Customer Reviews

Ghoul

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I really enjoyed this book, best horror book I've read in ages. Reminded me ALOT of early Steven King (before he went way dark, sorry Steve, sad but true).

If you liked Salem's Lot, you'll probably enjoy this book. A very quick read. Three adolescent boys, best pals, on summer vacation dealing with their respective family issues, stumble into true horror. A real monster, bloody murders, an old cemetary, dis-believing adults, a nasty dog, what horror fan can ask for more?

I do agree with some previous reviewers about the somewhat "rushed" ending but other than that,this book was fun! Enjoy!

I have read Brian Keene's "The Rising", "City of The Dead", and "Terminal" and they are three of my favorite books in my personal collection. "Ghoul" is a great read but I think it falls short of the quality of the books mentioned above. I found the three young boy characters to be very believable and likeable and the villians nasty enough to root against. The plot was strong overall but I felt at times Keene tried too hard with his 1980's pop culture references to bring his readers into the world of June 1984. He used them to the point of being a bit distracting. I also noted a couple of instances where he was a bit repetitive describing some of the people and places in the novel. I got deja vu reading these passages the second time and felt they were unnecessary. The ghoul himself was a nasty piece of work and a lot of fun to read about. He was a great villian. I also liked Keene's realistic ending and themes concerning the changes we go through as we pass from children into adulthood. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and highly reccomend it. I just felt it is not quite as good as the other three novels that I have read by Brian Keene. I certainly look forward to reading more books by him.

It's 1984 (if you ever forget that, Keene will remind you on the next page), and Timmy, Barry, and Doug are looking forward to summer vacation. Unfortunately for them, there's a ghoul living under the church cemetary that likes to eat dead bodies, and has recruited Barry's father (a monster in his own right) to obtain women for it, through whom it wishes to further its race. Sounds bad enough. But remember, this is Brian Keene we're talking about. So things are bound to get worse...much, much worse...

"The Rising" hooked me on Keene; it was one of the most original, scariest books I'd read in ages (the ending was a true horror classic; surprisingly, the sequel didn't ruin anything). "Terminal," "City of the Dead," and "The Conqueror Worms" (title lovingly borrowed from Poe) continued that reign of no-holds-barred horror, the kind that Stephen King doesn't even dare write anymore (well, ok, maybe every once and a while). Keene uses real-life characters; the hero of "Worms" wasn't some worm scientist, he was a seventy-year-old redneck who just happened to get caught up in the midst of things. Keene's characters are three-dimensional, so much so that they take on a life of their own.

That's why I was slightly disappointed with "Ghoul." I guess I should expect it--this is, after all, a formatted novel. The whole "coming of age" horror novel has become a subgenre all its own, with everyone from Dan Simmons, Mr. King, and Ray Bradbury chipping in (hell, Dean Koontz, a non-horror author, even wrote one). Granted, Keene does bring his own unique touch to the tale, but it doesn't show until the last hundred pages or so. Until this, it's by-the-numbers...with a slight twist. You'll be able to predict most of it, although it's still a ride worth finishing (this IS Brian Keene, after all). If only he hadn't thrown in so many nostalgic moments...you won't ever forget the novel takes place twenty years ago. Still...it's a fiendishly good time, and a novel you should definitely take the time to read.

This is better than the zombie novels Keene wrote, but I was expecting it to be more on the level of Dark Hollow. The characters seem more like adults than children and I think too much filler was put in (Seriously Katie had nothing to do with the story take her out and like forty pages go with her). The gore is good, there could have been more, but what was there entertained. If your new to Keene I'd recommend trying Dark Hollow instead of this, Ghoul is too linear. The plots predictable and the moment of realization is ridiculous, though this still kept me reading. 2.5 stars.

Brian Keene, Ghoul (Leisure, 2006)

Keene leaves the zombie-infested world of his first two books for Ghoul, a somewhat surprisingly small-scale novel set in the mid-eighties. Though you don't really need to take note of this fact, because in the first half of the novel, Keene will remind you of this constantly. It's the book's biggest failing. If you set a novel in a particular time frame, it makes sense--in fact, for atmosphere, it's necessary--to include some details of the time and place to lend the narrative veracity. However, Keene overdoes it to a ludicrous level. Once you're past all that, however, and the book gets too plot-heavy for all the extraneous details, it picks up and we get back to the good, solid action/horror hybrid that Keene does so well.

