EXPLORING THE LABYRINTH 9. TEQUILA’S SUNRISE

Exploring The Labyrinth
 
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.
 

9. Tequila’s Sunrise
​

Well, it had to happen eventually.
 
When this project started, I reached out to Mr Keene. For two reasons; the first, as a courtesy, to let him know this series was happening, and secondly, to sense check the publication list I had and make sure I had the publication chronology right. He was enormously helpful with the second point, adding in books I’d missed, rearranging the order to be correct, and even adding in then-projected titles for forthcoming work.
 
Additionally, he gave me a piece of advice, that, in retrospect, also feels a bit like permission. Sooner or later, you’ll encounter something you don’t care for, he said. When that happens, just be honest about it. It's all part of the process.
 
And, nine books in, here we are.
 
It’s not that Tequila’s Sunrise is bad, I don’t think. It’s just that I really didn’t connect with it. I’m going to deconstruct why, here, as best I can, but if you find yourself reading this and thinking dude, what’s your problem, that sounds awesome?  - well, there’s an excellent chance that, for you, it will be, and if that’s so, go ahead and dive in with my blessing. There’s little enough joy in the world as is, gentle reader, and I’d deprive you of not one drop that you can find.
 
So, the main tale, a short novella-length piece that takes in just under half of the total page count concerns Chalco, a young Tenchoas man from Oaxaca (we would later rename his people Aztecs, and the land he lived on Mexico). As the story begins, the Spanish have already made landfall, and Chalco’s father is off with the other adult men to fight the invaders. As a result of this, Chalco has taken on hunting duties for his family. During the hunt, he meets a God. From there, things do not go well.
 
I think one of my principal issues with the story was the pacing. I’m sure if you were to look back through the prior eight essays in this series, a constant theme has been just how good Keene is at pace; at delivering novel length tales that zip by, drawing you in and keeping the pages turning relentlessly. Much of that comes from just straight up, sentence level readable prose; by which I mean, prose that doesn’t get in the way of the reader and the story, words that put you there (and on that score, Tequia’s Sunrise delivers, to be clear).
 
But it’s also, I think, about the pace of events themselves within the story, and it’s there that Tequila’s Sunrise doesn’t deliver in that same way, for me. There are no doubt huge challenges involved in trying to produce historical fiction - I recall clearly what an unexpected headache I got from setting GodBomb! in 1995, just purely in terms of remembering what that meant about how the world worked, and that’s a story set entirely in one room - and if Keene didn’t put in the research hours for this project, I’m never playing poker with the man, because if this isn’t a good approximation of the Aztec way of life, he’s bluffed it at a masterful level. The story drips with authentic detail, from the names of the people and tribes, to the description of the daily routines, to even the food and drink sources; it’s all familiar, and Keene takes us through it as we follow Chalco through his morning routine.
 
The problem is that it’s slow - or at least, I found it to be so. Again, to be clear, there’s nothing misfiring on a sentence level, but the sheer richness of the background information felt to me to be having a negative impact on the pacing of the story itself; for the first time I can recall reading a Brian Keene story, I was feeling impatience for the narrative to kick in.
 
A related frustration - and this one is very personal and idiosyncratic, so I acknowledge that upfront - is that the story is set up as a fable, and yet goes into this almost cinematic or documentary level of detail, and for me that created a stylistic tension that didn’t resolve well. I always think of fables as primarily broad strokes, arcitype laden short stories, almost designed to be spoken aloud, harking back to the verbal tradition that predates the written word. But while structurally Tequila’s Sunrise is a fable, stylistically, it isn’t, and while I will always respect the decision to try something different, for me, this particular experiment didn’t quite pay off.
 
All of this was exacerbated for me by the strangeness of the narrative itself. I’ve just got done describing it as structurally a fable, and it is, but it’s also a story that’s by far the most rooted in Keene’s own multiverse mythos to date; offering what I think is our first eyewitness account of The Labyrinth; what appears to be a collection of interdimensional portals that connect across alternate worlds, and also times.
 
As you may have gathered from my previous essay, it’s an idea I really enjoy conceptually, and I’m sure one of the pleasures of this project will be tracing the contours of that concept as it develops over the next forty odd books (!) , but here, I found it exerted a gravitational pull that distorted the story; again, like the prose style, it felt like a bad fit for a fable about a young boy on the cusp of manhood, and a magical drink that could allow him to travel back in time and head off the invasion of his country at source. For me, once Chalco entered The Labyrinth, the story changed again in terms of genre, and in a way I felt to be jarring and incongruous.
 
As I said earlier, I will always applaud attempts to do something different, something dangerous or stylistically experimental. And if what I have described sounds like something you’d enjoy, probably you will - again, on a sentence level, it’s as good as anything else I have read of Keene’s work, and the research and descriptive work in the first quarter of the tale is meticulous. It just wasn’t for me.
 
Happily, I did find the second half of the book, comprising a collection of five shorter tales, to be excellent, and a really good sampler of the breadth of Keene’s horror chops at this point in his career. There’s a heartfelt response to 9/11 that for my money  is easily the equal to King’s own efforts on that score, an Alizimers-from-the-inside story that will squeeze your heart far harder than you’ll be comfortable with, and a tale of a grieving father with a twist as nasty as I can immediately recall from Keene’s catalog so far, which is a pretty high bar indeed.
 
One of the things I was looking for when I started this project was getting a sense of how a professional writer develops, as their career progresses. Keene has been upfront about his dislike for his early work, even his career-defining debut. While I don’t share that distaste, and as much as I found the title story here a misfire, the collection as a whole does show a level of emotional depth and a range that demonstrates both a significantly expanded palate from those first couple of novels,and, arguably more importantly, an admirable impulse to keep pushing into new spaces, to experiment with styles and voice and settings and subject matter.
 
Tequia’s Sunrise may, for me, have been a failure; but it’s also undoubtedly the case that it represents a striving that bodes very well for the future of this project - not least because the only way to never fail is to never try.
 
Keene is a relentless, restless tryer. And I remain really excited to see what he tries next.
 
Next up: Dead Sea.
 
KP
10/7/19
 

---

Tequila's Sunrise by Brian Keene 

Discover the secret origins of the "drink of the gods" in this dark fantasy fable by best-selling author Brian Keene. Chalco, a young Aztec boy, feels helpless as conquering Spanish forces near his village. But when a messenger of the gods hands him a key to unlock the doors of human perception and visit unseen worlds, Chalco journeys into the mystical Labyrinth, searching for a way to defeat the invaders. He will face gods, devils, and things that are neither. But he will also learn that some doorways should never be opened and not all entrances have exits... Tequila's Sunrise. Take the shot and open the door... if you dare. Deadite Press is proud to present this author's preferred edition of Brian Keene's long out-of-print novella, which contains material not included in previously published editions. Also included in this edition are seven bonus short stories: Dust, Burying Betsy, Fade To Null, Golden Boy, Two-Headed Alien Love Child, That Which Lingers, and Bunnies In August.

---