Literature that reads like metal sounds

[ASBO]

The most metal books ever:

* Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Celine
* The Possibility of an Island, Michel Houellebecq
* The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
* Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
* White Noise, Don Delillo
* Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
* American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
* The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe
* Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
* The Story of the Eye, Georges Bataille
* Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

These books are metal in spirit and topic, and should keep you reading for awhile. If you haven't read all of them, you might consider it, since most of this list is essential for current cultural literacy anyway. Fiction only.

[Abyssal]

I haven't read all of those, but of those I have, Heart of Darkness is really the only one that sees appropriate. Journey to the End of the Night is definitely a stretch. It may be an interesting read, but Celine didn't really have very much to contribute to anything besides "Civilization is deceitful, twisted and confused - and so am I". Metal (at its best) is too lucid, focused and certain of itself to be really compatibile in that case.

[ASBO]

Additional suggestions:

Paradise Lost, John Milton
Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
At the Mountains of Madness, H.P. Lovecraft
Jules Verne
H.G. Wells
E.A. Poe
Faust, Wolfgang von Goethe
Frankenstein, Mary Shelly
Songs of Experience, William Blake
Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse
Lord of the Rings trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien

[dungarthbanshee]

Anything by Robert E. Howard. The themes of many Conan stories are very metal, praising Nietzsche's irrationality over rational pedantic, and primitive barbarism over unhealthy unnatural civilization, not to mention the anti-christian tones, in this case "Mithra". Beautiful and lush writing also, I can't imagine having skipped Howard's work and having the same appreciation for literature that I do.

The Complete Chronicles of Conan was recently released.