05/13/2026 Exploring the Labyrinth by Kit Power: THE GIRL ON THE GLIDER, essay 27

Candace Nola
4 hours ago
19 min read

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.

THE GIRL ON THE GLIDER

Essay 27

So.

This whole project started because, sometime in 2016, I bought The Girl on the Glider, as part of an Amazon 99p/99c sale.

And when I picked my jaw up off the floor, I wrote this:

The Girl on the Glider - Brian Keene

Well, this is kind of an awkward admission time. Here goes - this is my first encounter with Brian Keene’s work. Basically, Keene broke about a year or two after I dropped out of reading horror. Since beginning to reconnect with the scene in the last couple of years, his name has come up with crushing regularity. And I’m a huge fan and regular listener of his Horror Show podcast: as well as being an entertaining listen, it’s also consistently essential community broadcasting.

So, when Mr. Keene mentioned in passing that The Girl on the Glider was one of the books he was proudest of, and then coincidentally announced a price drop on the eBook edition on his blog, I figured it was time to take a long-overdue look. The fact that Girl… is a short novella also played into my decision-making - a quick hit to give me an idea of his style, a palate cleanser in between the longer works I’m currently reading.

Well, it’s been over a week and I’m still struggling to get to grips with this story and the impact it’s had on me.

I think The Girl on the Glider is a jaw-dropping piece of work for a number of reasons. I guess I’ll start with the voice - for the length of this tale; it was like Brian Keene was living in my head, talking to me. It’s that simple. The book captures the cadence and rhythm of his speech so closely that it’s genuinely eerie, like reading a transcript of an unbroadcasted episode of The Horror Show. There’s a good reason for that, which is revealed in the Afterword, and I will not spoil it in this review, but it made my reading experience immediate and visceral. I know metafiction isn’t everyone's cup of tea, and I understand why. Nonetheless, if you’re even remotely open to it as an approach, I think you’ll find this an exemplar of the form.

And I don’t want to shortchange the story - it’s as neat and efficiently told a ghost story as you’re likely to read and works on just about every level. That said, the story itself is not the reason I’ve found my mind returning to this book again and again in the days since I finished reading it. No, that has more to do with the breathtaking and painful honesty on display here. I’m starting to think that this book may actually be, in its own way, as important and valuable a book for the aspiring professional author to read as On Writing.

No, I'm not fucking kidding - though I share your incredulity. And to clarify what I am saying - I’m not suggesting this book could or should replace On Writing. What I am saying, after long and careful reflection, is that The Girl on the Glider is a near-essential companion to On Writing.

So, I guess I should probably tell you why I think that.

And there are two reasons - one general, one specific. The general is, this gives you an insight into what it’s like to be a successful horror fiction author in the second decade of the 21st century. In the throwaway background details, I was given as honest and unsentimental a window into that world as I could wish for. With not a single ounce of self-pity or appeals for sympathy, a clear picture is drawn of just what a slog the life of a professional writer is. That’s why it’s an essential companion to On Writing. Because while On Writing, yes, as I can personally attest, will get you fired up, will absolutely infect you with a love of fiction, will leave you desperate to fire up your WIP and get it on, what it doesn’t do - cannot do - is give you an insight into the path you’ll likely end up going down. Because for basically everybody reading this, King-level success and money is not going to happen. Depending on who you listen to, the digital revolution may mean that it never happens that way for anyone ever again. There’s good news alongside that, if true - more than ever before will be able to make a middle-class living, or a decent second income - but the fact remains, the era of the global author millionaire may well be over for good.

And with the best will in the world, King can’t tell you about that life. It’s not his fault, and this is not a deficit in On Writing - it’s simply a statement of fact. I will always respect how King held on to the reality of his origins, how to this day he can write relatable working and lower middle-class characters (and for that matter how he continues to pay it forward in all kinds of ways - blurbs, support, huge amounts of charitable donations, etc.). Nonetheless, for him to talk about the struggles of the day-to-day of a ‘merely’ successful (as opposed to stratospherically world-dominating) writer would have been so inauthentic as to undermine the whole point of that brilliant, brilliant book. It’s the one thing he can’t speak to.

But Brian Keene can. And he does. Brilliantly. With purpose. With muscle. With clear-eyed honesty and no apologies. And it’s absolutely gripping.

