The plan is to reread all of Brian Keene’s available works in roughly the order that they were published. I’m doing it because I’m an author in need of improvement and a reader who enjoys a storyteller willing to bleed out on the page in a powerful and interesting way. I’m a fan of Keene’s work. I think there is something to be learned through this process.

You can also go back to the Introductory Post: A Gathering of Books to read more about the how and the why of this or any of my other posts up through this one and beyond by checking out the Master List of all my #BrianKeeneRevisited posts.

We have the author’s preferred edition of Earthworm Gods. Fancy. This was also known as The Conqueror Worms. I didn’t realize how contentious the existence of that second title was until I read the afterword of this book. Turns out, the unwilling change in title was filled with conflict with marketing departments, crappy covers, and all manner of bad choices outside Keene’s control, bad memories for him with a book that held a special place for him because of the turning point it represented for him in his style of storytelling.

I had trouble getting through this one at no fault of the author. Between the first and second acts, I had a heart attack. Leading up to the heart attack, I had a lot of pain the doctors couldn’t identify. After getting stints put in, I was tired and unfocused. I joked on Twitter about the book possibly giving me a heart attack. Another reader said he had a stroke while reading one of Brian Keene’s books. The author responded to us saying that you had to hydrate before reading his books. You’ve been warned.

We have a strong opening for our character narrator. Brian Keene’s skills are fully on display here. In the afterword, he discusses that this was the first time he felt like his true voice as a writer started to really show itself. I’m surprised to hear him say that, not because the book wasn’t good, but because the work that preceded it was generally stellar. He’s grown a great deal as a storyteller over the years, so maybe finding his voice here and going forward was a big part of that.

The narrator states that he’s not a writer on multiple occasions. It sets an interesting tone and forgives some narrative liberties. It also works to make the story more immersive.

I thought early on there was a feel to this story I was having trouble placing. The narrator mentions the split narrative acts of War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. Keene discusses this further in the afterword. Clearly, that was it. That was the feel. This story was born from the framework of two earlier short stories. Wells’s odd structure of the brothers’ stories lended itself to the construction of this tale and gave it an old classic monster story feel. The transition between tales and narration adds to the story, I believe. And as intended, it expands our view of the world plagued by endless rain and monsters. I think the second act’s story might be more interesting than the first. I believe I thought the same when first reading War of the Worlds, too.

You know it’s a crazy ass story when the giant worms are maybe the third or fourth weirdest thing we’re going to encounter before the tale is over.

Nicotine withdrawals loom large over the narrator and his choices. In Sympathy for the Devil, Keene details his own struggles with trying to quit tobacco which seem to overlap the writing of this story if I have the timeline right. It’s a lot more than a quick line about wishing for a cigarette. People in the know understood and appreciated the reality.

The “isolated man” theme is explored well in the beginning. Then, we end up with a couple old geezers versus the weather and the worms. Basing these characters off men he knew, Keene succeeded in making them three-dimensional and full.

Keene’s history is all over this story. A good bit of Kevin’s backstory borrows from Keene’s own experiences.

A shoutout to the author Piccirilli. The bunkers from The Rising are mentioned too.

Ob gets a shoutout in graffiti and from the mouth of a possessed character later. Here Ob supersedes The Rising universe to become Keene’s own “Man in Black” without the limitations of being a man. Unless it appeared in an earlier short story, I believe this is the first mention of the Labyrinth in Keene’s mythos and what waits at the middle of it.

As with previous Keene stories, strong religious themes overlay the internal and external struggles of all these characters. The book of Job is quoted regarding things that grow up out of the dust of the earth and destroy the hope of men. There’s more mud than dust here, but it tracks. “God broke his promise” is dropped into the tale beautifully and with power.

“That’s when the people from Baltimore fell out of the sky.” Great line. Partly because anything could happen in this story.

Another homeless character appears in this tale of unlikely survivors pushed together much like in City of the Dead.

The burial of Jimmy is weird and wonderful.

“My dreams were as dry as my eyes.” Great line.

The Alka-Seltzer bird trick in this story will appear later in Dead Sea too.

There are a couple times characters picked odd moments to wax poetic about literary history when trouble was racing toward them and time was running out. I think there is overall marked improvement in the execution of dialogue in this story as compared to earlier work like Terminal. As Keene said himself, he came into his own more with this work.

Real life tales don’t have perfect endings. Keene delivers the messiness of this story with no more apology than that from the narrator character who declared himself unfit to tell the story from the beginning. Maybe perfectly done in its imperfection. Keene doesn’t tell stories like other authors and never really has. Maybe this story serves as readers’ warning that you’ve entered his world which is run by his rules and you’re just along for the ride from here on out.

My next post in this series will be Dark Hollow #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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