I read this book every year minus the last year, since high school. I don't know why. It's not like it's a brilliant book or deviates from the normal autobiography, but it has something about it that draws me in. I'm a fan of the man, but not enough to say he's pure genius.

( )

I first saw Marilyn Manson when he opened for Nine Inch Nails on the Downward Spiral tour. He made essentially no impression on me. When he came to fame a couple years later, I couldn’t stand him – he was just another shock rocker, a dime a dozen, juvenile and desperate. Granted, he took his music and his shows farther than most, but I have no respect for grown men who seriously espouse the philosophy of a pissed off teenager. Grow up.

It’s not that I disagree with the goals of shock rock; but I find it intellectually lightweight, simplistic and jarringly naïve. The worldview that drives shock-for-shock’s sake offers easy, obvious, small answers to big, complicated issues. Frankly, from what I’ve seen – shock rock acts are usually the least effective way to achieve their own goals. It’s such a waste of effort.

Given my lack of respect for him, I can’t tell you why I read Manson’s autobiography, The Long, Hard Road Out of Hell, when it first hit shelves in 1998. (It was probably the reference to Dante.) It deeply impressed me at the time. He showed himself to be very intelligent, and admirably self-aware. His act, his music, his philosophy had far more thought and intention behind it than I had ever credited.

In the intervening years, I've become a Marilyn Manson fan. He outgrew his shock-for-shock’s sake beginning and evolved into a performer who is far more musically sophisticated, much more entertaining, and more purely theatrical. I still despise his first three albums, but Mechanical Animals is one of the best rock albums to come out of the late ‘90s; his cover of "Tainted Love" is brilliant! Looking back on it, I think that reading The Long, Hard Road Out of Hell is what started my conversion into fandom.

In the years since I first read it, I’ve wondered if the book was really as good as I remembered, or if my good impression was simply the result of extremely low expectations.

Having re-read it now, I can say that it’s a bit of both.

Manson is pretentious, arrogant, immature, pathetic. His governing philosophy is pedestrian pissed-off-teenage-boy solipsism and nothing more. It’s actually embarrassing how seriously he takes it!

But his great intelligence is still obvious. His self-awareness is far deeper than one can expect from a run-of-the-mill self-professed nihilist, and the degree to which he controlled his own persona is impressive. He’s very honest – as harshly as he judges and hates the world around him, he’s completely open about hating and judging himself first. He spends pages ridiculing modern culture – and then throws in one sentence where he admits that he’s a hypocrite. He talks candidly about wanting to hurt and destroy others – and then tells us that he knows he’s a horrible person. He knows exactly what kind of monster he made himself.

What’s most important, though, is that by the end of the book, what he wants more than anything is to find his own humanity again.

What makes this book interesting to me now is where it fits in Manson’s timeline. Antichrist Superstar – what I consider the last of his juvenile shock-rock albums – came out in 1996 and he wrote Long, Hard Road in the aftermath of that tour. 1998, the same year the book was published, saw the release of Mechanical Animals – the album that marks the beginning of his evolution out of his juvenile phase, into a more sophisticated and interesting performer.

This book, therefore, is a part of his transformation. This is him assessing everything he’d done to date and trying to learn from it.

We know now what the transformation yielded. We know what it taught him.

He grew up. Which is a far greater accomplishment than many shock-rockers achieve. ( )

Well written and engaging but linear and bombastic. A bit self-indulgent but interesting in parts. Ultimately a self-aggrandizing first person perspective on a divisive character of murky intellect. ( )

En estos momentos y cuando logro escaparme de esta cochinada adictiva, estoy leyendo "El largo y duro camino de salida del Infierno", escrito por uno de mis ídolos musicales, el Reverendo Marilyn Manson.
Y yo sé que muchos pensarán "Puta ,un libro escrito por Marilyn Manson? y es que escribe?, ha de hablar de puras drogas, satanismo y cosas asi!" Pues es cierto. La autobiografía de Marilyn Manson habla de drogas, satanismo, sexo, rebeldía y rock and roll. ¿De qué otra cosa podría hablar? Ahhh, pues mire uste que cosas, habla también de amor, de sentirse vulnerable, del largo y duro camino que debe seguir una persona para encontrarse a sí mismo y a aquello que quiere representar.

