​EXPLORING THE LABYRINTH 6: WHITE FIRE by brian keene

 
In this series, I will be reading every Brian Keene book that has been published (and is still available in print) in order of original publication, and then producing an essay on it. With the exception of Girl On The Glider, these essays will be based upon a first read of the books concerned. The article will assume you’ve read the book, and you should expect MASSIVE spoilers.
 
I hope you enjoy my voyage of discovery.
 
6. White Fire
 
So I have a bit of a confession to make about this series - I’ve been bending the rules just a little. Not substantially; each essay does represent my first encounter with the book in question. However, there is a matter of timing. By which I mean, I read a title ahead.
 
The reason is simple: I find for these longer form pieces, I need a bit of time for the book to ‘bed in’ with me. I find a gap of 6 - 8 weeks is ideal. It gives the novel(la)time to mulch down in my mind, leaving me with firmer memories of what the big parts of the story were; simply put, if I sat down to write these essays directly after reading the book in question, I’d end up with a series of unreadable 15,000 word messes that basically retold the story beat for beat in worse prose. This way, I get to give myself time to figure out what it’s all about (or what it was about for me) and you get something actually readable. Win win.
 
And that gap also gives me time to read the next book.
 
So, I’d read The Rising before I started writing about Clickers, and I’ve been a book ahead ever since. Which means when I wrote the essay on Dark Hollow, I’d already read Ghoul, which I’d assumed would be the subject of my next essay. And so I’d opened up a theme about the writing technique/approach of bleeding on the page, and part of my motivation for doing that was because Ghoul was coming next, which, spoilers, fairly drips blood. So, you know, cheating, technique, whatever. The point is, I was fixed and ready for a smooth segway, and feeling just a little smug about my essay series writing chops - not too shabby, Power, you may get a book out of this yet.
 
And then Brian fucking Keene goes and fucks it up.
 
He re-releases White Fire.
 
White Fire has been out of print for years, and was never published as a stand alone novella. Deadite Press released this latest version - as with their other reissues, as the Author’s Preferred Text - at the end of October.
 
And it was written around the same time as Dark Hollow, according to Keene himself. So, cheers, man - you totally screwed up my awesome segway. So selfish.
 
Anyway. So here’s White Fire, with apologies for the lack of usual mulching. We’ll be back on track with Ghoul soon. And I am not kidding about the spoiler warning - if you’ve yet to read this and don’t want the ending (and much of the beginning and middle) spoiled, turn back now.
 
White Fire is the story of Captain Tom Collins, US Army, who is working with a colleague in the Center for Disease Control (CDC), transporting something very nasty across country via an unmarked cargo van. You’ll be shocked to learn that it all goes horribly wrong, and the vehicle is hit by a tornado, resulting in the release of a super-lethal, highly infectious engineered strain of meningitis.
 
Given that set up, and Keene’s predilection for apocalypse, I figured I was in for The Stand but novella length. And it certainly starts that way, with Collins and CDC colleague McLeod getting a lift from a civilian to the nearest town (infecting him in the process), before contacting HQ to set up a quarantine area - shades of The Crazies there too, as I think about it. But the narrative doesn’t go that way at all, despite initial suggestions that it will - like when the infected civilian refuses to be held in the fire department and goes home instead. Instead, vaccinated personnel are brought in from CDC central, and while many people do lose their lives, the disease is ultimately brought under control.
 
It’s an interesting counterpoint to The Stand, which is exacerbated by the decision to have the virus in White fire be a Russian strain, rather than US bred disease - though it’s the decision of the US to keep enough to study that ultimately leads to it’s release. It’s also, for Keene, an unusually optimistic tale - not only does the military have a plan for how to deal with an outbreak, but the plan basically works, with the final civilian body count in the low hundreds. Hell, they even let the media know what’s going on, in broad terms, which basically never happens in this kind of story. Throw in a jump forward final chapter/epilogue where Collins gains access to the full research lab and burns up all the remaining samples, and we’re left with a tale that by Keene standards is practically a happy ending.
 
I do like the decision to go this way, and I was also impressed with how well the vast majority of the characters respond to the situation. One of the big lies of most disaster fiction (and yes, The Walking Dead, I am looking at you, though you’re far from the only culprit) is that the second the shit hits the fan, humans revert to Lord Of the Flies levels of selfish violence and lunacy. You can see why - the constraints of dramatic fiction practically demand it.
 
The only problem with that is that it’s basically bollocks. The truth is, when things get really tough, most people respond with kindness, with help, by doing what they can.
 
And so it is in White Fire, which makes it that rarest of disaster fiction narratives; one where people act in a realistic fashion, and do what needs to be done to contain things. Making it hands down the most optimistic of Keene’s books so far, which is an odd thing to say about a book with a triple digit civilian death toll, but there we are. The book played on my expectation that I was going to see the end of the world, but ultimately delivered something both more realistic and more uplifting, which is not a sentence I’d have expected to type in this series.
 
