It also details his grandfather's sexual fetishes (including bestiality and sadomasochism) to the forming of Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids, to the recording of Antichrist Superstar.

Later, Manson and Strauss got a deal to write the singer's autobiography for ReganBooks, an imprint of HarperCollins founded by Judith Regan, who was behind Howard Stern's Private Parts (1997).

[5] The autobiography shares its title with the Marilyn Manson song "Long Hard Road Out of Hell" (1997)[7] and features an introduction written by film director David Lynch; Manson had previously contributed two songs to the soundtrack of Lynch's film Lost Highway (1997) and would later collaborate with the director on a coffee table book titled Genealogies of Pain (2011).

"[10] Tucson Weekly's James DiGiovanna found the book "quite good" and praised its opening chapters for insightfully "illustrating the mesmerizing and disquieting effect such images can have on the young.

"[11] Jason Morgan of The Washington Post said that the book's prose is "surprisingly polished and even beautiful on occasion," it sometimes succumbs to "lush writerly excess" reminiscent of William Faulkner's work.

[14] People said that the "tell-too-much autobio reveals that beneath the weird makeup, noisy music and parent-enraging act beats the heart of...a boring guy from Ohio.

"[16] Emily Barker of NME deemed The Long Hard Road Out of Hell one of the "juiciest" rock star memoirs of all time and praised it for being revealing.

[20] In an article describing Manson as a reactionary comparable to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, J. R. Moores of Drowned in Sound said that "The Long Hard Road Out of Hell is Ayn Rand for people with pentagram thumb-rings.