END OF THE ROAD BY BRIAN KEENE: BOOK REVIEW

 
 
End of the Road is a limited edition volume for Cemetery Dance, which collects nine months of Brian Keene’s blog posts documenting his 2016 promotional book tour for his then-new releases Pressure and The Complex. The blog post serves as part travelogue/trip diary, part Hunter S Thompsonesque state of the genre/nation address, and part meditation on mortality.
 
It’s also one of the very best books about the life of a writer that I have ever read.
 
It’s got that trademark Keene readability, for starters; for those of us familiar with his podcast work, the prose often feels like the author is talking directly to us, and I found myself hearing  the familiar cadences of his voice as I read - including recurring motifs of ‘I digress’ and the phrase ‘It’s all gone horribly awry’, both bloved stock phrases from that show. The whole piece is propelled by this clear, wryly depreciating voice, and the short chapters - byproducts of the books original incarnation as a blog series - also lead the tome an addictive, ‘just-one-more’ feel.
 
Because having drawn me in with the voice, what kept me reading at pace were the stories; sure, the road trip highs and lows - big crowds, small crowds, cancelled events, weather - but more importantly the people - the fellow authors, the readers, and in some ways most strikingly, the strangers; the silent inhabitants of the suburbs Keene drives through, the forest of Trump signs a constant feature.
 
End Of The Road is what is says on the tin - a travelogue of what may end up being Keene’s last full-bore road trip book tour (and writing in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, such undertakings already feel exotic, slightly unreal even), but it’s so much more than that. It’s a narrative haunted by friends and peers recently lost, by Keene’s own sense of foreboding for both his future and the future of his country… and also haunted by the very landscape he’s passing through; the blue collar America Keene proudly writes for, which feels like it’s being ground to dust almost before his eyes, by forces of neglect and malice.
 
And, sure, I could take issue with some of Keene’s finer points of political commentary (hell, as a card carrying leftie, that’s practically my job), especially when he occasionally falls into what I think of the knee-jerk centerist ‘both-sides’-isms, but that would be to epically miss the point; the politics flow from Keene’s otherwise cleareyed observations, not editorialising, and in terms of correctly identifying the growing malaise that led to the Trump win, it’s kind of hard to argue with, given how things turned out.
 
As someone slowly working my way through the Keene catalogue, in order of publication, I’m already well aware of his continued fascination with the end of the world. Here, though, it’s so much more personal; for all his continued talk about and insistance on the nature of cycles, in the Horror business and in society/economics (and to be clear, he’s correct about both), there’s a melancholic undertone to the whole thing; like the moment in the Sopranos pilot where Tony  says ‘I dunno, sometimes, I feel like I came in at the end of the thing, you know?’
 
That said, as much as there is sadness and loss, there is also joy, and laughter, and the odd pure grain shot of the old Splatterpunk fuck-you spirit, too. Keene is clearly concerned about the state of things, and fearful for the future (and again, writing in March 2020 *looks out of window* kinda hard to fault that), but this book remains at its core a joyous, even defiant celebration; of a life lived in loving service to a genre Keene still eats, drinks, breathes and dreams; a genre that’s thrown some lumps at him, but also given him a set of life experiences and friendships you suspect he wouldn’t trade for anything.
 
And ultimately, it’s that love, that hard-won joy, that drives the beating heart of this extraordinary book, elevating what in lesser hands might have been a diverting diary of places visited and people met into something that is, I think, essential reading for any of us who have spent any time at all walking, or trying to walk, the path of a writer.
 
There’s still a few copies of this limited release over at Cemetery Dance. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Purchase a copy by clicking here 

Review by Kit Power 

the heart and soul of horror reviews