03/18/2026 Exploring the Labyrinth by Kit Power: SCRATCH, essay 25

Exploring The Labyrinth

In this series, I will be reading every Brian Keene fiction book that has been published (and is still available in print) and then producing an essay on it. With the exception of Girl On The Glider, these essays will be based upon a first read of the books concerned. The article will assume you’ve read the book, and you should expect MASSIVE spoilers.

I hope you enjoy my voyage of discovery.

SCRATCH

Welcome back to Brian Keene country. In particular, welcome back to rural PA, where we meet Evan Fisher, comic book illustrator, his wife Marlena, and his son Dylan.

At the start of the story, they’re leaving an idyllic if modest life; two neighbours (a retired couple, and a single mum with a couple of older kids), a couple of acres of backyard, and a stream that’s good for trout fishing. Hell, they’ve even got a dog.

In short, they’re living the dream.

Keene sets all this up with characteristic directness; the story is first person, so Evan talks to us directly about his circumstances and surroundings, giving us the outline of his life. It’s the kind of character work Keene does so well; sure, Evan seemed like a thinly veiled authorial insert (it was the ‘working to Anthrax’ that gave it away to me, given the author photos from this period all show Keene in an Anthrax hoodie, though since reading the story I’ve learned that the house and surroundings were also directly lifted from his place of residence at the time it was written), but so what? It was good enough for King in The Mist, and that’s widely (and correctly) regarded as one of the greatest horror novellas of all time. Most importantly, it works; Scratch delivers a vivid portrait of a time, place, and family, and while as a writer I’m perpetually fascinated by speculation about how the creative process works and what elements writers draw on from their lives to inform their fictions (and we’ll be covering this subject at some length in a couple of essays time), as a reader, I don’t really care how the magic is done, as long as it’s working.

And it’s definitely working here; the conversational style flows with confidence and pace, welcoming the reader into the narrative as it sets the scene. The opening prologue even begins with an engagement with the real-world concerns that may have partly inspired the story, with a discussion of the changes in weather over the last decade, winters running cooler, storms more frequent. Keene's narrator stays agnostic as to causes, which is an interesting decision I’ll admit to finding personally frustrating (because we do know why it’s happening, and what we need to stop doing before it’s too late for us all), but I respect the choice, because fundamentally this is not a story about those causes.

This is a narrative about consequences.

Following a torrential thunderstorm that lasts for several hours (taking out power to the buildings next to the river in the process) and forces our family into the basement, Evan steps outside with Sanchez, his trusty dog, to try to survey the damage and check on his neighbours.

Keene does a great job building up the atmosphere in this section; a combination of the storm damage, Sanchez’s building unease, and a thick fog all conspire to render the familiar unfamiliar, and Evan experiences a growing, nameless unease that we as the reader feel even more acutely (because unlike Evan, we know he’s in a Brian Keene story). I especially liked a small but vivid moment where Evan is observing the dangerously swollen stream and describes a litany of items he sees floating past. It’s a simple moment, but it really demonstrates the power of Keene’s imagination, how clearly he sees the moment, and the level of detail creates a powerful sense of verisimilitude that really puts the reader in the scene. I was reminded of the sequence in Pale Fire when the tornado rips through a small town, Keene laying out the descriptions of the buildings in the path such that you can see it playing out in your mind's eye. I think it’s really easy to overlook how important moments like this are, in terms of how they allow the reader to become immersed in the narrative; to see the scene and story playing out in their minds (as, presumably, the writer has done).

Another thing I really appreciated about the story is the interactions Evan has with his neighbours. Initially, Evan sees Thena, the single mom, but the flood has cut her house off from the road, and the roaring of the water is too loud for them to communicate verbally, so they make do with some rudimentary sign language and gestures. It’s a small scene, but it’s clever for two reasons; firstly, it reinforces the unsettling feeling of how one significant change (in this case, a flood and attendant power cut) can make the simplest of exercises (chatting with your neighbour) challenging or even impossible, and render a previously pleasant environment unsettling, if not outright hostile. Secondly, it displays a fundamental truth of human psychology that the horror genre in general, and disaster stories specifically, often either elide or contradict completely; when the shit really goes down, the vast majority of us don’t immediately transform into paranoid, grasping, selfish sociopaths. Instead, most of us behave just as Evan and his neighbours do - we pull together, look out for each other, and share whatever we can with whoever needs it.

