What do you do when you have some new songs, but not enough for an album? When you’ve got unreleased tracks, but not enough for a compilation? When you’ve got a bunch of band members hanging around the studio, but they’re not seriously interested in a reunion? In 2010, Danish power metal band Iron Fire’s answer was to “do all three simultaneously.”

It’s hard to figure out exactly what sort of album this is – most database type websites consider it a new studio release, but most of it was written in 2003, and was present in rough form in various demos. It’s mixed up with a few, and all of them are recorded by the band’s former members: and it’s a metal band, so there’s a ton of former members.

I don’t know why they bothered tracking down every random asshole who was ever in this band to contribute instruments – you can’t hear any difference. The drums are very triggered and mechanical. The guitars are a pulverising backwash of distortion. You’re not going to be smiling and thinking “hey, that’s Morten Plenge on drums!” Everyone’s performance sounds fairly interchangeable, except for vocalist Martin Steene, who has always humanised some very inhuman music and continues to do so here.

The songs are all fairly strong, although it’s clear why some of them never appeared on a real Iron Fire album. “The Phantom Symphony” is long-winded, but contains a lot of tasty treats, tacky horror-movie obsessed lyrics aside. “Back to the Pit” and “The Graveyard” are just the usual fare. “Crossroads” is a ballad that serves to break up the relentless speed that dominates most of the album.

The new songs are better. “Reborn to Darkness” has a jangly, progressive edge to its riff approach. “Still Alive” lays on the quadtracked guitars, sounding more like Nevermore than a European power metal band. “My Awakening” is fast and powerful as fuck, probably the most immediate and memorable track on the album, with some well-placed death metal vocals in the chorus. The bonus version of the album contains an orchestral version of “Crossroads” and another re-recorded song called “Afterlife”, which sounds pleasant enough.

The presentation and production is good, but it’s not as much as a retrospective as you’d hope for – this is a VERY modern sounding Iron Fire. I hope you like downtuned guitars and death metal vocals. Ultimately I don’t know how necessary something like this is – Metalmorphosized is something aimed at the band’s hardcore fans, and they’d probably be more satisfied by hunting down the demos that these songs originally appeared on. Still one of the more memorable compilation-cum-studio-cum-reunion albums I’ve heard.

Before Burroughs decided his purpose in life was to beat the English language like a bitch who owed him money, he was writing things like this – a sane, lucid, and readable pulp novel about his addiction to heroin. Books about drugs often have a hallucinogenic quality, as if they’re trying to give the reader a second hand high. This isn’t like that. Burroughs is offering his body as a testing ground: he puts substances into it and writes about it in analytic terms.

This was shocking in 1953. In 2015, not so much. Rich trust fund brat pulls the silver spoon from his mouth and starts cooking coke on it: stop the presses. Even if it’s not a pack of lies like A Million Little Pieces, the story is very familiar. I feel like I’m reading about a man’s disclosure of sexual envy and mid-life ennui. We get it. This is not special.

Its interesting if you want to know more about drug culture in America before Vietnam, Iran-Contra, crack cocaine, and all the rest. But really, not that much happens in it. Burroughs describes how he got involved with the scene, the interesting characters he met, and his occasional run-ins with the law. Beyond that, he doesn’t tell us much. This isn’t an exploration of man’s dark heart, it’s a police report.

Subsequent re-issues have tried to shoot steroids into the story with lurid, impressionistic cover art. But the original Ace Books cover art best captures the spirit of the tale: a man struggling with a woman, who has knocked a hypodermic syringe out of his hand. This is the most dramatic incident in the book, and even then it’s not all that interesting. Burroughs’ sexual proclivities are written about in the same dry way – he throws in off-handed mentions about boffing men, and then its back to scoring drugs. I was curious for more. These details about his life could have been expanded upon, and expounded upon. Instead, we get sketches.

