by Jay Wilburn

Why would I attempt to read, and in many cases, reread over 65 books from a single author from the beginning to the present of their career? Solid question. Richard Chizmar started #StephenKingRevisited and I started moving quickly through Stephen King’s books as I joined in. I was looking at what to make my next major reading push. I considered covering other author’s series or just doing my normal reading without having a major effort going on. Then, I looked across the copies of Brian Keene’s books along my shelf. I thought, maybe …

I originally picked up the Leisure Books paperback of The Rising from a bookstore that still had its horror section back in 2004. Later, I grabbed up City of the Dead and Dead Sea. I was hungry for this type of fiction and there was a lack of it on bookstore shelves in the era when buying anything online, much less books, was still an alien concept to me. I was about the business of gathering books.

Around 2010, I received my first check for my own published story. It was five dollars for a zombie story. In 2013, I quit my day job to become a full-time author and have been making a living through writing ever since.

I had interactions with Brian Keene on Twitter before I ever met him. He was and to some degree still is that other level. He’s that guy who I bought his books from a real bookstore before writing for a living was more than a wild dream for me. He was “for real”.

I believe it was the second Scares That Care convention where I first met him. He was still “over there” and “for real” and I was just “trying to make something out of myself”.

At a future Scares That Care convention, I was on my way up to Virginia, riding with Armand Rosamilia and his wife. Keene called Armand and offered him a spot in the Celebrity Room. I thought that was cool for him. I knew I was going to be at the dealer’s table on my own, but that was fine. This was a big moment for my friend. I’d still see everyone around the convention.

Then, Keene asked Rosamilia if his tablemate, that would be me, the guy just trying to “get there”, was somewhere I could be contacted. Armand said I was in the car and Keene offered me a spot in the Celebrity Room, too. That was a big moment for me and not the last time I would be there.

Over the years, we had more interactions, ended up at more conventions as peers, sat at tables late at night talking after conventions, and interacted professionally on publishing projects we both happened to be a part of.

I reached a point where I realized Brian Keene knew who I was, valued me as a person, looked at me as a fellow author, and considered me a friend. I was interviewed as an author on his podcast during one of the telethons. My brain still does its best to keep him on that other level he has occupied since I first picked up The Rising. Because no matter how wide he opens his arms and speaks to me as a peer, he is still “for real”.

After the release of Triangle of Belief, I interviewed him about that book and his career on my podcast. I closed that show recently, but will put up those episodes on my Patreon eventually.

Keene is at an interesting phase in his career. He has a catalog that rivals Stephen King in less than half the decades King needed to write as many works. It is still decades long — a very long and a short time at the same time depending on how it is measured. It spans many ups and downs of changes in publishing. Keene also had to weather these changes from a more vulnerable level of writing than someone like King. Keene wasn’t just some guy giving it a go. He had enough fame to have to deal with the downsides of it. He was still at a midlist level where a publisher imploding or an evolution/revolution in the industry could pull the foundation out from under him. He couldn’t just watch things happen with detached curiosity. Keene had to take the wheel of his career and navigate through all the storms between The Rising and The End of the Road. If he crashed, he had to build a new ship for his career and set sail again, cutting his own course. He recently wrote with a sort of desperate passion to get out the books he needed to write, in the event that these were his last, and now he finds himself free to write what he wants.

Well, sort of.

He wrote recently about a one man writing retreat to a cabin where his efforts to close out a few projects were only interrupted by a daily hike and an evening by the fire. Those were the planned interruptions. The unplanned ones included the ache of his knuckles, which he attributes to too many years of punching things. I remember him putting up impossible numbers on days he needed to hit a deadline in the past. Hourly breaks to let the pain subside don’t lend themselves to this sort of pace any longer. The plan for the generation of writers ahead of him was to create a back catalog that supported you after you hit 60, but most of those writers ended up writing until they were dead. Keene had a hard road to where he is now and producing until 60 and beyond for him is going to come at a cost. For me as a reader, I will get more stories, but we will both pay for that privilege with very different currencies.

These were the conditions under which his fiction, nonfiction, and every creative work were born at the various stages of his career. He did all this through an era where his life, family, friendships, rivalries, losses, personal struggles, professional challenges, and tumultuous growth as a person and as a creator were playing out in real time and often in full view.

Keene found himself at the forefront of the industry often and repeatedly, and because he was still in a position to have to grind out every success, he was vulnerable on those frontlines.

He had a choice to make. He could simply fight his own battles and no one could fault him for doing so. We all do that. He had plenty of battles to fight personally, professionally, and otherwise. His other option was to use his position, as vulnerable and imperfect as it was, to fight for others in some cases better than they could fight for themselves alone.

That second choice was the harder road. He was not the perfect hero and he knew it. He was not always going to be perfectly up for the fight and he knew that too. Somehow, he girded himself for battle over and over again with equal measures of reluctance and enthusiasm.

