MOONSPELL frontman Fernando Ribeiro and TESTAMENT guitarist Alex Skolnick recently bonded over books on Side Jams With Bryan Reesman, trading picks for the most metal literature they’ve read.
Asked to name their choices, both immediately landed on William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. “That’s the first one I thought of,” Skolnick said. Ribeiro noted the book even contains the phrase “heavy metal,” often credited to Burroughs, adding that the term’s origins may also trace back to the sound and string gauges of LED ZEPPELIN. “The heavy metal expression was already in there,” he said. Skolnick agreed, calling Naked Lunch “far out” and “extreme,” adding, “If you could channel the intensity of extreme metal into a book, it would be Naked Lunch.”
Ribeiro also pointed to J.R.R. Tolkien as essential reading for symphonic and power metal fans, and praised German authors like Thomas Mann and Günter Grass for embodying metal’s epic scale. His standout pick, however, was Goethe’s Faust. “It has every ingredient of heavy metal,” he said. “It’s epic. Love. A bargain with the devil. Redemption.”
Skolnick’s modern pick was Don DeLillo’s White Noise, citing its unsettling “airborne toxic event” and cosmic dread. Ribeiro added DeLillo’s Silence, a short novel about the collapse of communication during a blackout. Unlike real-life outages that bring people together, Ribeiro said, Silence shows how quickly society unravels when communication disappears.
Skolnick also recalled a chance encounter with Margaret Atwood at BookExpo in New York City. “She grabbed my arm and pulled me over,” he said, leading to a brief exchange with novelist Michael Chabon—who, to Skolnick’s surprise, was wearing a RUSH shirt. “We ended up talking music. He’s a big RUSH fan.”
Skolnick has long spoken about the importance of reading, once writing that every good book is “like a vitamin, a workout, a healthy meal.” The benefits, he noted, aren’t immediate but accumulate over time, strengthening thought and mental well-being. Reflecting on his youth, he criticized how reading was reduced to obligation rather than discovery. As an adult, he embraced books that don’t just tell stories, but challenge assumptions and rise above what he calls “the sea of mediocrity.”