06/17/2026 Exploring the Labyrinth by Kit Power: ENTOMBED, essay 29

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.

ENTOMBED

Essay 29

We’re back in the mountains of West Virginia; specifically, we’re at The Pocahontas Hotel, built in the 60s as a cover story for the Eisenhower-era government fallout shelters that were being secretly constructed underneath.

As the story opens, we learn that the fallout shelters were finally declassified following an exposé by an investigative journalist, and since then, the bunker (built to house a thousand government employees) has become a tourist attraction, and Pete, our narrator, works there as a tour guide.

And unfortunately for Pete, he’s on shift when Hamylin’s Revenge (the ‘slow zombie’ outbreak from Dead Sea) reaches the hotel.

One thing I’ve touched on a few times on the way through this project is how much Keene has developed his skills in terms of delivering exposition and setting the scene; Entombed opens with a masterclass in how to do it. Told in a first-person voice dripping with anger (and, just under the surface, fear), in the opening chapter we are quickly brought up to speed with the nightmare scenario Pete is living through; a bunch of people in the hotel made it to the shelter (good), but the zombies are outside the blast doors and, while they can’t get in (also good), they won’t go away (bad) and while the survivors have clean running water, the guy who was trying to bring food supplies in before the doors were closed got zombified, so there’s no food (worse).

And then, at the start of chapter two, thirty days after the doors closed for good, Drew (Pete’s only real friend in the shelter) comes bustling in to inform Pete that the vote for cannibalism by lottery just passed, two votes shy of unanimous. Drew was the other holdout. And because Pete refused to even take part in the vote, it was further decided that he’d be first on the menu.

First page of Chapter Two. Here we fucking go.

Now, I’ve made a lot of noise in essays past about how well-behaved people are in survival situations in real life, and that a pet bugbear of mine is apocalyptic fiction where, overnight, everyone turns into a gibbering extra from Mad Max. And I stand by that.

But.

The scenario Keene has crafted in Entombed isn’t really a survival situation. The zombies are at the door, and they’re not going anywhere. There’s no way to fight through them. To open the door is to die.

And to stay behind the door is to die of starvation.

This is much closer to the circumstances faced by, well, The Donner Party, and we all know how that turned out (fun factoid, there was a moment when one of the groups even considered instigating a lottery to decide who should be killed such that others might eat). Pete dryly informs us that it takes the average person forty to fifty days to starve if they’ve got access to clean drinking water, and that they’ve been locked in for ‘about a month’.

So, sure, they’re at a crunch point. Also, there are ways in which this is the bleakest scenario in any Keene story to date, because, dig it; even where people have been facing the literal end of the world (because zombies, or it won’t stop raining and there’s giant worms now, or even hey, it’s the Rapture), they didn’t know it, or at least not for sure. There was always the chance that’d be able to find some kind of sanctuary, wait it out (okay, not really, but the point is the characters didn’t know how screwed they were), or that somewhere there was an infrastructure/army that would fight back. Hell, even in The Cage, which in some ways feels like a spiritual twin to this novel, the dwindling band of prisoners didn’t know for sure what would happen when the crazy person took them back into the store.

Here, our survivors are cursed with perfect knowledge: there’s no way out, there’s no cavalry coming, no recorded message advising to shelter in place and promising eventual rescue. There’s only the inevitability of starving to death, and how long you can put that moment off.

And, of course, what you’re prepared to do.

Put it another way: everyone in this novel understands they’re stuck in a Brian Keene story.

When it comes to that sickening lurch in the stomach feeling, the only work of Keene’s that I can think of that comes close to Entombed is Urban Gothic, and in that case the squick really doesn’t kick into it’s highest gear until somewhere around the halfway point; whereas Entombed had me round the throat from the opening page, and started squeezing on the first page of chapter two.

There’s another element that adds to the plausibility: a charismatic leader who’s advocating for the long pork lottery.

Chuck is an interesting entity. Our POV narrator, Pete, is pretty partisan (and as the narrative develops, increasingly unreliable, as extreme trauma and caloric deprivation have the inevitable impacts on cognitive function), so I guess we’ve got to take what he says with a pinch of salt. At the same time, every unbiased fact we’re supplied about him (and the small number of scenes we actually meet him) seem to confirm Pete’s prejudices; not least because it’s clear that the entire scenario was Chuck’s idea, and he’s been advocating for it for days.