That feels like a truth worth remembering and reflecting on, here in 2025.

Anyway.

Shortly thereafter, Evan meets up with Jeff, his other neighbour, and they discuss Thena’s predicament - they’re trying to figure out a plan to help her and her kids evacuate their newly created island residence, worried that the waters might rise further before they recede - when Sanchezs’ growling warns us that the danger is about to get significantly more immediate.

Because they - and we - are about to meet Scratch.

At its heart, Scratch is a creature feature; the eponymous cryptid is a giant water snake of local legend, drawn downstream by floodwaters. The reveal scene is everything you want: the creature is glimpsed, the mind-boggling scale presented, but like the shark in Jaws, Evan is at first only given a partial view of the monster. Keene does a great job with the scene; it’s cinematic in delivery, but he also leans on the strength of prose as the medium, using Evan’s confusion with what he’s seeing to great effect, which further accentuates the horror and weirdness of the moment. It’s also a brilliant payoff for the set-up of the flood isolating the house; Evan and Jeff are close enough to see and hear (some of) what’s going on, but in terms of ability to intervene, they may as well be on the moon.

From there, it’s a pretty straight shot, narratively speaking; the two men return to their homes, arm themselves, and drive as close as they can to the neighbours' house (the journey gives the opportunity for Jeff to fill Evan in on the local legends around Scratch, and for me to reflect how good Keene’s gotten at blending info dump scenes like this so seamlessly into the narrative I didn’t even spot it until I was taking a second skim pass on the text in prep for the essay). They, of course, can’t drive all the way, and have to take the final part of the journey on foot, a tense trek through the woods behind Thena’s house, before heading inside to confront Scratch and meet their destiny.

The confrontation plays out exactly the way you want it to; sudden, violent, terrifying, lethal, and ferociously paced. Keene yet again demonstrates his talent for writing set-piece action horror: it’s like a movie, only better. And while, by Keene standards, Scratch is a relatively low-key threat (in the sense that he’s not actually about to cause the end of the world), that fits so well with the scale of the setting that it doesn’t matter a bit; ultimately, the apocalypse is always personal, and Scratch contains more than enough danger for Evan and his neighbours to be changed forever.

I also really loved the length of the story; it caught me off guard, because I was reading on an e-reader and hadn’t realised that there was a backup story included (which we’re getting to, I promise), but it’s exactly right, and packs all the more punch as a result; it’s a novella length idea, as simple as that, and I dread to think what a novel length version would even look like. You’d have to broaden out the scale, and as soon as that happened, I think the story would lose all the intimacy and claustrophobia that make it so effective. I’m not one of those ‘novella is the perfect length for horror’ people, to be clear; but Scratch is an exemplar of why and how novella-length tales can work so well. An absolute joy.

Scratch is backed up by Halves, a shorter tale, the inspiration for which hit Keene in the backyard of the house Scratch is set in. It definitely feels like a kissing cousin to the headliner story; similar location, similar family unit (daughter instead of son, cat instead of dog, and the wife is a more present character in the story, the parental relationship a bit more sharply drawn, as the narrative demands). But I’ve got to say, as much as I enjoyed Scratch, I think Halves is not only stronger of the two stories, but it might actually be a minor masterpiece.

For starters, it’s an incredible portrait of parenthood, and the wonderful gift and awesome burden of being responsible for a young life. The way the two parents navigate the twin issues of their pet cat leaving bloody offerings on the front porch, and their young daughters' horror at this, alongside her relationship with her imaginary friend Mr. Chickbaum rings painfully true, and the aside where the narrating father talks about how one of the amazing gifts of having kids is how it puts you back in touch with visceral memories of your own childhood just took my breath away. Like, I’ve felt that constantly, over the last fifteen years, in my own adventure in fatherhood, but I’ve never seen it expressed so elegantly in prose; still less in a fiction context where it’s such an important facet of what the story is doing.

