This nasty story from future could only have been written by a nasty man from the past, 1980s Stephen King. This was back in the day when he didn’t care, when he broke rules, when he threw “faggot” and “nigger” around liberally, and when he wasn’t pants-wettingly anxious about being a remembered as a Great American Author. He was already something far better than that: a good writer.

He was considered trash at the time. But even if he was, he was a unique kind of trash that defies obvious and easy comparison. Ray Bradbury wishes he was this pissed off. Harlan Ellison wishes he was this coherent. Dean Koontz wishes he was this misanthropic. Apparently the entire book was written over the course of a week, which works just fine – he doesn’t have the chance to get snarky and arch and clever-clever.

The plot is familiar to all, and honestly, not all that sensible. At one point, he moves the story to its next junction by giving the main character a supernatural vision. Then at the end, King can’t figure out what to do, so he blows everyone up. But the story always seemed secondary to The Running Man. The real star is King’s gritty, quasi-cyberpunk world, which he shows off through flashbacks, monologues, and those unexpected shots across the bow King is so good at. A good example of the latter is when the main character meets a woman with full breasts, and concludes she must be corrupt or criminal (because she’s eating well.)

The pace is breakneck. You’re afraid to stop reading because you might get whiplash. The book simply doesn’t have a dull or boring moment, from the man’s run-in with gangsters with hearts full of gold (and lungs full of cancer), to the incredible high-stakes bluffing game at the airport, to the final catastrophic flight to the FreeVee offices. It’s impossible that an out of work every-man could be this good at outshooting and outwitting trained killers, but the relentless pace of the book quashes these objections in your mind. You can’t smell a fart when they’re travelling at Mach 3.

This is one of those “look at me” books that does anything for your attention, and tries to be bigger and louder than a movie. A comparison to Ellison seems appropriate here, because he’s also known for doing anything in his stories for the sake of holding a punter’s attention. But unlike Ellison, King doesn’t seem to have Narcissistic personality disorder, so I don’t know what his excuse is.

This is the best Bachman book (although Misery would have edged it out, had it been released under that name), and probably the darkest and grittiest of King’s novels. 1984 pastiches are dull and overfamiliar these days, and so are cautionary tales about couch potatoes and reality TV, but The Running Man still scorches and sizzles on the page. This isn’t a maudlin, sentimental old man who writes with his literary reputation first and foremost in mind. This is 1980s Stephen King. Don’t walk, run.

Hailing from that legendary hotbed of heavy metal Ulaan Baataar, Mongolia, Ornaments of Agony is a funeral doom band (meaning that if you enjoy listening to it, they have failed and you are entitled to your money back).

Funeral doom is not a genre that lends itself to mutation and experiment. There is only one way to do this sound, and Ornaments of Agony sound much like Wormphlegm and Ahab and all the rest. A distant, reverb-saturated guitar assault rips at your ears, like buzzsaws from a kilometer away. A vocalist croaks and groans miserably, his voice distorted and Daleked beyond recognition. Pianos play ugly, chromatic melodies. Pianos seem a fixture in funeral doom, I suppose because an ear bored of guitar dissonance can be shocked anew by awful noises made on a piano. In D&D terms, the guitars are chaotic evil, while the pianos are lawful evil.

“Heregsuur” emerges from a null hypothesis of fuzzy industrial noise. The song initially sounds like a relaxing Pelican song before becoming nasty and brutal. “Huiten amisgal” is really too fast for funeral doom, and is more vocally-driven than the others, but the general template of dissonance remains.

The performance is (deliberately?) sloppy, with different tones and timbres just coming and going, none of them really in time or having much to do with each other. The old joke goes: three men in the third world are in prison, and they ask each other why. The first says ‘I was always 5 minutes late for work, so I was accused of sabotage’ The second says ‘I was always 5 minutes early for work, so I was accused of espionage’ But the third says ‘I was always on time for work, so I was accused of having a Western watch’. That could also describe the tracking and recording of this album.

“Tumen jargal, arvin zovlon” finishes the album much as it starts – that’s my one complaint, it’s that the album is too unvarying in its approach. Maybe the band members thought that the album should be constructed like a battleship – solid gray steel from top to bottom, with no point of weakness. But Sun O)))’s “Alice” shows that slow metal songs don’t have to be like that. You can finish different to how you started, without compromising a track or album’s intensity and bleakness.

Like all extreme metal, Ornaments of Agony abandons songwriting and merely tries to be an unforgettable experience. One band of this style sounds the same as the next, and I have no idea if this band’s one member is intentionally sloppy or just sucks at playing. But the goal is achieved, nevertheless. Genghis Khan would execute enemies by pouring liquid metal down their throats, and Ornaments of Agony continues his tradition in sonic form.

Do I want to see the future? No. The future is boring. What I want to see is the past.

The future is separated from us by a few sunrises and sunsets. The past is locked away forever. If you want to know what will happen in anno domini 3014, the solution is relatively easy: live a thousand more years. But we’ll never know for sure what happened in 1014, unless it’s documented in some way through art or writing (which themselves are unreliable). In theory, we could use computers to recursively calculate past events, but even that approach is better suited to the future than the past. It’s easier for a computer to take some causes and calculate the end state than to take an end state and calculate the causes.

What’s particularly interesting is musical history. Who was the first guitarist to use distortion? Who was the first drummer to use a matched grip? Many of these questions have no answers. People who make history often don’t realise they’re making history, and many things from music’s past are unrecorded and undocumented.

In Cauda Semper Stat Venenum is an Italian progressive rock album, allegedly from 1969. If this is true, then Jacula was more groundbreaking than a nose-diving 747 packed with shovels. The levels of distortion and heaviness rival anything Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, or Deep Purple could boast at the time, and the songwriting is dissonant, challenging, and very dark. If it could be proven that this is from 1969, you could definitely say that Jacula were the true forefathers of doom metal.

But maybe it’s not from 1969. The guitar distortion has a very processed and modern character, quite unlike the rawness of Link Wray’s early sound, or the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter”. There’s fairly technical guitar shredding that also doesn’t jibe well with a 1969 release date. Nobody can find any reference to this album in contemporary Italian music magazines. There are rumours that In Cauda Semper Stat Venenum was recorded much later, and given a ludicrous back-date to enhance its street cred.

Sadly, lies about release dates are common in metal. French hack Luc Mertz (who records as Zarach “Baal” Tharagh) claims he was playing black metal in 1983, before even the first Metallica album. Black metal musician Kanwulf claims to have released a demo in 1989, which seems unlikely given that the name “Kanwulf” comes from a TV series that aired in 1995, and this name is prominently stamped on the cover of his demo. Everyone wants to be the first to the party.

How well does this album stand up, if we give it a later release date? Not too well. The songwriting is bleak but tedious. Its symphonic themes are fairly complex but tonally the same, and this bores the ear. The guitars are just “there” – there’s no riffs driving the music, the way Tony Iommi would have it. The album’s one interesting moment is “Triumphatus sad”, where guitar solos and hammond keyboards duel back and forth in an interesting manner. Otherwise, the album is a monotonous backdrop of sound. ONE sound.

Does In Cauda Semper Stat Venenum have value? That depends on the release date. If it’s from 1969, it’s an important part of musical history. If it’s from the 90s, it’s worthless and forgettable. And nobody knows when it’s from, so I guess it’s like they used to say: You pays your money and you takes your choice.

Or did they? I don’t know. That’s from the past too.