And we’re back in The Mist territory, here, with Chuck filling the Mrs. Carmody role, but of course, King didn’t invent the notion that at moments of existential crisis, a charismatic leader with Very Bad Ideas can do a lot of damage; that’s more what we refer to as a lesson from history.

glances briefly to camera, then returns to the script

There’s a heartbreaking, telling moment in this second chapter, when Drew is delivering the deeply unwelcome news to Pete; when he announces the vote is over, Pete expresses relief, saying ‘now we can get to work on a real plan’, which is immediately shot down when Drew delivers the news that the vote was in favour.

It’s heartbreaking for two reasons; the first is that, despite the apparent cynicism and bitterness of Pete’s disposition, established through the voice of the first chapter, it’s clear that Pete has a fundamental faith in human nature that is absolutely shattered by the vote result. It was literally inconceivable for him that his fellow survivors would vote for something so obviously insane, and yes, I am manfully resisting the urge to start editorializing in 2025 electoral politics, behold and admire my great restraint.

So there’s that. But also - and this didn’t occur to me until rereading this chapter in prep for the essay - it’s that, once Drew delivers the double whammy of both the vote result and Pete’s imminent sacrifice for the greater good, Pete’s entire mentality shifts into the brutal pragmatism of survival - literally kill or be killed, which, let’s be fair, it doesn’t get much more existential than that.

And it’s gutting because, as understandable and psychologically plausible as that decision is, it means that Pete himself abandons all thought or hope of finding another solution to the situation. In other words, he unwittingly or subconsciously accepts the mental limitations that have driven the others to make the decision, and by restricting himself to the parameters dictated by others, many of the terrible decisions he will make, and awful actions he’ll take, feel so inevitable the whole narrative takes on the tone of a Greek tragedy; a series of inevitabilities, all of which stem from that initial limiting decision.

Because they believe there’s no other way, there’s no other way. And all that follows, follows.

The anatomy of history is often like this: a chain of events that create a sense of inevitability, not just in retrospect, but at the time they are happening. And yet, when examined from all angles, in almost all cases, there were other choices that could have been made, or chance events that made a material impact on the arc of history, without which things could have turned out radically differently. And (sorry, but it’s true) those dangerous, charismatic leaders I mentioned earlier will absolutely exploit every single crisis (and if necessary, even fabricate a few) in order to create both the panic of urgency and the sense of inevitability.

Now, Chuck isn’t doing exactly this; the crisis is undoubtedly real, as is the existential threat of starvation. But what we do suspect early on, and later have confirmed by his actions, is that Chuck is not primarily concerned with ‘solving’ the starvation issue. What he’s really concerned about is leveraging the issue to secure power for himself. And the proof of this, even in chapter two, is how, having won the vote by near unanimity, he immediately changes the rules on what the vote meant, by selecting the first victim not by lottery but by a perceived crime or slight against the in-group (refusal to participate in the vote).

Again, sorry to bang on about it, but this is classic authoritarianism; vote for a lottery, sure, but then be given an outgroup to substitute (or, let’s use the accurate term, scapegoat) for having to put your own name into a hat. Nobody who voted for the lottery is going to object, because no matter how invested they are in the platonic ‘logic’ that Someone Must Die So We All Might Live (For A While Longer), they’d all rather someone else got ate instead of them. And they always, always, always assume it won’t ever be them in the outgroup.

Because the Leopards would never eat my face, surely.

As events transpire, we don’t get to see what would have happened if Chuck had gotten to Pete quickly, but later events strongly suggest that the lottery would never have actually served as the selection criteria for ending up as dish of the day. And ground Chuck would never have been on the grill, you can take that to the bank.

Pete sees all this, as soon Drew hands down the word, and his immediate (and, in a narrow sense, rational and factually correct) reaction is; okay, well, it’s them or me.

And he’s not wrong. It’s just that, by devoting all his energy to staying alive (by killing anyone who comes after him), he loses sight of the idea of finding what he refers at the opening of chapter two as a ‘real solution’.

And that’s kinda the essence of tragedy, which is one of the things this story is.

It’s also, from that moment on, a splatterpunk descent into hell, as Pete, initially driven to kill to survive, discovers a taste for the violence he’s committing.