The story revolves around three childhood friends, Timmy, Barry, and Doug. Summer vacation has just started, and the three are looking forward to spending the summer the way twelve-year-old boys usually do. Until, that is, Barry's father ropes him into helping out in the family business--tending the cemetery for the local church. Problem is, the title character, who's been imprisoned in the cemetery for hundreds of years, was awakened when Barry's father, drunk as usual, cracked the stone keeping it asleep. And now the ghoul has roped Barry's father into providing him with human women to play with when he's not snacking on his favorite meal, the other bodies buried there. Everything comes to a head, in that Brian Keene kind of way. (There's an end piece that's even more heavy-handed than the pop culture references at the beginning, and twice as predictable, but it's forgivable.)

The simple answer is that if you've read Brian Keene's work before and you've liked it, Ghoul will be a winner. If you haven't, starting with The Rising and City of the Dead, which are slightly more accomplished from a writing standpoint, would probably be a good idea so you can get a handle on Keene's action-heavy style before diving into this one and its relatively slow beginning. Once it gets going, though, it's a lot of fun. ***

This is the 5th Brian Keene book I have read. This book has a different type storyline from the previous books I have read which are The Rising books and The Conqueror Worms. I think the writing here is excellent as in his previous books but the content was more disturbing to me. While the other books dealt with zombies ripping people apart and eating them and the other wildlife run amuck eating people . . . this dealt with more than just a supernatural monster. Even without the Ghoul to deal with, these kids dealt with real life monsters -- like serious abuse. The Ghoul was almost an afterthought to the problems these characters faced.

I am a recent Keene convert. His writing grabs you and sucks you into a story so fast your head spins. I am trying to wait patiently until his next book.

Let me start this review off by saying Brian Keene is one of my favorite authors. I will go on record as saying he is very quickly becoming the inheritor of Lovecraft's legacy. Albeit that unlike Lovecraft, he can actually write contemporary characters and thus make his stories much deeper. But like Lovecraft, though most of Keene's work is brilliant, he too has written a few clunkers. For every Call of Cthulhu, Haunter of the Dark, and Shadow Over Innsmouth Lovecraft wrote, he also had his The Quest of Iranon or Lurker at the Threshold (to be fair this story was finished after his death), which were just not very good. Mr. Keene's best work includes the Rising, Dark Hollow, Ghost Walk, Fear of Gravity, and Unhappy Endings. Now that I have clarified my stance on his work, I have to really do something I don't like doing, write a bad review of a book by a good writer.

Before I criticize this book, I must admit to a bias towards "coming of age" stories. I get annoyed by them! I think a majority (not all) of stories where you have the young man/woman who "journey" with friends from childhood to adulthood as a result of a "shared" adventure really is a tired and old theme. In Ghoul, this theme is played out in our three main characters Timmy, Doug, and Barry. The book is set in 1984 and our three twelve year olds are our main heroes. A few people have criticized the overuse of 80s pop cultural references that are littered all through the book. Keene does go a little overboard with them, but besides some minor annoyance, these references don't hurt the book. It echoes a bit of Stand By Me and a less thought out review would just label it as Stand By Ghoul. But I can't go down that road because it is not King story clone. It is just a poorly executed use of three young characters that are not interesting enough to hold together a novel. The worst part of these three characters is the two who have some major problems at home. Neither set of problems is meshed well into the rest of the story, so I kind of thought what was the point of doing it. Doug (the fat kid) doesn't have a father and his mother takes too much of an interest in him (if you catch my drift). Barry (pseudo-muscle boy) has an abusive father that is the caretaker of the local cemetery. Keene tries to make these two problem children interesting but you don't get any resolutions to their problems in Ghoul. The mom doesn't stop loving Doug and Barry still gets beat up right to the end. The story focuses too much on the most boring of the three, Timmy. Timmy has some conflict with his father but it is not really fleshed out well. His mother is so much of a non-entity; I question why Keene even wrote her into the story. I think Keene would have been better off writing these three characters as young adults rather than pre-teen kids. The young age of the characters really prevents them from doing anything against the main threat in the book which is the Ghoul.

