maiden
88.Desert Plains, Judas Priest
89.Heavy metal, sword-and-sorcery, the Outsider ... and Iron Maiden's “Drifter”
90.Among the Living, Anthrax
91.Revelations, Judas Priest
92.The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune, Arkham Witch
93.Mountains, Manowar. RIP Ross the Boss
94.Defender, Manowar
95.Darkside of Aquarius, Bruce Dickinson
96.Don’t Break My Heart Again, Whitesnake
97.The Thin Line Between Love and Hate, Iron Maiden
(Note: The following is the lead item in this week's Arcane Arts. I also cover REH, Jane Yolen, 70s horror, and Mike Grell's Warlord. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox)
Metal is vast. Metal is diverse. Metal is sprawling. The number of subgenres is staggering … more than 70, are you kidding? And to be honest, a little stupid. Drone metal. Funeral doom. Djent metal. Some of the finer points make sword-and-sorcery vs. heroic fantasy look like high school debate club.
And so I don’t think it’s possible to write an absolutely definitive history of heavy metal. And even if you could, who would be interested in such a thing? If you like doom are you likely also a fan of funk metal or Christian metal?
This past weekend I finished reading an attempt at a comprehensive history, Andrew O’Neill’s A History of Heavy Metal. I’d describe it as breezy, entertaining, fairly well written. But also, quite biased and therefore incomplete. An ostensible history shouldn’t ignore bands that the author does not like. O’Neill hates glam metal, so we get 10 pages of why it sucks … except for maybe Appetite For Destruction. He also has little use for Anthrax and Megadeth (Dave Mustaine’s nasally voice grates on him) so they’re largely ignored too, despite their considerable footprint.
For what it’s worth I recommend A History of Heavy Metal as a breezy, sometimes entertaining read that filled in a few corners for me. Black and death metal, mainly, and a lot of bands I’ve never heard of.
What he wrote was fine… but it’s not what I want to read. Or write. I’d rather go deep than broad. Curated instead of encyclopedic.
This is a roundabout way of explaining how I ended up writing a heavy metal memoir. We have histories. We’ve got Sound of the Beast and Louder than Hell and O’Neill’s book. We have information: Videos, podcasts, even, a map. We’ve got a million stories of the bands and performers themselves.
We don’t need another Flame and Crimson for heavy metal.
So, I wrote something quite different. A story from one fan’s perspective—my own. My life, with heavy metal as the backdrop.
My memoir will only focus on the handful of metal genres I like. But I’m not writing a history. So if you’re looking for a treatise on Unblack Metal (a real subgenre, by the way) you’ll need to look elsewhere.
But if you’re looking for one fan’s utterly unique story, maybe you’ll like this. August is getting closer.
I was driving my John Deere around my lawn last weekend... cutting the grass of course, not just driving it around, though just driving around on a John Deere is a perfectly valid activity. I had queued up some old thrash song from the 80s and the Spotify app continued to play like songs from its omniscient algorithm. Which led me to this wonderful little rediscovery. "Medusa," off of 1985's Spreading the Disease. I hadn't heard it years, and had been missing it.
Spreading the Disease is Anthrax's sophomore effort but the first appearance by vocalist Joey Belladonna. He's kind of an odd fit for a thrash band with his traditional metal/high octave/operatic style of singing, but it works with the band--especially on this song. He sounds fantastic. And the main riff is absolutely killer.
Interestingly, executive producer Jon Zazula has songwriting credit for "Medusa," his only such contribution for Anthrax. The lyrics are fun if very much on the nose, not sure how Medusa would stare at you were it not with her eyes, but there you go:
Medusa, she's staring at you Medusa, with her eyes Medusa
In addition to the thrill of nostalgia from the song itself, my search for an accompanying visual led to this horrific, fantastically rendered scene from Clash of the Titans (1981).
This sequence genuinely creeped me out as a kid, and I still find it effective today. The unnatural jerkiness of Harryhausen's stop-motion animation only adds to the medusa's horrible otherness. Her eyes are particularly well-done, and I love the addition of the Naga-like tail.