So, there’s that. There’s also a second reason - mildest of spoilers ahead, so if you haven’t already read the book/are already sold on picking it up, skip the rest of this paragraph to avoid learning more. For the rest of you, there’s a section in this book where Keene, in a few short pages, lays bare a truth I’d long suspected about fiction writing, but never heard anyone admit to before - least of all this brazenly, with what amounts to a worked example. It’s breathtaking both in its casual delivery and in its content. I think it may have been the single most eye-opening practical lesson concerning fiction writing I have ever read - and yes, I include On Writing in that statement.

I’m actually left with a bit of a mix of emotions. There’s a lot of embarrassment that this is my first encounter with Keene; that I’ve managed to miss a writer this good for this long. Curiosity and excitement, too - because the flip side to that is that there’s a big fat back catalogue to dive into, and that’s always exhilarating. The other thing is a sense of determination - a determination to take this man’s advice incredibly seriously, to sit my ass down for an hour every night and fucking write. Not because such an approach guarantees any kind of success or fulfilment, but because that’s the only way you’ll ever have a chance to get it done.

Thank you, Mr. Keene. The Girl on the Glider has changed how I think about writing. Looking forward to the rest of your work.

6/5/16

Fast forward to 2025, and I reread The Girl on the Glider with more than a little trepidation.

Look, I’m an enthusiast, okay? As I mentioned in the first essay in this series, I have critical faculties, but I’m not a critic. And my memory of this book was obviously intensely positive. At the same time, it’s been holy shit, almost a decade; I’ve been around the block a few times since then (and, once or twice, through the damn mill, too). And I’ve read twenty-five Brian Keene books, to boot. It seemed to me like the odds were pretty good that I’d at least have to temper or qualify my earlier praise as I got into a deeper, spoiler-filled discussion of the book.

So, I thought, as I reopened my Kindle edition and began to read.

And by the end - actually, no, by about three pages in - I realised if anything, the opposite was true.

This novella is an absolute fucking masterpiece.

I’ll be honest, part of that is I’d taken the afterword description of the book as ‘metafiction’ and ‘99.9% true’ with a pinch of salt; I’m a fiction writer, and I think I’d just assumed that was… not dishonest, but definitely part of the storytelling.

But since then, I’ve listened to hundreds of hours of The Horror Show, read twenty-five of his fiction books, and even spent an afternoon driving around with the man, as we visited the sites that inspired so many of his works and he told me tales about events and people passed. And all that has given me a far better sense of his autobiography, and in particular of the fierce work ethic his early successes and later trials and tribulations inspired.

I mean, check it out: in the eight years since The Rising put Keene on the map, he’s produced twenty-five novella or novel-length works, including an astonishing eight titles in 2010 alone (including the text under discussion). I know Keene once said on The Horror Show that he could write a novel in 30 days if he had to, and I believe him, but this is still by any reasonable standard a punishing work rate (and makes the consistency of quality in his 2010 output honestly kind of astonishing). Now, sure, publishing is lumpy, and books can sit in various stages of near completion for a while before making it out into the world. Still, it’s notable that 2010 was an unprecedented year for Keene publications, with him otherwise having a fairly consistent pattern of two to three titles a year.

And all of that is in this novella; the extraordinary level of pressure he’s under, the hint that his friends and family have already attempted to stage some kind of intervention (which apparently didn’t go over well with the author), and a genuine concern on the part of the author that he really might be losing his mind.

He’s working at an insane rate, with the entirely understandable wolf-ethic of a freelancer (which a mid-list horror author basically is); you fill your belly today because you don’t know if you’re going to eat tomorrow. And that hunger, that fear, is all over this novella, especially in the early sections. Part of what’s painfully real about the psychology on display throughout this novella is Keene’s sense, not of dread or fear (at least not until fairly late in the game), but annoyance; it’s like Jessie Venturea in Predator saying ‘I ain’t got time to bleed’, only when Keene expresses it, it’s not out of cartoon machismo but genuine desperation. Indeed, to break format and jump one title ahead briefly, he talks in the afterword to The Rising: Deliverance about not wanting to be known as just ‘the zombie guy’, and writing in a huge range of genres as a result, but being called back to the world of The Rising, at least in part, because ‘I like money’.