But Junky has some moments where Burroughs really hits paydirt and gives us something good. I liked his description of being a drug addict. Paraphrased, it goes something like “I didn’t take drugs to get high. I took drugs to be functional. Heroin meant I could brush my teeth and shave myself and put on clean clothes. That was my high.” Pleasure operates at a tight Malthusian limit: no matter how much you dump into the brain, once a habit starts there will never be enough. I was reminded of a rotten.com article on crystal meth, and how quickly you degrade to a state where basic, mundane life is impossible without it.

Moments like that are chinks in the armor of Junky, and I wish there were more. Right now, it seems like a paradox – a tell-all book that tells almost nothing. I was hoping for more insights, more details, more specifics on what it’s like to be a man like Burroughs in the 1950s. I wonder if the good stuff was left on the cutting room floor: this was a different age for publishing, just as it was for everything else.

I suppose you could argue that Burroughs promotes a positive social message by making drugs look boring.

Twilight creator Stephanie Meyer has a gift for characterization. On first (and second, and third) reading, you might think the gift is defective, coated in Anthrax, made by slave labour in Shenzhen, China, and should be returned posthaste to the dollar store where she bought it.

But it’s true, she does write good characters…if you view characterization from a certain perspective. Complaining about Bella Swan being a bad character is like complaining about Georgi Markov’s ricin-tipped umbrella because it doesn’t keep you dry in the rain.

Bella’s supposed to have no motivations, no will, and no identifying details. This is intentional, because young girls are supposed to imagine that they are her. She’s a blank shape moving through the text with “YOUR FACE HERE” written on it. You’re supposed to close their eyes and imagine you’re Bella, being romanced by a handsome jerk. They say that cricket appeals to people because everyone thinks they’re good at it. Twilight seems like cricket – it packages a fantasy in a way that makes it seem like it could happen to you.

There are male equivalents. Ninety years before Twilight, there was a book called A Princess of Mars, where a man from our world is transported to Mars, and more or less becomes king of it, winning the heart of a beautiful woman. But Edgar Rice Burroughs made a mistake in John Carter’s characterisation – he was too tough. Tall, handsome, a soldier from the Civil War, he lacked that everyman quality. Maybe that was less of a problem in 1912, when you still met everymen who were like that, but still.

Ripoff books soon appeared that corrected this flaw. John Norman’s infamous Gor series eventually pupated into a diary of Norman’s unashamed and aberrent sexual fantasies, but the first book (Tarnsman of Gor) was a retread of A Princess of Mars with the intimidating alpha male hero changed into an unassuming college professor. That’s doing it right. To appeal to science fiction fans, you really want a nerd hero, not someone who resembles the jocks who bully them on the football field.

It creates realism problems: it doesn’t seem plausible that John Norman’s hero could so quickly pick up Bruce Lee-esque fighting abilities (at one point, defeating a dozen armed men with his hands literally tied behind his back). But that’s not the point. The hero has to code as a nerd. It doesn’t matter whether he actually does anything nerdy. It’s like The Social Network Movie – where Mark Zuckerberg effortlessly owns every conversation he’s in, has the eerie confidence of a cult leader, but he knows a lot about programming so I guess he’s a nerd.

In any case, “nerd becomes king of fantasyland” was the number one cliche of fantasy books for several decades (wielding several ancillary cliches such as “the first alien lifeform encountered on the planet is an attractive humanoid female”). It started to become annoying, because usually the author tried to both have his cake and eat it, by making their nerd suddenly a cool ass-kicking hero when the story required it.

This approach has metastasized into the world of videogames (where blank cipher Gordon Freeman is a dorky scientist who obviously can outfight teams of Black Ops specialists), as well as Hollywood movies (where the hottest girl in high school can’t get a date because she’s quirky and has a random sense of humor, or whatever).

Artists try to have it both ways, and we get characters that aren’t just fake but contradictory in a self-annihilatory fashion, like matter and antimatter mixed in a flask. Books, movies, etc are full of fat characters who wear size zero jeans, master generals who make utterly retarded decisions for the sake of author’s convenience, etc. In books, the labels always lie.