Randy Blythe's New Book Just Beyond the Light: Exclusive Excerpt + Giveaway Contest

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19-02-2025

The post Randy Blythe's New Book Just Beyond the Light: Exclusive Excerpt + Giveaway Contest appeared first on Consequence.
In addition to fronting one of heavy metal's premier bands, Randy Blythe is becoming a prolific author. Following his 2015 debut memoir, Dark Days, the Lamb of God frontman is back with a new autobiographical book, Just Beyond the Light (Making Peace with the Wars Inside Our Head).
Ahead of its February 18th release, Consequence is sharing an exclusive excerpt from Just Beyond the Light (order here), along with giving away three hard-cover copies of the book.
While Dark Days dealt with 'the most harrowing episodes of his past,' including Blythe's headline-making imprisonment in a Czech prison, Just Beyond the Light focuses on 'how he works daily to maintain positivity in a world that feels like it is spinning out of control.'
Blythe says of the new book, 'For me, the single most gratifying aspect of being an artist is learning that your work has been useful to others in some way. I've been told by lots of readers that my last book, Dark Days, helped them — I hope Just Beyond the Light does the same.'
In promotion of Just Beyond the Light, Blythe will embark on a book tour beginning February 19th in Philadelphia, and wrapping up March 14th in San Diego (pick up tickets here). However, the metal singer warns parents not to bring their kids, as 'some of the stories I will be telling will involve heavy, HEAVY alcohol and drug usage, as well as the batshit insane situations that occurred as a result of said substance intake.'
Below, you can enter to win one of three copies of Just Beyond the Light (contest ends March 14th at 11:59 PM ET), and read an exclusive excerpt from Chapter 3 of the book. You can also guarantee yourself a copy of the book by ordering it from Amazon.
Win Randy Blythe's (Lamb of God) New Book Just Beyond the Light
Chapter Three: MY WAY
There is a war inside my head, an incessant conflict ignited daily by my constantly shifting perception of reality. This internal Ragnarok kicked off when I was around eight years old, the age I first became aware that adults were not infallible beings, that I could not trust all grown-ups to act in an upright manner, that some of them were not even worthy of my childish respect. Before then, I moved blissfully through life, walking happily along in the feather-light footsteps of innocence. Because I was lucky enough to be raised by moral and loving parents, I believed that everyone thought the same way that I had been taught to — we were all equal, no one better than anyone else for any reason. My parents told me that we were all children of a loving and caring God, and as such we should love one another equally in kind.
This seemed a sensible way to live, and the people within my tiny immediate orbit gave me no reason to think otherwise. I was never abused in any manner by any adult, but at a certain point I became aware that not everyone or everything was what it first seemed to be.
Most people generally wore a mask of decency in public, but in private or under duress, sometimes cracks would appear in the facade of decorum. Adults would say they believed one thing and then do another as angry and unguarded glimpses of true feelings peeped through the splintered face of their civility. Oddly to my young mind, this seemed to happen more freely around children such as me, as if these adults considered us so dimwitted as to be beneath notice. But children are nothing if not great noticers, and as I cataloged incidents of the hypocrisy and sheer stupidity some adults displayed, my childish illusions of their flawless benevolence were ripped away. Despite this rude awakening, a great part of me still saw so much beauty in the world, still felt so much love for and from many different good people that I couldn't automatically sink into a prepubescent riot of nihilism and apathy. Life could be extremely painful, yes, but it was also full of incredible joy. At that point, the long fight with myself began, a battle between hope and despair for the character of my soul.
One man inside me is almost unbearably sunny, a yammering, hippieish sort of dude who not only wants everyone to get along but also firmly believes that's possible. Indeed, at times Mister Relentless Optimism feels like we are on the brink of a planet wide social satori, a mass realization that we are nothing other than one great interconnected web of light. He believes that progress is not only possible but also actually occurring — just look at the advances in science, technology, and medicine! Comparing our modern medical knowledge to the ludicrous superstitions of the past ('When people acted weird back in the day, they used to drill holes in their heads to let the demons out! Imagine being that primitive — thank God we live now!'), he sees irrefutable progress. If he ever becomes discouraged about ongoing social inequities, he quickly reminds himself to consider life just over a hundred years ago, when women didn't have the right to vote and Jim Crow laws ruled the land. This cheerful dude believes that even the worst, most incorrigible criminal-minded sociopathic assholes can be rehabilitated if they are just given a chance, shown some compassion, and gently prodded in a constructive direction. Mister Relentless Optimism's heart often hurts, but only because it's ripping apart at the seams with a wild and savage love for every atom in the universe.
Mister Relentless Optimism wakes up at dawn, hums a verse or two of 'Kumbaya,' then throws open his antique French windows to take in all that glorious sunshine. He smiles at the beauty unfolding before him and says to the world: 'Hang in there, everyone — we're all going to be okay!' Then he spins old-school seventies dub reggae albums and bounces around his well-lit apartment having encouraging conversations with his houseplants.
Then there's the other guy.
