Like Virgil of Dante's Inferno, Kavadlo guides us through metal's long and complicated relationship with literature, art and critical theory, elegantly displaying how metal is more erudite than its critics – proving them wrong again and again.

T Coles, author of Death Metal (2022)

In Rock of Pages, Jesse Kavadlo sings a song of 80s metal, an epic account written from the inside that captures the music and its moment. As he does so, Kavadlo joins Dee Snider at the hearing table, testifying for the literary merit of the genre against the attacks of Tipper Gore and the PMRC. In the end, for Kavadlo, 80s heavy metal was dangerous, but not in the way its detractors argued; rather, like great literature, its Explicit Content challenged American pieties. In Kavadlo's hands, metal also reminds us of the value of literature and all expressive art, however uncomfortable, and of the importance of protecting it from the censors.

Samuel Cohen, Associate Professor of English, University of Missouri, US

This witty, engaging, yet erudite study plumbs metal's relationships with its literary forebears to prove that this often-dismissed genre rewards close reading and carries significant social implications. With a light touch, Kavadlo shows that heavy metal offers more than just a good time.

Mark Osteen, editor of The Beatles through a Glass Onion (2019)

Jesse Kavadlo rips through the 1980s like a guitarist hammering a solo-raw, precise, and unrelenting. Rock of Pages isn't rock 'n' roll nostalgia, it's cultural theory in leather pants, wired on feedback, and attuned to the distortions of myth, image, and power. This is the book the decade-and its readers-have been waiting for.

Bob Batchelor, author of Roadhouse Blues (2022) and The 1980s (2006)

Rock of Pages makes a lively case that the theatricality of 1980s heavy metal concealed a far more literate imagination than its critics were willing to admit … [It] offers an energetic and thoughtful attempt to situate heavy metal within the broader cultural currents of its era.

PopMatters Magazine