It’s hard not to imagine a certain level of understandable frustration here, because his output has been both prolific and extraordinarily varied (and for the record, I think all my favourites have been outside of that direct Rising mythos), and yet…

And yet, as the story develops, and Keene becomes more and more convinced that something unpleasant and unexplainable is happening in his house (and as he interprets his wife’s stated desire to move somewhere more suburban as a tacit admission on her part that she’s also experiencing some of the oddness), he faces head on the simple fact that he can’t do the obviously smart thing, which would be to move his young family to his wife’s preferred suburban setting.

Because he can't afford to.

In fact - and you’ll have to forgive me, I’m slow, and this has therefore just occurred to me - he’s become trapped in a Brian Keene story.

Yikes.

And while the stakes are, thankfully, appreciably lower than in that novel, there are elements of the situation that echo Terminal, in particular. Keene’s frustration, his feeling of being trapped by circumstance (and, as I think on it more, even his initial decision not to bring his wife into his confidence) all echo Tommy’s feelings in that novel to a degree that’s eerie. We can only be grateful that Keene is an older and wiser man than Tommy, and that as a result, he found a better way through.

But I cannot tell you how heartbreaking it is to (re)read Keene talking about conversations with his wife where he’s considering trying to pick up some shifts at the foundry (and her admirable response, which is to pack him off for 30 days to get some uninterrupted writing done - I guess underlining the point about not going down the Tommy route of not talking about shit). Because I’ve done the journey now, book by book, and this is Brian fucking Keene, and guess what? Even with all his talent and all his work ethic, he’s sitting here, twenty-five books in, honestly not sure he can make it work as a writer.

I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but what fucking chance do any of us have?

Talk about a horror story.

And this is what I was too polite, and I guess spoiler phobic, to get into in my 2016 review; this is why this book is up-there-with-On-Writing important. Because here’s a two-time Bram Stoker award winner, a man only 4 years out from receiving his Horror Grandmaster title, putting out an insane number of books in a year… and financially things are tough enough, he’s contemplating returning to the day job.

Like, are you fucking kidding me?

It occurs to me now that this is also Keene’s Batman/Joker origin story (because let’s face it, at this point in his career, he’s kinda both). While he doesn’t name names in the book, fans and followers of his career will have a fairly good idea of who at least some of the small press publishers are that he’s talking about here, as he justifiably rails against a seemingly endless parade of people willing to harass him into the ground over writing deadlines, only to turn turtle when it’s time to pay out royalties - a problem sadly as evergreen here in 2025 as it was in the 2010 this novella was written. And I can’t help but wonder if this situation didn’t end up being at least some of the spark for the work he did on The Horror Show, exposing dodgy publishers and trying to provide cautionary tales for fellow writers.

But the reason I would suggest any hungry horror writer needs to read this (alongside On Writing) is simply the object lesson this provides; you can have the talent, the relationships, the audience… and this writing life can still feel very hand-to-mouth. Not to deter anyone who has that burning desire to throw words at the page (let’s face it, if that describes you, you’re gonna do it anyway, and good for you), but to really underline the message at the end of On Writing, where King says to do it not for the fame or money but to ‘get happy’. Because if you’re anything like me, you may at that point have found yourself thinking ‘easy for you to say, Stevie’… and I’m not going to judge you if you did. But The Girl On The Glider provides the necessary counterweight, I think, in that it gets really up close and personal about just how tough and unforgiving this business is (though I’d have to assume if Keene had gotten his foundry job back, he’d still have been writing at the weekends, so, you know, King’s not exactly wrong).

Anyway, the second reason I put Girl… up there with King’s book on the craft is because The Girl On The Glider contains maybe the single best writing lesson I’ve ever read.

It occurs roughly three-quarters of the way through the book, just as the story reaches its climax, in terms of ball-crawling weirdness. Keene briefly rehearses a passage from A Gathering Of Crows, and then he casually lays out how much of it was directly fed by the experience of being woken by his crying toddler.

It’s a breathtaking side-by-side; he shifts to third person, describing the real-life event that happened to ‘Brian’, and you get to see, in basically real time, how the creative process (sometimes) works; how much is simply, directly channelling the experience, where details are changed and why, and how the real-life experience is integrated into the fictional work.

And it’s… A Lot. Like, the audacity of it, for starters; throwing the spotlight on the man behind the curtain, like Penn and Teller when they go into ‘here’s how the trick’s done, folks’, with that same edge of almost gleeful transgression. Then there’s the nuts and bolts of it; it’s not written as a ‘how to’, but if you’re a writer and you’re not taking notes as you’re reading this section, then, bluntly, you’re a fucking idiot. When old hands tell you ‘everything you experience is grist for the mill’, this is what they mean, and I’ve never seen it done this brazenly, this take-it-or-leave-it nakedly before. Anywhere. Ever.

