​EXPLORING THE LABYRINTH: GHOUL

 
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. Ghoul
 
Two essays back, I talked about Dark Hollow and blood on the page - the notion that one way to write great horror fiction is to not merely write about what scares you, but about the life experiences you’ve had that have scarred you - made you older, and sadder, and slower to love and trust. With Ghoul, Keene delivers a coming of age story so raw and exposed that it’s frequently painful to read.
 
It’s also, in this readers humble opinion, his best work so far - a masterpiece on its own terms, and one of the definitive coming of age horror novels.
 
Ghoul stars a gang of three children, Timmy, Barry, and Doug, each aged 12, and charts their experiences over a summer break in the 80’s. The three kids each come from troubled homes - Barry’s father is a physically abusive alcoholic, Timmy’s father is authoritarian and gruff, and is in constant tension with his grandfather, who lives with them, and Doug’s single mother is also an alcoholic, and sexually abusive towards him (these sequences are some of the most upsetting in the book, told unflinchingly and without the slightest hint of prurience - utterly stomach churning stuff).
 
The impressive thing about all of the above is how well Keene balances the horror of these situations with their normality - at least, as far as the kids themselves are concerned. There’s two main aspects to this; one is the rather obvious observation that whatever we experience as children informs our perception of normality - and why wouldn’t it? We have nothing to compare it with, after all. Keene understand that we, as readers, will look at the experiences of these kids with various degrees of horror and disgust, but also that the kids themselves will not; or at least, not in the same way. Indeed, part of the horror in each case comes from the kids helpless acceptance of their situations - the psychological warping effect that comes from being harmed by the people who claim to love you, the feelings of wrongness, and the guilt that accompanies those feelings. After all, don’t our parents tell us they love us? Don’t we love them? So why do we also hate them? Why do they seem to hate us?
 
This is elemetally dark stuff, and all the more horrific for it’s relatively commonplace feel - a feel exacerbated by the second important aspect that re-enforces this warped notion of ‘normality’ - the small town setting. Back in my Dark Hollow essay, I observed that Keene captured the small town vibe so well that it forcibly reminded me of the issues I have with that way of life, even as the book itself functionally served as a love note to it. Well, in Ghoul, that claustrophobia is a key and irreducible component of the horror. There is literally nowhere to hide, and everybody is in everyone else’s business. Doug’s abuse is secret, but Barry’s bruises are common knowledge, and yet nobody in authority shows the slightest interest in making any kind of intervention - by and large, it’s an open secret and just ‘how things are’. That shrunken horizon, and sense that there’s nowhere to run to, amplifies the horror of the tale. The children are trapped with the monsters.
 
Which brings us to the Ghoul.
 
By the standards of the creatures we’ve encounters so far in Keene’s work (giant man-eating worms, demon alien zombies from the gap between worlds, angels of Pestilence, cancer) the Ghoul is an altogether weaker, and in some ways pathetic creature. Cursed with immortality, and under a strict injunction to eat only rotting flesh, the Ghoul’s aversion to sunlight causes it to live underground. That said, this isn’t a sympathetic monster - cursed he may be, but he’s also irredeemably evil, committing murder in the opening chapter, and worse, kidnapping young women in an attempt to procreate (another utterly skin crawling revelation, and one made all the more potent by Keene’s decision to have the assaults themselves happen ‘off camera’, and therefore entirely in our imaginations). The decision to have sections of the book from the Ghoul’s perspective is a ballsy one, and is one of the many echos the book has with King’s IT. As with that book, Keene nails these passages, delivering a creature that has a plausible interiority and psychology, despite being supernatural. And he’s also supernaturally strong, capable of acts of extreme physical violence.
 
The first chapter from the Ghoul’s POV is an especially fine one. It opens with a tour of the graveyard, visiting the death circumstances of several of the occupants before passing beneath to the creature below. There’s echoes in this passage of the tornado from White Fire, and also resonances with the following book in this journey, Selected Scenes From The End Of The World. It’s an incredible act of sheer imagination and storytelling which then transitions to the creature himself, who manages to give us his backstory, place in the wider Keene mythos, reason for recent reawakening, and outline of future plans with an ease and readability that suggests Keene has learned a huge amount sinse City Of The Dead. This is assured storytelling - not flashy, but goddamn it gets the job done, and done right.
 
