Dark Days

November 16, 2015
Debut author Blythe, lead singer of the metal band Lamb of God, centers his powerful and intelligent memoir on his 2012 arrest and incarceration for 37 days in a harrowing Czech Republic jail. The charge was manslaughter, related to the death of a fan at a concert two years earlier. Blythe admits to having fought the demons of drug and alcohol abuse in his life, but he maintains his sanity during his prison time through his certainty that he had not been drinking before the performance, and that he had not meant to hurt the fan who had jumped onto the stage. When Blythe pushed the young man away, he fell off the stage, hit his head, and died. Blythe's brutal honesty allows him to accept that he might have to pay the price for a deadly crime. He is excellent at describing his prison, "a grim and filthy collage of unhappiness; constructed of iron-rodded barriers of finality, and the collective claustrophobic despair of the men and women locked behind them." He also gives a suitably Kafkaesque of his trial, during which he is acquitted after the prosecutorâwho had vowed to discredit Blythe's entire storyâasks only three questions before falling asleep. A mixture of horror and humor makes this a remarkable memoir.