But then, what sneaks up on you (or, att least, what snuck up on me) is that the sheer balls of the writing lesson is so blinding that you (me) miss just how fucked up and creepy the real life occurrence is; until the moment where he drops out of the third person and back into first (the way he announces the shift is another almost absurdy bruvaha, fourth wall shattering moment that’s probably my single favourite ‘fuck you’ in his work to date). When that happens - and if you’re paying close attention, you realise this is a continuation of the writing lesson - suddenly, as the reader, we’re pulled right into what’s happening; no longer observing with the partial distance of third person and distracted by the ‘lesson’, our minds catch up with what’s already been described as Keene throws more and more disturbing detail at us, creating a sudden surging overload of WTF. He’s merciless in this sequence, and regardless of how strong your Scully muscles are (and mine are plenty strong), I’ll be amazed if you get through it without experiencing a frisson of genuine fear.

It’s a lesson-within-a-lesson, for those of us reading close enough. I wonder how many spot it.

I wonder if Keene spotted it himself.

Anyway.

There’s one more thing I want to get into <marriage/relationships>, but before I do, since we’ve brought up Scully… Look, I’m a sceptic to the bone, okay? Let’s start there. The reason I tend towards non-supernatural horror/dark crime fiction (in reading and writing) is because on some fundamental level, I don’t believe in the supernatural at all (which doesn’t mean I don’t believe there aren’t things we don’t yet understand - there’s a lot we don’t understand - only that everything is, at least in the abstract, understandable, in some cause-and-effect way. No real magic, only science we don’t yet understand, to butcher Arthur C Clarke). I’ve heard dozens of claims regarding ‘proof’ of supernatural occurrences in my 47 years on this planet, if not hundreds, and the one thing they’ve all had in common is that they’ve not actually been proof at all; they’re either unfalsifiable (and unreplicable), or they’ve worked backwards from the conclusion (or, in at least one memorable case I can think of, stunningly misapplied Occams Razor). And I’ll freely admit that at least part of my scepticism is rooted in an unpleasant childhood experience involving a man seeking to exploit me at that age distinctly Mulderish tendencies for decidedly unwholesome reasons. What I mean to say is, I experienced things in those years that were certainly strange, was given supernatural explanations for them that I accepted readily, but which on sober reflection and with the passage of decades, I’ve come to realise have rational explanations that are rather more likely than the line I was fed.

In fact, fuck it, we’ve come this far, let’s stick a big fat pin in it and see if anyone will still talk to me afterwards; writers are incredibly susceptible to woo. King talks about this a lot, in his various short story introductions (I’m thinking particularly of the lengthy and quite brilliant essay that opens Nightmares and Dreamscapes, where he ruefully lists the things ‘Stevie has believed’ down the years). And mostly, this power, gift, ability - to see things that haven’t happened, even things that can’t happen - with vivid clarity, and then translate it into words that transmit the picture in our minds into the minds of our readers (that’s King again, in On Writing) is pretty uncomplicatedly a positive thing. Again, I can only speak personally, but I can attest for a fact that the countless hours I’ve spent visualising and gaming out violent encounters of various kinds (and not just visualising, but experiencing, or trying to; trying to imagine not just the visuals, but the sensations, the tastes and smells, the elevated heart rate, the adrenaline, the pain and pain responses) have, on the thankfully incredibly rare occasions I’ve faced violent threats in the real world, given me a (perhaps unearned) confidence at my ability to navigate them with - touch wood - no scars to show from it. Not out of some bullshit ‘Neo in the Matrix plugging Kung Fu into his head’ magical thinking - I’m working on my physical fitness, but I’m under no illusion that if I threw a punch right now, I’d be as likely to put my back out as to trouble anyone else - but, mainly, because when those moments have arisen, or threatened to, I haven’t wasted a single, precious second questioning whether or not what’s happening is actually happening.

And in such situations, those seconds can be - often are - vital.

I think that’s one of the most profound gifts a horror imagination gives you, honestly. And is there the odd sleepless night? Of course. But I would not trade them for having that clarity when I needed it most.