He always ran the risk of running afoul of people he could have easily avoided. He risked his own career. He risked his health. He risked going too far and sometimes did, having to admit he was in the wrong at times in part or in whole.

Nevertheless, others benefited from his willingness to be the reluctant, enthusiastic champion of genre writers. Those who benefited most were new creators below his position of success. Those who benefited most from Keene’s efforts were those who often had nothing to offer him in exchange. Whether he formulated it in his mind as a motto and creed or it was something more base that was part of his natural instincts, Keene reached down to help others up almost to the exclusion of reaching up for help for himself. And he punched in wild, madman haymaker swings with almost every one of his efforts in every direction except down. He pulled his punches when he sensed the direction of the opponent was down, because something in him wouldn’t allow himself to punch that direction.

When he found himself burned in a terrible accident, his friends, readers, and others throughout the industry were willing to step up to help financially and otherwise. We finally had him where we wanted him. He had to take our help now, he had to accept a hand up the same way he had offered to all of us, and we were finally in a position to do right by him. This, as much as anything, illustrates how much he means and how, despite his best efforts to destroy himself, he manages to keep going for now.

So, whether it’s his fault, our faults, the fault of the world we find ourselves in, or some combination of these conflicting energies, Brian Keene is either a man in a maelstrom or he is the turbulence and the storm himself. It is from here we get books like Pressure, Ghoul, and The Girl on the Glider. These conditions produce friendships and collaborations like the Clickers books, Curse of the Bastards, and Fucked. It is also from here that we eventually get Triangle of Belief, End of the Road, and whatever might be next.

Keene is an imperfect writer and man, but he has a real refinement to his storytelling, his word choice, and his writing skill. He also has a raw edge that does not fear to risk taking his characters and stories to unsafe places. This paradox of refinement and raw abandon creates moments of creative greatness again and again – imperfect, bloody, and beautiful moments.

I’m a fan of Brian Keene and his work. If you ask him, I believe I am also a peer and a friend. I’m an author with a lot to learn and I’m a reader here to be entertained by someone willing to bleed on the page for me from aching knuckles that punched too much. Keene bleeds as well or better than any.

So, I am about the business of gathering books. I prefer to hold a physical copy in my hand, but there are a few I’m going to have to begrudgingly settle for the ebook. Others, I will not be able to obtain. If I have the wealth or the luck to come across them later, I’ll drop back and add in those readings out of order gratefully. What’s the point of spilling all that blood and paying in pain if I’m not able to enjoy it for myself? As it is, there is a long enough road ahead of me with what is available and there is much gathering left to be done.

Brian Keene is at the level of legacy building and it was a long, strange, and furious path over two decades and counting of publishing to get us to this point. He’s also the man alone in a cabin, thinking about the friends and fellow writers no longer with him, as he sits back down from his pain break to write some more. It is a thing that bears witnessing. #BrianKeeneRevisited is my effort to be that witness, participant, and co-traveler.

It all begins with the line “The Dead scrabbled for an entrance to his grave.” And we are among the undead, digging our way inside to see all there is to find.

To see everything I’m going to be reading and in what order, you can check out the Master List for #BrianKeeneRevisited. All future posts will be linked in that master list as I finish the books. The list includes every book I have or that is still available in print for me to buy. It excludes comics, franchise/movie/TV tie-ins, standalone pieces in other anthologies, etc. This is not a definitive list of all his works. Due to the nature and the scope of his career, there is so much that is out of print and has risen to costly collector prices. The best list of everything he has done is the bibliography found on his own site. On there, Keene links where you can buy those books still in print. I will also link in my corresponding posts where the books under discussion can be found.

I believe it is time to begin this journey from The Rising to The End of the Road and beyond.

My next post in this series will be The Rising #BrianKeeneRevisited which can be found on the Master List of all my #BrianKeeneRevisited posts. Note: The photo of Brian Keene used in the banner image of these blog posts was taken by John Urbancik and used by permission of both Keene and Urbancik.

Jay Wilburn

Jay Wilburn has a Masters Degree in Education that goes mostly unused since he quit teaching to write about zombies. Jay writes horror because he tends to find the light by facing down the darkness. His is doing well following a life saving kidney transplant. Jay is the author of Maidens of Zombie Kingdom a young adult fantasy trilogy, Lake Scatter Wood Tales adventure books for elementary and middle school readers, Vampire Christ a trilogy of political and religious satire, and The Dead Song Legend. He cowrote The Enemy Held Near, Yard Full of Bones, and The Hidden Truth with Armand Rosamilia. You can also find Jay's work in Best Horror of the Year volume 5. He is a staff writer with Dark Moon Digest, LitReactor, and the Still Water Bay series with Crystal Lake Publishing.

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