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.

This new edition of Running with the Devil: Hail Saten volume 2 is dedicated to author Christine Morgan, “who has the goods to go the distance.” He acknowledges others who are personal and important to him. He hints that volume 3 will show the fallout of his mistakes from these years.

This volume covers primarily the years 2004 and 2005 which included some personal and professional challenges to him, the releases of City of the Dead and Terminal, and a whirlwind book tour that maybe came at the worst possible time for him.

The things I share and discuss here will only touch on a fraction of what is in this work. You’ll need to buy it and read it for yourself. The book tour is some of the best stuff and I’m leaving most of that for you to discover.

I only knew Brian Keene after he stopped punching down. I might be wrong on my assessment of that because I’ve never been a target of Keene’s ire myself, Praise Ob, but he indicates that along with how he spent money and some opinions that didn’t age well, the moments in these recollections when he believed he was punching down are moments he’s not proud of. We all have to grow. Most of us get to mostly forget who we were and what we did in the early 2000s. We weren’t blogging it all and living out our growth in public. Keene does not entirely like this long ago version of himself.

Keene thought he saw signs of Big Foot in one passage. This is the type of believer Keene has always been. Here we get hints of Dark Hollow and seeds of the philosophical explorations of Triangle of Belief coming many years down the road.

Kerry vs Bush is big business early in this book. The Swift Boat controversy is in full swing. Keene gets up to some political shenanigans, mostly summed up in chasing people who stole his yard placard as he went after them partially clothed down the road. Everyone believed it was the most important election of our lives, after all.

Young Brian Keene cannot be trusted with money, drugs, relationships, or tattoo needles. I trust older Brian Keene more, but any story I hear about him, even now, no matter how outlandish, I have to admit that almost any act of insanity or self-destruction might be possible.

I think he and I bought The Land of the Lost DVD boxset around the same time. He was super upset about the Will Ferrel remake of Land of the Lost. This too shall pass.

Keene kept madman paces of writing on a daily basis in these days of yore. Even in the time that he came onto my social media radar years later, he’d engage in writing marathons to catch up on deadlines that required and achieved mindboggling wordcounts. In more recent days, Keene has paid a price for the punishment of years that won’t allow those inhuman feats of writing any longer. In other writings, he talked about how these paces of all-day writing every day contributed to broken relationships. You always neglect something. Always. Even in the midst of these pages still believing these mad writing paces were sustainable for a while, Keene realizes and states, “I’m sure there’ll be a price to pay for this pace.” He has an uncanny way of predicting the future.

Keene rants about Wal-Marts and Starbucks coffee as only one could in 2005. Also, in 2005, Keene decided he was retiring from flame wars and even presents himself as a reborn stoic of sorts before the book is over. Okay. Whatever you say 37-year-old, big-spending Brian Keene. I just got through saying you had an uncanny way of predicting the future and then you say some real bullshit like this.

Keene was convinced the CDC was covering up a coming global pandemic. *looks out the window* God, I wish I could just say he was crazy and full of shit and stick with that.

He was working on King of the Bastards with Steven L Shrewsbury much earlier than I thought.

Lost became his favorite TV show, but he never stopped watching South Park or listening to Howard Stern. This leads to his purchase of satellite radio when Stern moves over from terrestrial radio. I forgot how long ago that happened. This coincides with a funny misunderstanding involving Keene losing his shit with David Lee Roth. You’ll have to read it for yourself.

Is Coop a bad influence on Brian or is Brian a bad influence on Coop? Yes.

Oh, stand back. Keene is trying again to quit tobacco. It shows up prominently in the characters in his work from the time period.

Keene says, “I milked my pain for personal gain.” This might be his strongest attribute as a writer and also the biggest mistake for his personal health. It defines him as an author and a person his whole life. Keene suffers a personal family tragedy that he hints about in the original text but explains more clearly in the new introduction to this book. You get to be in the know in a way readers at the time were not. This leads Keene to struggle with reconciling his suffering with his image of God, much like the characters in his books are forced to do time and again. He compares writing to bleeding often and he invites us the readers to bleed with him. All of this spillage ends up on the page in one form or another eventually.

He called self-published authors the crack hoes of the publishing world. There is context. Read it. After that, we can decide if we need to gather the tar, feathers, and townspeople to address this.

There’s a great essay on the act of immortalizing through storytelling.

Keene shares his research that led to his version of Ob and his minions.

He also shares the history of the Grossout Contest. Cash prizes!? I won the Grossout Contest two years in a row in 2019 and 2020. Do you know how hard it is to be the two-time back-to-back Grossout Champion in the height of a pandemic that apparently 2005 Brian Keene knew the CDC was hiding from us? There were no cash prizes then. I got championship-level gross too late in history apparently.

He looks back on the horror message boards of the earlier Internet fondly as they evolved out from under him into something less wonderful, by his estimation. These proto social media gathering places brought him some of his deepest friendships of this century. Even in these years, he looked back on those message boards with a deep nostalgia. I’ve heard him pine about them in more recent years and that nostalgia has only grown. Even in his own writings in this book and earlier, all the downsides of social media were evident there all along.

Keene had no more time to bait assholes, he said with no sense of irony in 2005.

We get our first mention of Meteornotes at one point in here. Big Joe the manservant looms large as we approach and enter the road trip tale of the book tours. In the midst of reading this, I asked Keene what happened to Big Joe. He directed me to episode 59 of The Horror Show with Brian Keene podcast. As I started to listen, I remembered listening to this episode before. The price I am paying for my pace is degenerative memory loss. Everything is a surprise every time I hear it these days. It was jarring to hear Dave’s voice again from healthier days so soon after he passed. If you are curious about Big Joe after reading this book, check out that episode too.

Keene outlived most of the bookstore chains, businesses, and publishers where he signed and visited on his book tour through a number of states, regions, and countries. It’s like reading about a road-weary ancient vampire recounting his journeys through now lost civilizations. Or a talkative, troublesome, demon-possessed zombie.

Along the way, he decides to do touristy things full of people while hating people and then gets upset at the people for being there. Lucky for them, he gave up on baiting assholes, flame wars, and tobacco too, right? Other than that, he had fun.

He discusses the role of Night Shift and Stephen King among others on his person and his eventual identity as a writer in an essay that’s one of my favorites in the book.

Keene ends up in a dark place, darker than usual, in conjunction with his time on the road and everything that bookended those months. Going on that tour might have been a huge mistake considering. In the end, it is presented that there was loss and gain along that road. The cost of the loss was almost very, very steep though. Skipping the tour would have cost too and might not have saved him anything in the process. He worked through his anger at God in his own fashion. He would have to work through a lot more with friends by his side after it was all over. And still, all the suffering that was to come lay ahead for him no matter how stoic or enlightened this troubled young man still approaching 40 years might have become at the closing of this volume.

My next post in this series will be Ghoul #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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