There’s also an interesting aspect to the creature, here, which again contains echos of IT, for me. In that novel, King’s monster is absolutely a metaphor for childhood fear and imagination… and it’s also absolutely not a metaphor at all, but a real physical thing that eats children and corrupts adults into tolerating otherwise intolerable levels of child death. Similarly, a creature that lives in the graveyard of a small town, eating the bodies of the dead and reaching out for the living, infecting and destroying their lives too, lines up neatly with the patterns of abuse that fester when the buried actions of the past are consumed rather than confronted, perpetuating the cycle of misery across generations. At the same time, as with IT, the Ghoul is really real, with agency and power, and whether or not the kids defeat this supernatural evil, they’ll still be left with the more mundane (if no less brutal) injustices they face at home. With this in mind, it’s especially telling that it’s Barry’s violent father, working as the caretaker of the graveyard, who becomes the Ghoul’s human agent in the town, aiding with body disposal and profiting from the relationship by taking the jewelry and valuables that have been buried with the dead, and which the Ghoul has no use for.  The coda of the novel is absolutely shattering on this point, as Timmy revisits the town as an adult to see his old friend Barry, only to see signs of physical abuse on Barry’s son. They may have beaten the Ghoul, but it seems not all of them could beat the cycle.
 
I haven’t talked too much about Timmy, yet. He’s a very clear authorial insert - a bright kid who likes comic books and storytelling, with a loving but difficult relationship with his father that’s partly managed through, and partly exacerbated by, his relationship with his grandfather, who lives with them. I am frankly in awe of how Keene presents the complexities of this relationship triangle, the frustrations of the father, clearly having been raised with a high level of discipline now being frustrated by his own father undermining him with his son. At the same time, it’s clear from the grandfather’s perspective that he’s trying to make good with Timmy on the mistakes he made with his own son, Timmy’s father. We’re back to the resonant themes of generational mistakes and regret, in microcosm, and what’s especially powerful here is part of the tension within the family comes from the attempts on the part of the Grandfather to fix his past mistakes. It’s the kind of thing a big L Literary novel would spend 700 pages on (and to be clear, done right, it could be a riveting 700 pages), but here, it takes up barely the first quarter of the novel, before the devastating sudden passing of the Grandfather on the first day of summer sets the tone for the descent into horror that is to form the rest of the narrative. It’s an amazing portrait of struggling blue collar small town family life, and even if the rest of the novel wasn’t some of the best storytelling I’ve so far encountered from Keene, this opening section would be worth the price of admission.
 
Part of what makes that death so sad, beyond the impact the loss has on Timmy, is the understanding the reader has of how it will fundamentally change the dynamic at home for Timmy. It’s such a smart piece of writing, because the reader experiences the sinking feeling way before Timmy, our POV character for these sequences, does - he’s too busy trying to process the loss to realise how things have changed. And the inevitable moment when that threat is delivered on, when Timmy tells his father about the Ghoul, and his dad responds by tearing up Timmy’s comic collection (believing the malign influence of the comics to be the reason for Timmy’s dark theories) is stomach churningly awful, not least because Timmy’s father is clearly acting out of best intentions. It’s impressive that, even in a narrative where the other kids are suffering incredibly harsh physical abuse of various kinds, this sequence really holds its own. Some of that may be down to my own predictions for storytelling, I suppose - but I also think part of it is just down to how well it’s written, and how well Timmy’s perspective is captured. The apocalypse is always personal, after all - our own Hell is always a private one.
 
 So, yeah, Ghoul stands as my favourite Keene novel so far. It’s absolutely everything I enjoy about Keene’s writing in a single slim volume; brilliant characters, small town claustrophobia, a monster that’s real and monstrous, no looking away, no easy answers, no happy endings, blood not just on the page but jetting out onto the ceiling and running down the damn walls. Particularly impressive is the portrait of the kids, where again I find myself reaching back to King for a comparison, and I don’t have higher praise than that (in fact - whisper it - I might even give Keene the slight edge on that one, for Ghoul at least). There’s only one aspect I came close to snagging on during my read, which was that I felt the stated theme of ‘adults are the real monsters’ was overplayed. By which I think I mean, overstated, in the literal sense of ‘stated too many times’. It’s an observation that Timmy makes, in those exact words, at multiple points in the narrative, and it just felt a little jarring to me - not least because the book had already done such a good job in portraying that truth, which made the explicit stating of it feel redundant.
 
Even there though, on further reflection, I realise that it’s entirely in keeping with Timmy’s character. He’s a writer, after all, and a young one. When a young writer hits on a powerful truth, no matter how obvious it might seem, it’s rare they can resist repeating that truth to themselves. And of course, it’s the power of that truth that ultimately allows Tim, alone of the three children, to find a way out of that town and into the light.
 
Next up: Selected scenes from the end of the world.
 
KP
2/12/18