Dave Mustaine's In My Darkest Hour has entered the New York Times hardcover nonfiction list at number four. The book came out on 8 September through Grand Central Publishing's Da Capo imprint and was written with Joe Layden.
Its subject is the squamous cell carcinoma at the back of his tongue that he was diagnosed with in 2019, and what he did with the time: radiation and chemotherapy in the morning, recording sessions afterwards, and at the end of it The Sick, The Dying... And The Dead!. He writes about asking for help, which by his own account he had never been able to do, and about what being that ill did to the way he works.
A metal memoir reaching the top five of that list is rare and the timing is not accidental. Megadeth are in the middle of ending: the self titled album in January went in at number one on the Billboard 200, their highest debut ever, and the touring behind it is the last of it. The book is the other half of that, and the readers it has found are not only metal readers.
The one about Ellefson is in there too, and what he writes about the bassist's last years in the band was the part that travelled first when the book arrived.