A review by mckibbin
Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground by Didrik Søderlind, Michael Moynihan

1.0

I love books about music scenes (any music scene, really) and am not immune from morbid curiosity about murderers and miscreants – but hells bells was this a slog. Written mostly in sensationalist fanzine style (“the prison environment functions as a hothouse for Vikernes’s fertile mind”) with some splashes of Dr. Evil deciding if things are evil enough, the book offers some minor rebukes and corrections at times but is mostly content to just let the hateful BS spew forth unfiltered, transcript-style, from provincial, cosplaying edgelords and boring old bigots like Varg Vikernes, whose prison rantings are so predictable and tedious that they’d make a disappointed Odin gouge out his other eye.