And it’s not just useful on a personal level; many of my fellow horror writers were alive to the danger of Trump when most people were still laughing at his first set of primary performances in 2016 while saying confidently, ‘It’s not like he can win!’. Similarly, I vividly remember talking to a horror writer friend who’d gotten stranded in Italy during the first outbreak of Covid. He’d seen an opportunity to return home, but, after thinking about it, realised he didn’t want to be ‘that guy who concealed the zombie bite’, so he stuck it out until he’d quarantined for enough days to be confident he wasn’t infected (and, yeah, side note, one depressing thing the Covid epidemic taught us all is that we know a lot of people who wouldn’t just conceal their zombie bite, but would in fact go on marches where they angrily insisted bites didn’t cause infection at all).

Horror writers spend hours every day thinking about worst-case scenarios (reasonable or otherwise), then asking the question, ‘What would really happen?’, then writing down the answer, and by and large, our success or failure stands or falls on how well we imagine it; nothing kills a horror story dead faster than a character or group acting in a way that doesn’t ring psychologically true. So good horror writers are, at least intellectually, generally pretty good at predicting potential problems and thinking clearly when the shit’s hitting the fan.

The downside is, we can (and often do) jump at shadows. Hypochondria is not uncommon. Pessimism can sometimes be an issue. The old joke about how leftist economists predicted four of the last three downturns can certainly apply. And I suspect for many of us, the siren call of Ligotti-style nihilism can occasionally feel pretty seductive (and, look, he’s not wrong in the sense that it really all does/will, inevitably, end in tears).

To take this back to Keene, one of the ways this forward-thinking has manifested is that he’s a keen prepper, going so far as to cohost a limited podcast series on the subject (How to Survive in 2025). And it’s worth noting that, unlike many self-styled ‘survivalists’ who fairly spectacularly shit the bed when Covid arrived (either by buying into laughable conspiracy theories, or simply by being exposed as cosplayers cartoonishly unready for something as mundane as a pandemic), Keene remained clear-eyed, science-led, and appropriately cautious (he wrote a brilliant blog post about holding his breath while dealing with an unmasked neighbour which I’ve been unable to locate, but it was one of the best couple of paragraphs about living through the Covid era, and the weirdness of the moment when some fellow citizens just Would Not Believe, that I can immediately recall). Even better, through his no-nonsense blog posts and newsletter during that period, he modelled best practice behaviour, without preaching or fanfare, describing the precautions he and his family took. I don’t know if that blog saved lives… but given the demographic of Keene’s audience, it’s entirely possible that it did.

On the other hand, Keene’s been admirably upfront about his own battles with hypochondria and mental health generally. And, again, it’s an interesting and suggestive facet of horror writers, in that the vast majority of those I’ve met in person have been some of the kindest, friendliest, and most empathetic people I’ve ever met…. And it’s also very rare to meet one that hasn’t had some kind of history or experience of mental health issues at some point in their lives. My personal hypothesis is that it’s close to an inevitability if you have a vivid imagination - sometimes, the mind monkeys just won’t leave you be, and that’s all there is to it.

Which, to my mind, makes the emotional and psychological nakedness of The Girl On The Glider all the braver; by giving us this extraordinary piece of metafiction, Keene’s implicitly inviting some smartarse like me to come along and do the handwavy Scully thing.

Well, fuck that; my new Atheist phase is, gladly and decisively, in the rear-view mirror at this point, and my far-more-comfortable hard Agnosticism says I know I don’t know (and I know you don’t either). Can I come up with a blend of rational explanations for the events depicted in The Girl On The Glider? Sure, I can. I bet you could too.

Does that mean that is what happened?

I don’t know. And neither do - or can - you.

And that’s not what’s important. Anyway. What’s important - what the final, greatest writing lesson The Girl On The Glider provides - is the implicit challenge of the piece, which is simply: be this naked. Be this vulnerable. Above all, be this honest.

That’s something King talks about in On Writing. But I don’t think you’ll ever read a better object lesson in walking that walk than in The Girl On The Glider.

My Life In Horror Volume II’s penultimate essay wouldn’t exist without the object lesson in courage The Girl On The Glider provided me, and I seriously doubt I’m the only person who can say something similar.

The hour has grown too dangerous for cynicism, and too late for anything but honesty.

Thank you, Mr. Keene, for showing the way.

17/6/25

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.