Despite the poor main characters, Ghoul does have an excellent monster. Keene's ghoul makes the monster in Lovecraft's story Pickman's Model seem warm and fuzzy! It is foul, disgusting, horrifying, and intelligent as well. It eats dead flesh as a curse set against it by The Creator. It is freed when a stone marker in the local grave yard is broken. Once he is free, he only wants to eat corpses and propagate his species by interbreeding with any local women he can come across. The Ghoul uses Barry's father who is the graveyard caretaker as the means to get women for his lair. Barry's father in return gets the riches from the bodies that the Ghoul eats. This part of the book works very well, this sick symbiosis between the monster and the man who is a monster is one of the few bright spots in this book.

Even though Keene does present this creature beautifully in the book, I do have to level some criticism about how it did a few things. Now, when an author creates a monster, usually the beast will have a set of rules assigned to it that not only defines its characteristics but also places limits on what it can do within the story. Keene's Ghoul has a back story that details how it was cursed by The Creator to only eat rotting, dead things and that it could not eat the flesh of living or freshly killed things. Now late in the book, the Ghoul all the sudden realizes what it had been missing and starts killing and eating his victims. The Ghoul even says (I am majorly paraphrasing here): hey this is pretty good stuff! Now, when you set a rule up for a monster (especially if said rule comes from a Creator) there should be some sort of consequences for breaking that rule. For example, the Ghoul would decay from within if he eats living flesh or at least get a bad stomach ache or something. Keene really just lets the beast get away with it. So it kind of begs the question of why set the whole cursed by the creator to eat decayed flesh rule if the ghoul is going to break it without anything happening?

The book closes poorly, the ghoul has a very obvious weakness and it is exploited very quickly and it dies. Keene really doesn't let us know what happened to the two women who endured molestation at the hands of the Ghoul. I don't know if this was intentional or just a rush job by him not closing all the loose ends. Considering what is alluded to happening in Keene's other book Dark Hallow (I won't give that away) the silence on the two women does lead you to wonder if he will link back to Ghoul at sometime in the future. The end of the book has Timmy coming back after 20 years and he meets up with Barry and they have an awkward conversation which really doesn't bring anything to the story. I guess this chat's purpose is to sympathize with Timmy because he realizes that he has finally grown up and left childhood behind. Making Barry grow up to become like his father is rather foolish and totally predictable. I have to say that this is the most character poor book Keene has ever written. Considering Keene's greatest strengths as a writer is building characters, I really don't know what happened with Ghoul.

In closing, I gave Ghoul 2 stars out of 5. Now, that said, you do have to keep in mind with Brian Keene these ratings are subject to change because of his habit of linking all of his works together in subtle ways. For example, I gave the Conqueror Worms the same rating but that rating has now gone up to 3 out of 5 because I have been reading the sequel Deluge which is an online novel that Keene has on his website. The more I read about that story, the more I like the first novel. Though I still wish he would not have included The Garden Where My Rain Grows word for word in Conqueror Worms because he proved he had enough material to leave it as a stand-alone story. The same thing happened with Dark Hollow, which I thought was a 3 star novel, when I read the sequel Ghost Walk; it made the preceding story better because of how Ghost Walk explains what happens to the main character Adam Sneft.
Keene will probably link Ghoul back to a future work and make me reconsider my rating on this book. This is a good problem to have with an author as talented as Keene, you can read his works individually or all of them to catch his overall scheme with his labyrinth story arcs in each story. So for one of his poorest works, let's hope Keene does something better later down the road to make Ghoul a better story.

I loved the two book series Brian Keene did a few years back, and Ghoul has the same feel to it. . .almost. Look, if you like his other work you'll like this. My only arguement with Ghoul is that Edward Lee has a novel out from the 80's called Ghoul that has to do with a clan of ghouls in the suburbs. But if you don't know what I'm talking about that's fine. Bottom line: Brian Keene's work fills some of the holes left in the horror market today. If you like zombies and shadows in the night you'll like this.