That descent is insidious and Keene crafts it superbly; enough so that for long stretches of my initial read through, as appalled as I was with Pete’s decisions, I found it hard to argue with either the logic or morality of it. This was, in part, because the logic of his opponents kept shifting (as totalitarian ‘thought’ is wont to do, because it’s never really about the ‘logic’ it pretends to espouse, it’s always, in the end, about power and control over others). After Pete kills his first round of attackers, he very reasonably makes the point that, whatever the method of selection, if the purpose of the exercise is to produce meat, it’s done. The people he’s killed (again, unambiguously in self-defence) can keep the rest of the survivors going for a while, and the lottery can, if needed, be instigated later.

And, initially at least, I’ve very much with Pete on this one, to be honest; at the point at which your own personal morality has degraded enough that ‘let's kill one of us and eat them’ feels like a reasonable proposition, it’s not really clear to me why you cut up rough about the selection method for who gets killed (as long as it’s not you).

The counterargument feels spurious (‘well, but you’re dangerous!’ - yes, so maybe leave him alone?), and even complaining that it went against the method voted for… well, so did picking Pete in the first place, as we’ve discussed. What I like about what Keene does here is how he exposes the ways we’ll often substitute essentially arbitrary rules for genuine logic or morality; the others don’t really think Pete’s going to be tastier then the others he’s killed (and you can bet they’ll eat them once they’ve put Pete down), but he’s broken the (just invented, spurious) rules, and that’s offensive.

So, in addition to Greek tragedy, we’ve got ‘what if Kafka, but Splatterpunk?’, and by now I trust you understand how much I love everything about that.

But then we have the matter of Pete’s descent into… well, the easy shorthand is madness, but I’m not sure it’s quite that simple, or that excusable. It’s more that Pete becomes his own self-justified version of Chuck. Having read Chuck's character and gleaned his intent, by the time the book ends, Pete has in a very real sense become Chuck, in behaviour and outlook. And again there’s shades of Kafka there, but also…

Ah, what the hell, we’ve come this far, let’s do it: Entombed, in addition to all the things we’ve spoken about, is also a pretty impressive exploration of the insidious nature of Toxic Masculinity.

And we need to start with: Pete’s divorced. Fairly recently, as the story begins. 

The reasons are simple enough, and Pete’s just about self-aware enough to begrudgingly admit it to himself; he didn’t treat his wife particularly well, he lied about spending money on things he wanted when they were both hard up, and he’d also been having an emotional affair with a coworker for years. As angry and as hurt as he was when Alyssa left him, Pete, at least early on in the narrative, understood her decision was justified, and resolved to try and get on with his life.

Now, as the afterword of The Girl On The Glider makes clear, Keene had recently been through a divorce himself, at the time Entombed was written. And like Pete, Keene takes responsibility for that relationship breakdown, and the impact the writer lifestyle had on his marriage. Not to redo that essay, but it’s typical Keene; unflinchingly honest, sparing himself no blushes, honourable and respectful.

Full disclosure: your humble correspondent is, at the time of writing this essay, in a moment of frankly unwelcome synchronicity, going through a no-fault divorce himself. And I’m here to tell you, as much as it’s obviously the right decision, and as much as we’re both, as far as either of us is capable of it, handling it in as adult a way as humanly possible, it absolutely fucking sucks.

It’s horrible. I’ve spent weeks not being able to sleep properly, where every single interaction, whether email, text, or spoken, with my so-to-be-ex has run a high percentage chance of ruining a night’s sleep - I mean, entirely ruined, spending the whole night lying ramrod stiff in increasingly unpleasantly warm sheets, running arguments over and over and over in my head, understanding the futility, desperately tired, but utterly unable to stop.

And then there’s the ball-crawling life admin; all the stress of moving house with the added fun of not having planned to do it, changing your home address on every single piece of fucking paper in your life (all of which, when it comes to government documentation, seems to carry an hilariously high ‘admin fee’ charge and take three to five fucking weeks), argue with the council about how much council tax you’re paying and why, no, you’re not actually in a spot where you should be paying a ‘second home premium’, because ‘home’ isn’t fucking home any more, as of four weeks ago, thanks for reminding me…

Add in a super-bright, unbelievably awesome 15-year-old daughter who you obviously want to see as much of as humanly possible, while trying to protect her from the fact that you’re scrambling like crazy to rearrange everything about your life so you’re aiming at a future you had absolutely no idea was lurking over the horizon three months ago…

Yeah, it’s a lot. And this isn’t to throw a Kit Power pity party, merely to suggest that while some of the specifics will be different for other people (and I’m acutely aware that a lot of them could be a whole hell of a lot worse, too), the generalities are universal, and they are awful, and it’s just an incredibly exhausting and painful process.

