The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

Written with journalist Neil Strauss, this memoir traces the life of Brian Warner, who became the shock-rock musician Marilyn Manson, from a troubled childhood in Canton, Ohio, through his rise as one of the most controversial figures in 1990s American music. The book chronicles Warner's transformation from a fearful, bullied boy into a self-described Antichrist waging cultural war against Christianity, conformity, and hypocrisy.

Warner's formative experiences center on his grandfather's forbidden basement. At 13, he and his cousin Chad began sneaking into the cellar of their grandfather Jack Warner, a throat cancer patient who breathed through a tracheostomy, a surgically created opening in the windpipe. There they discovered bestiality photographs, fetish magazines, women's lingerie, and dildos hidden in a locked drawer. The boys eventually witnessed their grandfather masturbating beside his toy train set, an experience that traumatized them both. Their mother later revealed that after a trucking accident, doctors had found women's clothes beneath the grandfather's own clothing. The discovery of adult depravity beneath suburban normalcy became a defining theme of Warner's worldview. Around this time, Warner's dog was poisoned, and he suspected a neighbor who had sexually molested him as a young child.

Warner's education at Heritage Christian School deepened his fixation on forbidden things. Weekly seminars warned students that the apocalypse was imminent, producing nightmares about the Antichrist that persisted into adulthood. Backward-masking seminars playing rock records in reverse to reveal alleged satanic messages only made Warner more determined to seek out the condemned music. Disillusionment set in when teachers rejected a photograph his grandmother had taken of what appeared to be an angel in the clouds, calling it blasphemous despite his sincere belief. Warner concluded that the suffering his teachers prayed to be released from was suffering they had imposed on themselves. He began rebelling: selling contraband candy, publishing a crude humor magazine called Stupid, and dealing in forbidden rock albums. The school refused to expel him because his family paid tuition, so he left voluntarily two months into 10th grade.

Public school brought chaotic encounters with sex, violence, and the occult. Warner befriended John Crowell, whose older brother practiced black magic in a barn filled with animal carcasses and pentagrams drawn in blood. John led Warner through a sewer under a cemetery to an abandoned house where they attempted to recite incantations from The Necronomicon, a grimoire of occult spells. His home life was strained: His father Hugh, a Vietnam veteran who had handled the herbicide Agent Orange and had post-traumatic stress, was emotionally distant and prone to violent outbursts. His mother Barb was overprotective, and Warner physically attacked her on multiple occasions. When Hugh took a job in Florida, the family relocated to Fort Lauderdale.

In Florida, Warner attended community college and wrote prolifically but received almost nothing but rejection letters. He worked as a music journalist, conning his way into a senior editor position at a start-up magazine called 25th Parallel by fabricating credentials. A devastating betrayal by Rachelle, a model who turned out to be secretly engaged, hardened him emotionally and fueled his ambition. He also interviewed Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails for the first time, an encounter that would prove pivotal.

Warner conceived the name Marilyn Manson as a symbol of American duality, combining the glamour of Marilyn Monroe with the violence of serial killer Charles Manson. He assembled a band from South Florida's underground scene, recruiting guitarist Scott Putesky (Daisy Berkowitz) and keyboardist Stephen (Madonna Wayne Gacy, later called Pogo). Their first show at Churchill's Hideaway in Miami drew about 20 people. Though Warner thought the performance was terrible, the applause gave him a sense of purpose unlike anything he had experienced. A volatile woman named Nancy inserted herself into the act, volunteering for increasingly violent stage performances and becoming sexually entangled with Warner. When he ended the affair, Nancy launched a harassment campaign: canceling shows, leaving death threats, and attacking her replacement onstage. Warner and Pogo plotted to murder her by arson but abandoned the plan. Nancy eventually disappeared from Fort Lauderdale.

The band's concerts became elaborate provocations: filling piñatas with cow brains, building papier-mâché cows, and placing performers in cages. Warner began dating Missi, an 18-year-old who replaced Nancy onstage and in his personal life. Bassist Brad Stewart's heroin addiction spiraled until Warner replaced him with Jeordie White (Twiggy Ramirez).

Trent Reznor invited Warner to the Los Angeles house where actress Sharon Tate had been murdered by followers of Charles Manson in 1969, and there offered to sign the band as the first act on his Nothing Records label through Interscope Records. The debut album, Portrait of an American Family, faced a troubled production and censorship battles with Interscope over a Charles Manson audio sample and provocative album art. On the subsequent Nine Inch Nails tour, Warner tried cocaine for the first time, and Twiggy began a relationship with Courtney Love of the band Hole that strained the band's ties with Reznor.

In San Francisco, Warner visited Anton Szandor LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, who helped Warner understand his growing emotional numbness as a stage in personal evolution and ordained him as a Reverend. Christian opposition intensified: The band was banned from venues, offered money not to play, and arrested. In Jacksonville, Florida, Warner was strip-searched, held for 16 hours, and charged under the Adult Entertainment Code before the case was dropped for lack of evidence.

The recording of Antichrist Superstar in New Orleans became a months-long ordeal. The album drew on Warner's reinterpretation of the Antichrist not as a satanic villain but as a liberator. Cocaine consumed the sessions, and Daisy Berkowitz quit. Warner attended his cousin Chad's wedding in Canton and returned to his grandfather's basement, realizing he now had more in common with the depraved old man than with the innocent child who once explored that cellar. He overdosed and was hospitalized. Missi became pregnant and, after nearly dying from a severe fever, had an abortion. Warner recorded "The Minute of Decay" while genuinely weeping, only to be told by Reznor and engineer Dave Ogilvie that he was overdoing the emotion. Tensions deepened when Reznor began working on filmmaker David Lynch's Lost Highway soundtrack, a collaboration originally intended for Marilyn Manson.

Warner quit drugs, found renewed self-belief, and finished the album on his own terms. Antichrist Superstar debuted at number three on the charts. The ensuing tour brought massive success alongside bomb threats, canceled shows, and a federal court battle over the right to perform at Giants Stadium. The American Family Association (AFA), a Christian conservative advocacy group, distributed fake affidavits accusing the band of having sex with animals onstage, distributing drugs to audiences, forcing children into satanic rituals, and keeping kidnapped teenagers handcuffed on the tour bus. Politicians including Senator Joseph Lieberman and televangelist Pat Robertson publicly condemned the band. Warner broke up with Missi on Valentine's Day 1997. A roadie named Sean McGann died in an accidental fall, forcing Warner to reckon with the value of human life. He reconciled with Reznor after months of silence.

The book closes with Warner reflecting that he has achieved everything he dreamed of but destroyed everything he loved in the process. The world now looks at him the way he once looked at his grandfather, and he writes that he hopes they like what they see, because he finally does.