The Dark One looks around and sees a world full of conflict and strife. He knows that it has always been this way and always shall be, because history has proven that the urge to war with others is an intrinsic and inescapable component of human nature. For each publicly celebrated altruistic action and advance in our society, he scans the news and quickly finds what he's looking for: a multitude of vile reactions and regressions in the name of self-interest and greed. The Dark One knows that despite all our advances in technology, we are swiftly sinking to the bottom of an awful abyss of moronic, narcissistic self-destruction. As his keen and cynical eye notes, this downward moral and intellectual trajectory is aided — nay, propelled — by the for-profit misuse of that same technology. On devices and in forums made possible solely by the rigorous labor of scientifically minded individuals, the demonization of science and the rejection of reason, knowledge, and objective reality itself are not only accepted but also celebrated and weaponized. The irony would be so judgmentally delicious if it wasn't so goddamned pathetic. The Dark One sees a willful, gleeful embrace of ignorance; a roiling human sea of hubris, stupidity, and hatred rising faster each day, much like the levels of our actual oceans. He knows that even if we come to some sort of peace with each other and manage not to destroy Earth, it doesn't really matter because in approximately five billion years the sun will burn out and our planet will die. The Dark One sits writhing not so much in an existential crisis (which implies the possibility of a solution) but in the continual dawn of an existential Armageddon.
The Dark One wakes up at three in the afternoon with a splitting headache, groans, then stumbles off the couch to make sure the deadbolts on his reinforced steel door are still locked. Through the peephole, he sees a slushy wintry mix falling on the dirty sidewalk outside and mutters to himself: 'It's too late. Drop the bomb now — NOW! — and wipe 'em all out. Maybe something that deserves to live will evolve next.' Then, beneath the flickering light of a single naked bulb hanging by frayed wires from his nicotine-stained ceiling, he flips the early-nineties Norwegian black metal album to hear the other side and sharpens his knife.
In fact, both of these guys are undeniably right about some things. Equally as important, both of them are dead wrong about even more things. Much like our asinine two-party political system here in America, both of them are blind to the actual reality unfolding right in front of them.
Mister Relentless Optimism is a schmuck. His cheerfully myopic vision fails to see the magnitude of the problems the world faces. He mostly just sits around blissfully hoping for the best. 'Hoping for the best' without action to back it up is worse than useless. What if Martin Luther King Jr. had never gotten past the 'dream' part of his famous 'I Have a Dream' speech? What if he had just sat around dreaming about the day little black boys and black girls would be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers instead of getting his ass handed to him by redneck cops across the South? I highly doubt I would have sat down at my favorite Mexican restaurant the other day for dinner and conversation with my friend Puma, a black man I refer to as 'brother' without a second thought. And yes, MLK paid for his dream with his life— but sometimes that's the cost of progress.
The Dark One is no fun at parties. And no matter how much I let other people twist my head into misanthropic knots, I am still a human being and as such a social animal. Like it or not, I need human connection to carry on with some degree of mental stability. James B. Stockdale was a US Navy fighter pilot and student of Stoic philosophy who was captured and kept prisoner in the infamous Hanoi Hilton during the Vietnam War. During his seven years as a POW, Stockdale was both repeatedly tortured and kept in isolation for lengthy periods. Years after his brutal ordeal, he concluded that long-term erosion of human purpose was more effectively achieved through isolation than torture. Although I am no scholar of seventeenth-century poetry, John Donne's famous 'no man is an island' line rings irritatingly true to my ear— experience has shown me that if I isolate myself too much, things get weird. And yes, it's true, many, many people suck— but I can't maintain a healthy existence without them.
These two drastically different characters, whipping the ship of my emotional state back and forth through the stormy seas of existence, resemble very closely the highs and lows of my active alcoholism. While drinking and drugging, at times I reveled in states of ecstatic bliss, periods when all was right in the universe (at least in my muddled perceptions), and I felt on top of the world. Matching that grand and delusional mountain peak were rapid descents into a foul-smelling valley of self-pity and sadness, a wretched place where all I saw was darkness. Every little inconvenience was merely more evidence that life was an entirely pointless exercise. This up-and-down emotional roller-coaster ride was exhausting, but people with experience told me that if I got and stayed sober things would start to level out and eventually I would find some balance and be content to walk a middle path.
'Walking a middle path' sounded so dreadfully boring to me, so . . . average. I have never really been interested in 'average' anything. But after decades of the highest highs and lowest lows, I was just too damn tired to climb aboard the roller-coaster anymore, so I threw in the towel and quit drinking. At first, the highs and lows were still there (minus the hefty bar tab and attendant hangovers), but slowly I began to find my emotions more on the beam. Now I am just content to be sober, no longer annoyingly overjoyed at the fact I no longer drink nor morosely romanticizing the not-so-good old days. My sobriety is overwhelmingly pedestrian, and unless I am discussing it with someone else, I don't really think about it much throughout the day— it just is. Being sober is my normal state these days, and that's good enough for me.
Being a middle-of-the-road sober dude has helped my mentality in general, but I am definitely still a work in progress, as the war in my head constantly reminds me. My drinking was, in part, a way to deal with that war. Alcohol muffled the constantly screaming voices . . . until it didn't. In fact, eventually it amplified those voices to a ridiculous level, but they are much quieter now that the booze is gone. Regrettably, they are still present, and I still listen to them with embarrassing regularity— and it still exhausts me.
Excerpted from JUST BEYOND THE LIGHT. Copyright © 2025 D. Randall Blythe. Published by Grand Central Publishing, a Hachette Book Group company. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
Randy Blythe's New Book Just Beyond the Light: Exclusive Excerpt + Giveaway Contest Spencer Kaufman
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