In fact the whole family is so beautifully rendered; the father/daughter talks in the car during the school run (as well as the detail that the reason she’s not on the bus is the other kids have been picking on her and the school has refused to do anything about it), the conversations between the husband and wife over how to manage the increasing weirdness of the situation; even the domestic details of their going-to-bed routine create this extraordinarily vivid portrait of a (mostly) normal family.

I also adore how the story keeps you guessing right up until the final page (or, anyway, how it did for me). We’re certainly meant to understand the ‘imaginary friend’ has some degree of reality long before the narrator does; indeed, one of the many delights of the story is how Keene achieves this. The narrator's rationalisations of ‘Mr. Chickbaums’ conversations with their daughter, as he informs her that the cat is the party responsible for the dismembered animals being left on the porch (and later, the heartstopping moment when the father hears his daughter, in one sided conversation with Mr. Chickbaum, stop talking mid sentence, as though she were interrupted) are painfully understandable - poor guy doesn’t know he’s in a a Brian Keene story - but I love how it creates a very delicate narrative effect whereby we, the reader, understand more about what’s going on than the narrator telling us the story does.

It also delightfully wrong-footed me, in that I spent most of the story wanting to yell at the father to stop with the Google searches and go and find the door hidden in the field behind the house and board it up, before the entire planet was swamped with Lepricauns that only children can see and hear (because, again, it’s a Brian Keene story; the end of the world is not just a reasonable worst case scenario, it’s a likely one). So when the ending arrives, it’s a double gut-punch, and it came so fast I was left reeling, with a million unanswerable questions, and it felt so good.

Genuinely, one of my favourite experiences of the entire project (and one that means I’m looking forward even more to diving into the ‘complete short stories of Brian Keene’ volumes, when we get there).

Next up: A Gathering Of Crows, the collective noun for which is, I believe…

Oh. Right. Yes.

I see what you did there.

🙂

KP 30/5/25

ORDER VOLUME 1 OF EXPLORING THE LABYRINTH NOW!

Exploring The Labyrinth Volume One collects the first 30 essays in this series, and features an introduction by Eric LaRocca, and an intimate, exclusive, career spanning interview with Brian Keene.

Order now to get your copy on October 13th: http://mybook.to/KPETL

 LINKS TO WORKS BY BRIAN KEENE:

Order Brian Keene books and many other indie horror titles direct from Vortex Books:

https://vortexbooksandcomicsonline.bigcartel.com/products

Missing a Keene title and can't find it on Vortex, check out his Amazon page:

https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001IQW9KY/

 BIO FOR KIT POWER:

Kit Power is an author of horror and dark crime fiction novels, novellas, and short stories, also a reviewer, essayist, and podcaster. The Finite, A Song For The End (BFA finalist, 2021), and Millionaire’s Day (BFA finalist, 2025) are his most recent fiction works; three novellas with interconnected elements that bring the apocalypse to his hometown of Milton Keynes in three very different ways. He encourages you not to read too much into that.

When he’s not gleefully visiting destruction on his hometown (fictionally), Kit writes non-fiction (much of which is collected in the two-volume My Life In Horror tomes, available wherever books are sold), reviews, blogs, and podcasts on subjects as diverse as Sherlock Holmes, Bruce Springsteen, and short horror fiction.

And if you enjoyed what you just read, please back his Patreon and buy his damn books, because the man needs to eat. Thanks.

Find Kit at the below links:

Find his podcast feed at https://talkingrobocop.libsyn.com/

Find his Patreon (free membership gets you the newsletter, as little as a $1 a month gets something new every week) at: Kit Power | creating Blog posts, Podcasts, Reviews, and Stories long and sho | Patreon

Find him on Bluesky: @kitgonzo.bsky.social