I thoroughly enjoy Brian Keene's work... with the sole exception of this book. The novel feels rushed and the character development is stunted.

If you're looking for a moving, gripping, 'coming-of-age' horror novel in the tradition of Stephen King's 'It', this is not the book for you. I highly recommend picking up a copy of Dan Simmons' 'Summer of Night' instead; Simmons' novel is one of the greatest works of horror fiction (or any genre, for that matter) available today and may, I suspect, have strongly influenced Mr. Keene when writing 'Ghoul'.

Read 'Summer of Night' by Dan Simmons. Read ANYTHING by Brian Keene other than 'Ghoul'.

Brian Keene's debut novel won the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel that year, and set off a storm of publicity announcing him as the Next Big Thing, which has only increased in the intervening years. Unfortunately, I found that novel, The Rising, to be a huge disappointment, and I avoided reading anything else by Keene until the premise for Ghoul proved to be irresistible.

This was partially because it shares its title with Michael Slade's best novel, but it was primarily because of its coming-of-age motif. In horror, the coming-of-age novels are generally the ones that are talked about for years (think of Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, Dan Simmons's Summer of Night, and Robert R. McCammon's Boy's Life as just a few examples), and I did not want to miss out on a potential classic by this highly popular author. But high expectations often lead to huge disappointments, and that was the case with Ghoul.

It is summer 1984. Timmy Graco and his friends Barry and Doug spend most of their time in their new underground bunker, or hanging out in the cemetery where Barry's father is the caretaker. Other than his friends, though, Timmy's grandpa seems to be the only one who understands him. Meanwhile, a being has arisen from underneath the cemetery. He is a ghoul, and he is hungry. Enlisting Barry's father to acquire more food for him leads to a summer that Timmy and his friends will never forget.

The characters are impressively drawn, but Ghoul has many flaws that keep it from being the classic that I expected. First and most importantly is Keene's heavy-handed treatment of the subject matter. A coming-of-age novel should not draw attention to its loss-of-innocence elements. Subtlety is required to let the events speak for themselves, to let the reader do most of the work in effecting the emotional resonance. Instead, Keene gives us far too many self-aware passages like the following: "Part of Timmy was ... afraid of what it might mean for his friend, and for them all. A loss of innocence, a dark passage from boyhood into the beginnings of manhood."

It is vital that we follow along with the characters through their struggles and do not have the important! parts pointed out to us. The thing about the loss of innocence is you're never aware of it as it is happening. It only becomes clear upon later reflection, and certainly not before the fact.

Another problem is that, despite the ghoul's subplot, the title of the book is misleading. This novel isn't really about the ghoul at all: it is about what Keene calls human monsters. And in practically exploitive treatments of sensitive subjects like incest and domestic abuse, Keene beats his readers over the head with his agenda. Along these lines, Ghoul could also have used a pass at a copyeditor's desk. A good portion of my complaints could have been remedied there as passages that were previously effective (if a little overdone) lose all of their impact when they are repeated almost verbatim just a few pages later.

This is unfortunate because otherwise Ghoul has a lot going for it. The twelve-year-old voice feels genuine, and tender scenes of young love are handled skillfully. Timmy is a classic character, and his grandpa makes the desired impression in only a few pages (too bad he manages to be forgotten entirely for the rest of the book!).

The scenes featuring the ghoul are especially entertaining; the ghoul himself even comes across as somewhat sympathetic -- particularly when compared to irredeemable characters like Barry's dad and Doug's mom -- after all, it is hardly the ghoul's fault that he has developed a taste for freedom and self-preservation. His story is gruesome and suspenseful and imaginative -- everything that the best horror is.

I want to applaud Keene for at least grasping at greatness, but Ghoul falls short in too many ways to recommend it. Despite its flaws, however, its fast-paced plot drew me in from page one and kept me reading -- almost against my will -- all the way to the end. I have to say one thing about Keene's prose: it really moves, even if it sometimes runs off the road.