LITERAL REMAINS

I don’t remember where I read it or heard it, but I can distinctly remember Wes Craven being described as a good director who has made some bad movies.  That can be said for a lot of artists, no matter the medium (David Bowie had Tonight, Stephen King had Insomnia, and David Lee Roth had a career).  I mention Wes Craven distinctly because I think that same description applies to author Brian Keene.  He’s a good writer who has written some bad books.  Also, Keene’s most recent novel reminded me, somewhat, of Craven’s (mostly good) film The People Under the Stairs.  Luckily, Urban Gothic is also mostly good.

Six teens from the suburbs travel to a downtown Philadelphia club for a Monsters of Hip-Hop concert.  The teens are out for a good time, trying to live life a little before their high school years are behind them and they go their separate ways.  The unofficial leader of the group, Tyler (who is a bad boy in their corner of the ‘burbs) wants to stop for pot.  While trying to find his connection’s crib, they get lost and the gang becomes stranded in a very, very, bad part of town.  A misunderstanding with a group of local youths sends the suburbanites running, ultimately finding shelter in a rundown house that the locals ignore and fear.

Inside the house, the teens discover they are not alone.  The house, abandoned though it may seem, is teeming with life.  Mutants live there.  Hideous, deformed, cannibalistic, hungry mutants.  From big to small, from the least to the greatest, from the less monstrous to the more monstrous, this inbred family of the damned wants to chow down on the trespassers.  It’s a night long fight for survival.

As I said in my review of Keene’s Castaways, his latest works have been lacking.  Urban Gothic feels like Keene is having some fun again.  His trademark wetworks are here, as well as his fascinations with genitals, bodily functions, and pus.  It runs that same terrain as Castaways, with only pretty much the names and settings having been changed, but it’s more fun than that book, and more entertaining.  There’s a message slipped in about not judging people, about stereotyping them, but it’s lost when you consider the inbred mutants.  Of course, one doesn’t read a Brian Keene novel for insight, knowledge, or self-realization.  Social commentary is not his forte.

Urban Gothic is not stellar Keene, but it will have to do.  For now.

3 out 5
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