Customer Reviews

Urban Gothic

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(20)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Just like the cover suggests, Urban Gothic is a haunted house story. It starts out with six suburban teens stuck in a bad city neighborhood when they get lost and their car breaks down. They have a misunderstanding with some of the locals, believing (understandably, from the way their interaction began) that they were gangbangers about to rob them. The protagonists, three boys and three girls, run for cover into an evil-looking abandoned house.

Not all of them make it to the end of the book.

Urban Gothic is filled with vile, deformed, cannibal mutants, some more humanoid than others, and Keene packs each chapter with brutal detail and gruesome deaths. There's a diverse group of characters; by the end of the book the six suburbanites, the local kids, their older neighbor and a scrap-metal thief all end up facing down the horrors within. The bad guys are some of the nastiest Keene's written (worse than the Siqqism from The Rising, Earl Harper from The Conqueror Worms and Sherm from Terminal combined) ; giants, dwarves, mutant babies that should have never survived the womb and even one particularly nasty creature that wears a woman's preserved skin as clothing. Just about everyone who dies goes crazy or close to it before meeting their end and even the people that survive will never be the same. The setting itself is impressive; the house, of course, is creepy as hell and described in great detail, but most of the action and horrible nastiness occurs deep underground, in the basement and caves inhabited by more loathsome creatures as the characters progress deeper within.

I had high expectations for Gothic just because it's a Brian Keene novel, but this surpassed them exponentially. I do believe it's his nastiest work yet. I made the mistake of reading it over dinner one night and... well... I had to cut my feast short, let's just say that. In addition, if you're a long-time reader you'll even catch a connection or two to some of Keene's other work. 10/10 and I want to see this book made into a movie NAO.

Some folks say there are no new stories. Some folks might compare Brian Keene's Urban Gothic to movies like The Hills Have eyes and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or the writings of Richard Laymon and Edward Lee. Yes, there are elements of these things in Urban Gothic, but, it's what Keene does with these elements that makes the book stand out. The action starts early and the tension rises with each blood soaked page. Instead of giving us complete character descriptions at the start, Keene lets the information trickle in; we learn more about each character from their reactions to the horrible situation they find themselves in, then we would if it was all layed out for us in the first chapter. While some may look at this as a simple slasher novel, it addresses issues of race,community pride and sacrifice, as well. BUT, it is a great slasher novel. Brian Keene's amazing talent takes horror tropes and raises them to a level that should not just be enjoyed, but should be praised. (Yeah, I know I didn't mention the inbred-mutant-cannibals. For that, you have to read the book.)

I've read other books by Keene and have loved them but this isn't one of them. Often at times I felt he was rambling through the storyline, when in fact the whole book felt like something slapped together. The writing in places felt forced almost like words were being written to boost the word count.
If you like mutants which make no sense, this book is for you. If not, skip it! I wish I had.

I really enjoyed the first Keene book I read, "The Rising," and looked forward to picking up another one. Unfortunately, the second book was "Urban Gothic." Decent story idea, but it never seemed to develop beyond a simple framework on which to hang the descriptions of excessive sexual perversion and grossness. *SPOILERS* When Javier was being captured and actually had a short discussion with one of the mutants, asking who they were, and the mutant replied, "We were here long before the buildings and automobiles, and we'll be here long after they're gone," I was really intrigued and looked forward to Keene's reveal of the mutant origins and where they might have come from. I thought that it might be cool if these were the descendants of the lost colonists of Roanoke, forced underground and breeding amongst themselves for 300 years. But there was no reveal. The most interesting line in the book was just a toss-off without any further explanation. Disappointing.

Brian Keene brings horror to Philly in this fantastic thrill ride. Great monsters who get sicker and sicker as the pages turn.

Afraid I have to go against the grain here and say the book was not so great. I am a horror fan, and have liked some of Keene's work as well as Lee and Laymon, etc. But this one just didn't pay off. Don't expect much character development-- that's okay-- but there really isn't much of any story either. Just a set up for a story which goes nowhere. Could just be an extended "first scene" to something. Some interesting possibilities are hinted at, or even specifically brought up, then simply dropped-- e.g. the junk collector-guy. No explanations, no epilogue, no reveal, no nothing. Just ends flat (I really thought the last chapter in my copy was missing!I had to check another.)

This was a quick read and a real page turner, I only stopped reading once when I got a little sick to my stomach. Good use of gore, horror and I think that it's fairly original. Nice racial stereotypes and just enough charactor development to define people, have me like them and care about and most importantly see their folly.

This is my third Keene and just like the others, I think that he needs one more chapter. I want to know about things one week later, or one month later. I want closure. In this book, I didn't want the house to burn down now, I wanted the public to learn of the mutants under the house.... you could even make a good sequel from it.

I do have two real complaints however. 1) I think that Keene just can't leave the topic of mutant penis alone for very long. Mr Keene sure loves him some mutant penis. 2) I have never read the word 'shriek' so many times in 300 pages. In fact, this maybe equals the total number of times I've read that word in my life before this book. It actually starts to become funny, waiting for the next mutant, or human, or rat or whatever to shriek. Maybe a penis should have shrieked, that would have been great.