It does also provide a pretty big chunk of Keene’s labyrinth mythos, so we should probably talk about that.
 
I’ve deliberately not gone into this much in previous essays, and beyond noting references, I don’t plan to much going forward either. It’s simply beyond the scope of the series, which is more about engaging with each book as I read it, but also, it doesn’t feel like something I’ll be able to do justice to. That said, there’s a confrontation at the heart of this book, where Collins meets a mysterious figure who has haunted the narrative from the opening chapter, which gives a huge chunk of information about Keene’s overarching mythos, and his fictional multiverse.
 
The man’s name is Pestilence. And yeah, he’s that Pestilence - the one from Revelation. And he hits Collins with some tough home truths before causing him to become infected with White Fire, in spite of his previous inoculation. For starters, it turns out to have been down to Collins that the virus survived in the first place, allebit at his insistence that they use it to make vaccines. More interestingly from the point of view of the wider project though, we are informed that The Squizzm come from The Void, outside of our reality, and are part of a group called The Thirteen, who have nothing to do with God, The Devil, or angels. We’re further told that the reason Pestilence is keen to see White Fire spread is because it’s likely The Thirteen will target this reality at some point soon, and such an end will not ‘serve God’, the way an angel led apocalypse will.
 
Oh, and God is absent his throne. Has been since the crucifixion, according to Pestilence (who is an angel and therefore probably not lying). So, there’s that.
 
It’s a huge amount of mythos that lands in a very small number of pages, and I found it really thrilling - after various hints around the edges of the big apocalypse novels, we’re finally treated to this big reveal that blows open a lot of the mysteries around the edges of Keene’s work - though I have, like a million questions, and we’ll see how many of them get answered over the next 50 odd titles. It also has the effect of transforming what I thought the narrative of the book was about, as well as sending Collins off in a very different direction for the books closing chapter. It’s interesting to note that this mythos heavy story has been out of print for some time, and I do find myself wondering how much reading it now, in line with when it was written, will affect the narrative going forward.
 
The novella also contains more of the stuff I’m beginning to think of as Keenisms - blue collar guys with note perfect dialogue, cinematic actions sequences (in this case a brilliantly described tornado-induced car accident) and a creeping sense of elevating threat. There’s also a sequence that tracks a tornado’s path of destruction across a small town that reminded me of vintage King - like the destruction of Derry during the final part of IT. Like that sequence, Keene employs an uncharacteristic omniscient voice to superb effect, hitting the perfect balance of telling detail and broader description. It’s an absolutely superb single chapter lesson in storytelling.
 
For the things I’ve spoken about, the biggest surprise in the story for me remains the way it completely cuts against typical disaster story tropes. The army responds with calm professionalism to the outbreak - aided by the fact that they had prepared enough vaccine to have troops with immunity that they could deploy. The quarantine zone they set up is effective. Hell, they even decide to tell the press what’s going to, and the press basically rolls with it. Sure, the old guy who gave the ground zero patients a lift back to the town skips out on his detention - but even there, the twist is that he goes home to his dog and dies in his bed without spreading the infection further. Although Keene plays with the expected tropes in the early chapters, ultimately, and uniquely in a Keene book so far, the system basically works, and the outbreak is contained. Hell, with the ending, we even get a sense that future outbreaks will be that much harder.
 
It’s a fascinating narrative choice. If I had to pick one characteristic of a Keene story to this point, I’d have said that ‘no happy endings’ was as safe a bet as any - though interestingly this was written at the same time as Dark Hollow, where ultimately the dark forces are vanquished. Faced with a novella about a viral outbreak, and knowing Keene’s love of the (fictional) end of the world in general, and The Stand in particular, by far the biggest and most spectacular twist, for me, was that it was basically a happy ending. It’s a bold choice, and one that certainly wrong footed me, but at the time of writing, I’m still not 100% sure how I feel about it. Sure, Collins pays a price for his mistakes, and it’s not like there isn’t a body count, but as a twist, everything basically works out feels… strange.
 
That said, the flipside of that coin is that I was deeply impressed with the counter to the disaster story trope of everybody going all Lord of the Flies once the shit hits the fan. Despite what fiction, and especially cinema, would have you believe, when things get really bad people, with amazing consistency, respond positively, with help, support, and a sense of shared humanity. The central problem for a writer of genre fiction is that this reality doesn’t generate drama - and so, most of us ignore the facts and have everyone just go feral.
 
But not Keene. Keene plays a straight bat in terms of the human reaction to the crisis, and in  the process, proves that you can still get a compelling narrative, and even a substantive twist ending, without selling out human motivation.
 
So maybe my issue with the book is simple jealousy, at his ability to pull off something so daring.
 
Or maybe I’m still pissed off that he screwed up my segway into talking about Ghoul.
 
Next up, Ghoul.
 
KP
11/11/18