I spun Tyrant while reading Jerry Bledsoe’s Blood Games, a hurtfully true story of three boys, two with startlingly high IQs, who were caught in murder-for-profit. Death prose for a New Orleans death metal CD sounded reasonable and resonant enough for my mind. After cracking the Olde English-printed lyrics booklet, though (yes, death metal lyrics usually fascinate, and no, you won’t be able to figure out a single syllable from the singer), I knew I should have been reading David Guterson’s new novel The Other. As Guterson’s John William, ever alienated from his own species, could not stop raising Gnostic scenarios of divinity enslaved by an erroneous Yahweh, Tyrant’s words throw open a wide vista beyond conventional worship. A sometimes confused vista, true—“I would rather burn in hell than cling to man-made falsehoods” sounds out proud—but a definitively anti-Christian vision would lump hell itself into those man-made falsehoods. “I Was Ignored. And Judged. And Cast Down.” (a song title) quotes Himmler (“It is the curse of greatness that it must step over dead bodies to create new life”) with, hopefully a twist cast back on “tormentors.” “Free will made flesh / Renounce the divine” renounce history itself and yea the self-consuming serpent Ouroboros might take its tail out of its own mouth, might “[turn] its head to strike its master.” The imagery makes up in passionate sprawling what it lacks in consistency. The music sounds like the sub-atomic level finely-tuned engine zooming up and around Pike’s Peak, and the singer sounds like he’s getting his skull crushed under the receptacle of that same engine. Come for the heaviness, stay for the vision, spin anew to pin down that vision.

I’m still nervous about that Himmler quote, though.