After the interesting and exciting read of Dark Hollow I was expecting great things from Urban Gothic, but I found that the gross and nauseating descriptions of the supposedly human 'creatures' ultimately turned me off and I put down the book at page 200. I have a good imagination and horror tales are my regular reads, but this one stretched the limits of believability and it lost me. Characters weren't really fleshed out all that well and I just wanted the book to end. I'll probably try another Brian Keene novel, but not without some serious research.

Being a huge Brian Keene, fan I had been looking forward to Urban Gothic for months before it was released. But it took me almost six months to finish reading it. I got halfway through and gave up. It actually turned me off horror for awhile and made me wonder why I preferred gore and monsters over interesting characters. I don't, what I want is for my horror novels to have it all: fascinating characters that I don't want to see die, monsters and gore. But Urban Gothic focused more on the characters' torture than on their description and development. Eventually I got back to reading Urban Gothic (obviously, or else I wouldn't be reviewing it now) and found the second half to be better than the first.

Three young couples attend a rap concert and on the way home their car breaks down in a bad neighbourhood. When a group of young black men approach them, they become frightened and run away, hiding in an abandoned house. Or so they think - the house is actually inhabited by a family of mutant creatures.

The plot is a familiar one, but I didn't mind because it's a plot I love (almost) every time I encounter it. It's similar to Brian Keene's novel, Castaways, which was also about monsters killing and eating people, but had a different setting (a tropical island).

The pace moves fairly quick, having the first mutant sighting/teen killing by the end of Chapter One. But the teens' efforts to hide or escape get old fast. Eventually Urban Gothic becomes dull and monotonous, which was the point I stopped reading. But when I picked the book up again months later, I was surprised to find that it wasn't as bad as I remembered. And it introduced a few fresh plot developments (killer mutant babies, for instance), which kept me reading to the end.

As I already mentioned, the area of the novel most lacking are the characters. Keene gives virtually no back story on them, making me careless about what happens to them and wonder why I should read any further. And because of this, I couldn't tell any of them apart. I spent the entire novel trying to identify Kerri from Heather, having to flip back to previous chapters to remember.

But I liked the group of black young men. They were the only interesting, non-stereotypical characters in the story and Urban Gothic would've been better if Keene focused on them more instead of the teens. And I did find the mutants (and mutant babies) disturbing.

It's not a bad novel, especially if gore interests you more than compelling characters. But if you're looking for a good mutant cannibal novel, I would stick with Ketchum's Off Season.

Having read and enjoyed several of Brian Keene's previous books, I was excited to pick up "Urban Gothic". The reviews promised an exciting take on the usual haunted house/teens in peril story. The author lives up to that promise- somewhat.

Keene's strength lies in his vivid creation of the world the characters inhabit. He paints a vivid picture of a neighborhood in plight, a place the world has forgotten about. With a few deft sentences, I felt as though I was actually on that blighted street and inside that ruin of a house. Visualizing the non-stop action was no problem and I found myself remarking many times, "this would be a great movie". However, his strength also becomes a weakness as he repeatedly describes the condition of the house and its inhabitants to the point where I'm not sure if it was for greater shock value or simply to fill pages. With tighter editing this book could easily be a novella. The first time I read a description of the main cannibal's STD-ridden genitals, or that the cannibals all seemed to reek of feces, those ideas were firmly embedded in my mind. These details were repeated so many times (seemingly every time a character was re-introduced)that they lost their effectiveness and I found myself skipping over them.

Another weakness of the book is the poor dialogue and character development. The characters are all straight out of Hollywood Casting. Pretty but fairly generic white kids, check. Down on his luck white guy doing something morally questionable to feed his family, check. Gang of minority teenagers who look tough but are really good deep down inside, check. And aging minority father figure, who misses the old days when people cared and did the right thing, looking for a chance to rally the neighboorhood and hoping to relive his youth, check. None of these characters were fleshed out in any way. I had a hard time remembering who had died and who had lived, or even caring, since there was nothing about the characters to make me identify with them. I was really hoping for so much more. I wanted to care about these characters. I wanted to see them defy stereotypes and behave (and speak) as real people would. There were several missed opportunities to develop the story (how did the cannibals get there? They're obviously somewhat human- how did they get the way they are? How did it affect the neighborhood in the past? Would the neighborhood come to life with the destruction of the house?) that were so obvious that it just seemed like lazy writing.

On almost all of the Brian Keene books I own (and I admit I own a few- I keep hoping his writing will improve- I really, really want to like him) there is a quote calling him the new Stephen King. I respectfully disagree. King writes horror so effectively because he takes his time. He makes his characters vividly real and makes us care about them before he plunges them into the worst situations imaginable (which is probably why his film adaptations are usually miniseries length). He delivers true horror that stays with you after you've put the book down. Brian Keene, disappointingly, goes for a quick shock and gross-out that you've forgotten a few moments after you've gone to the next page. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this sort of scare- it's fun and entertaining. But I keep hoping that this author is capable of more.