I feel Keene’s pain, in other words.

And we both feel Pete’s.

And here’s the insidious thing about pain, when it comes to Toxic Masculinity; Men are not supposed to feel it.

We’re not. We’re supposed to be stoic. We’re supposed to just manfully square our jaws and shoulders, gaze off into the sunset, drink whisky, and get on with things as if our entire lives haven’t crumbled around our ears, and as if our self-esteem/self-image hasn’t just been dealt what in the moment feels like a mortal blow.

Real Men don’t complain, they don’t whine, and they sure as fuck don’t cry (unless their dog has died, then a single manful tear is permitted - but something as trivial as a life partner deciding they no longer want to be a life partner? Not hardly).

And of course it’s bollocks; actual men (as opposed to Real Men) absolutely cry, and snivel, and feel self pity, and anger, and self loathing, and fury, and self destructive urges, and existential crisis of identity, and all the rest of it (and, sad to say, far, far too many of them end up taking it out on other women in their lives, or on the internet, or both, in the process kinda making their ex’s point for them).

But while we may know intlelectually that the Real Men thing is just bollocks desinged to get us to smoke Marlboro reds and die of lung cancer before we can claim the pensions we’ve worked ourselves to death paying into, it’s ubiqutious and insidious enough that it can’t help but feed the self loathing, especially on those long nights when all the mind seems to want to do is run on an enless hamster wheel of why-is-this-happening-why-can’t-I-fix-it-what-did-I-do-why-did-she-why-didn’t-I, as the endelsss seconds drain away and the dawn light begins to crawl through the curtains to let you know, congrats, anytoher fucking night of no sleep, wel played, that’s really going to help you get through the day, asshole. Among all the self-pity and self-recrimination and regret and defiance and anger (justified or not) this voice will occasionally sneak in (depending on the age of the man, it could be John Wayne, or Bruce Willis as John McClane, or maybe even Gerard Butler's hilarious ‘American’ accent from Olympus Has Fallen), saying ’stop being such a fucking wimp. Pull yourself together. Why can't you just be a fucking man?’

I mean, if you genuinely don’t, good for you, I couldn’t be happier, and please give me the number of your therapist. But I’m guessing the vast majority of men reading this will know exactly what the fuck I’m talking about.

And I’d bet my house (okay, sure, my soon-to-be-ex-wife’s house, har de har) that Keene knows exactly what I’m talking about.

I know he does. Because of Pete.

As Pete deteriorates - as the cumulative impact of the psychological stress of the violence he’s inflicting combines with the physical effects of exertion when your body hasn’t had calories in weeks and is now being put through the highest stakes workout gauntlet imaginable - it’s Alyysia, his ex, that he hears talking to him, insidiously, ambiguously,  seeming to spur him on to greater action. And as he abandons his humanity entirely, his self-awareness also dissolves, and Pete’s pain becomes a self-justifying excuse for the pain he’s now inflicting on the remaining people in the shelter. In Pete’s case, the same self-serving justification he gave for indulging his pleasure principles at the expense of his wife - ‘you gotta do what you have to to survive’ - becomes his rationale for what is, by the end of this extraordinarily bleak and violent novel, a murder spree of pretty impressive proportions.

And, really, the whole novel is a study in why, and how, and under what circumstances people make the decision to abandon their morality, or the way they seek to justify the unjustifiable.

And however carefully they dress it up, no matter the carefully crafted argument, it always boils down to the same basic claim (not coincidentally, the same claim that fascism uses to justify concentration camps and mass murder): Look At What You Made Me Do.

And it’s always - always - bullshit.

Because no matter how bleak or awful or painful or unfair our circumstances are, we have choices about how we act, and what we’re willing to do, and what we’re not. We may, in many circumstances, have no straightforwardly good options… but it’s a rare moment when we have none.

A lesson my own divorce has taught me is that I’m not responsible for the emotions of others, and others are not responsible for my emotions. I am 100% responsible for my actions, and others are 100% responsible for theirs (actually, that’s not remotely true, because free will isn’t anything like what it’s cracked up to be, but that’ll have to be an epic rant for another day, and it doesn’t undermine the argument that the only thing we have control over, and the only thng we can faily be judged on, are our actions).

And Entombed may just be the best novel I’ve ever read about the hell that awaits us, individually and collectively, when we deny that essential human truth.

KP

1/7/25

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:

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

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 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:

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