The Black Album

De: Matthew Pegas

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

A collection of short stories and essays from writer and podcaster Matthew Pegas.

“Matthew Pegas’s mind is both alarming and beautiful, gracefully holding up a psychedelic mirror to the lurid and phoney political driven online vortexes that young men drown in, starving of homosocial camaraderie. His talent is in capturing the nuanced and disorienting feelings that only come from late night internet spirals with 300 tabs open. Reading The Black Album sometimes feels like diving into the most dangerous online spaces while also getting an explicit, uncensored look at a young man spinning into psychological madness. A violent remix of short stories, cultural analysis and snapshots of digital despair makes this one hell of a debut rock n roll record blurring the real and the fake.”

—Alex Kazemi, author of New Millennium Boyz


“Matthew Pegas is figuring out how to live in a world which seems increasingly uninhabitable. The Black Album is a work of compelling modern alchemy; its materia the internet and manhood, the body, the occult, the darkness—and from this he has made just enough light to see the way.”
—Brad Kelly, Co-Host of Art of Darkness Podcast, author of “House of Sleep”


"How did young men become so lost? This is just one of the many topical subjects Pegas wrestles within the pages of The Black Album, and for this, I feel the need to acknowledge the effort put forth. Pegas is a young man, born in 1994, a Zillennial or Zennial, a group of people born between the beautiful tailspin of the late 1990s and early Aughts. I can think of no other young man of Pegas’ generation pondering such important subjects in such a classically considered fashion, a continuing conversation with Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and Joan Didion’s The White Album, but with the commonality of Uvalde or Sandy Hook always in mind, a cancer that won’t go away, no matter how much lip service politicians give to gun reform. School shootings, the loss of community, the importance of ritual to manifest a personal will to power, the satanic pull of Las Vegas, the need for meditation to dampen the blur of everyday white noise coming at us from seemingly everywhere—the internet, the undead unblinking eye of the screen, the thick wedge on your wrist, the mysterious chunky black monolith you hold in your hand… these are all subjects Pegas tackles with a true determination to help other young men find answers, or at the very least, to learn how to seek—and not to ignore the female of the species, but The Black Album is a book for young men, written by a young man—there is no estrogen to be found within these pages."

—James Nulick, author of Valencia and The Moon Down to Earth