SOURCE: "The Devil Sings the Blues: Heavy Metal, Gothic Fiction and 'Postmodern' Discourse," in Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 26, No. 3, Winter, 1992, pp. 151-64.

In the following essay, Hinds delineates the shared formal, thematic, and historic features of Gothic fiction and heavy-metal music, viewing both as subgenres—a term that Hinds takes care to redefine—that subvert their parent forms, the novel and rock and roll, respectively, and use images of the occult to critique mainstream culture.

   Maybe it's the time of year,
 And then maybe it's the time of man.
          —Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, "Woodstock"

It is a long way from the 1764 appearance of Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto to the 1968 Led Zeppelin I, but the monstrous subgenre behavior of the latter, one of the first unabashedly Heavy Metal albums, surprisingly resembles the former, both formally and historically. The first in a series of albums that came...