El libro narra la vida del Reverendo (para aquellos que no lo sepan, Manson fue nombrado reverendo de la iglesia de satán por su fundador Anton LaVey, no es para que le pongan un altar, nada más para que lo sepan y tengan algo de cultura) desde los inicios de su adolescencia hasta la gira promocional del disco que lo lanzó a la fama mundial, el Antichrist Superstar (aquél que cumplío 10 años éste 8 de octubre pasado).

Manson es una de las personas más inteligentes que he tenido la oportunidad de leer. Es un hombre que sabe exactamente lo que quiere y cómo conseguirlo. Sin embargo, no siempre fue así, un aspecto interesante del libro es ir descubriendo cómo se convirtió en lo que hoy es... y créanme que no tiene nada que ver con que su abuelo hubiese abusado sexualmente de él, con que se haya quitado dos costillas y su baterista las utilice en cada concierto, con que haya sido Paul en Los Años Maravillosos... Todos ésos son sólo rumores.

¿Quieren conocer la verdad contada por el hombre que la vivió? ¿Quieren divertirse un rato leyendo algo que no pretende ser serio en ningún momento? ¿Quieren aprender algo de ustedes mismos? ¿Quieren saber las reglas que les indicarán si son drogadictos? ¿Quieren conocer un aspecto más de un hombre que ha hecho de su vida una obra de arte? Éste es el libro que deben leer entonces.es un libro que me encanta, es muy entretenido, no te aburre y no se queda fijo en una sola cosa.

Para terminar, una cita del libro que les permitirá ver más claramente la forma en la que su autor se expresa:

"People don't keep journals for themselves. They keep them for other people, like a secret they don't want to tell but they want everyone to know. The only safe place for your thoughts is your memory, which people can't take and read when you're not looking -at least not yet. I'm starting to think that if the Internet is the CB radio of the nineties, then the home computer is the trailer park of the soul, a dangerous tool in the hands of idiots. Eventually self-impossed fascism will destroy man as he convinces himself he doesn't have to think anymore."
(Para los de escuela de gobierno la cita dice: " La gente no guarda un diario para elos, los hacen para otras personas, como un secreto que no quieren contar pero que quieren que todos sepan. El único lugar seguro para tus pensamientos, es tu memoria. donde la gente no puede leerlo mientras no ests viendo.Al menos, todavía no. Estoy empezando a creer que el internet es la radio de onda corta de los 90's, por lo que las computadoras son los parques de estacionamiento de l alma. Una herramienta muy peligrosa, en manos de los idiotas. Eventualmente el fascismo auto impuesto, destruirá al hombre, mientras este se convence a si mismo, que ya no tiene que pensar.") ( )

Well, this is certainly a Marilyn Manson book about Marilyn Manson. I had purchased this book ages ago but forgot about it. After sorting through things to give away to Goodwill/charity I found it again and decided to read it. It was certainly an experience.

The book is written 1st person by Marilyn Manson (with Neil Strauss) and it is basically exactly what you would think a memoir by Marilyn Manson would be like. This is basically the story of his early days, both growing up and the start of the band. I found it reasonably interesting and pretty entertaining.

It's always hard to decide what is really and fiction in any memoir written by a celebrity, and Marilyn Manson is no exception. I would say it's even harder in this case. So much of his stage persona is tied up in being the most outrageous with the "shocking" childhood. Is any of this true? Well, most of these tales I've actually heard repeated in various interviews over the years. The backstage stories told after the band achieved some measure of success seem plausible, if overblown and full of hyperbole. Which seems just about right for a book about Marilyn Manson.

Overall, this book is entertaining and interesting but probably only really for fans of Marilyn Manson (the person or the band). ( )