07/09/2025 Exploring the Labyrinth with Kit Power: Terminal-essay 4

Exploring The Labyrinth

In this series, I will be reading every Brian Keene 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.

Terminal

As noted in the previous essay, Terminal was written alongside City of the Dead. In the CotD intro, Keene mentions that of the two novels, Terminal was the one he was most excited about writing - at least, at first - as he resented having to write a sequel to a novel he felt was a finished article. For various reasons, the rights for Terminal reside with a different publisher, and at the time this essay was originally written, there was no Author’s Preferred Text version of the novel*, meaning that we didn’t have the insight the Deadite reissues have given us with those new introductions.

What we do know about Terminal, according to Keene, is that it wasn’t a commercial success - in fact, in his own words, it bombed’, and if City Of The Dead hadn’t been the hit it was, his career might have gotten into very serious trouble at this point. I get the impression that Keene himself thinks of the book fondly, but it’s certainly gone under-discussed compared to a lot of his other work (it’s possible the aforementioned rights issue is part of this - Keene has made no secret of his desire to regain the rights to this book).

My feelings about this novel are… complex.

There are elements of it that I liked a great deal, to the extent that for the first third or so of the book, I was fairly convinced it was going to be my favourite book so far. I like very much when horror writers take on the crime genre, or non-supernatural horror - some of my favourite King stories (Misery, Mr. Mercedes, short story The Ledge) do exactly this, finding the horror in everyday life, and Terminal sets out the store in this regard from page one, as twenty-five-year-old Tommy O’Brien is diagnosed with terminal cancer.

It’s a brilliant opening - for my money, Keene’s best so far - and he just rides the moment out and through, with all the unflinching, painful observational skills he’s employed previously. And really, it speaks perfectly to what I’m talking about; in the world that you and I live and breathe and walk around in, is there much more horrific than that diagnosis, at that age?

It’s a gut punch - to Tommy, and to the reader - and Keene doesn’t pull it one iota. He lets Tommy feel it, and in the process makes us watch and feel it too, and it’s horrible and brilliant.

It’s aided by the fact that Tommy, like Jim from The Rising, feels very much like a Keene insert. Not a carbon copy, of course, but Keene is a blue-collar writer, whose background in the Navy and later, foundry work, means he knows whereof he writes here. Tommy’s foundry job and the hand-to-mouth of his domestic life are unflinchingly portrayed, without sugar coating or sentimentality, and it’s powerful stuff.

As Keene showed the financial fragility of Tommy’s day-to-day, I found myself utterly convinced by his decision not to tell his wife about his one-to-three-month diagnosis. It’s a bad lie, of course, one of the worst - but lethally easy to make, and once told, incredibly hard to come clean about. Tommy’s situation feels utterly impossible, and that’s further compounded when he discovers he’s also about to be laid off at work.

As I suspect I’ll come back to when covering the Earthworm Gods books, it never rains…

The scene of Tommy’s firing is especially powerful, I think - as his boss (also a family man who has had - and beaten - cancer) gently breaks the bad news. It’s poignant, especially how well Tommy takes it. Because, of course, part of the reason his boss survived his diagnosis was early detection and treatment, and the reason Tommy didn’t go to the doctor was his job not providing health insurance, which led him to ignore the early symptoms that might have led to early detection and could have saved his life.

The power, and indeed the cleverness, for me, comes from the fact that none of the above is made explicit in the text. Tommy doesn’t rant or rage about the injustice of it all, doesn’t blame his boss - hell, it’s not entirely clear he even makes the connection between his boss's good outcome and Tommy’s own bad one. The injustice is just accepted and left to sit in the gut of the reader, just something for you to try to digest at your own leisure. Maybe my own reaction is born in part from having always lived in a society where healthcare is free to all at the point of use, but I’m willing to give Keene some credit here - my guess is, he knew exactly what he was doing with this scene. As blue-collar horror goes, it doesn’t get much worse, or more real.

Another part of the book that read incredibly real to me was Tommy’s friendship with John and Sherm. These two just leap off the page, John in particular invoking Bunchie from the Ray Donovan TV show - heart of gold, honourable, staunchly loyal, but, well, not too bright, to a danger-to-himself-and-others level. Sherm seems more level, and the way Keene portrays the friendship, in the early scenes in the foundry canteen and later, in the bar, after they’ve been laid off, absolutely sparkles on the page. I fell in love with this tough, sad little gang - and also began to feel terribly fearful for them.

Because, unfortunately for them, they’d wandered into a Brian Keene novel.

And sure enough, half loaded, Tommy lays out the plan: He tells them he’s terminal, and what he plans to do about it - rob a bank, so his wife and kid will be cared for. It’s a superb moment because of the awful plausibility of it; Tommy is a blue-collar alpha male, and he’s also desperate. Is it a terrible, dangerous idea? Well, yeah, of course. But what else can he do to try to make things right?

And also - what does he have to lose?

I feel the need to point something out here, also - this book was published three full years before season one of Breaking Bad got made.

Just saying.

The rest of the first half of the book is taken up with the preparation for the heist. Sherm, with a level of confidence that rings alarm bells that are just faint enough that I, like Tommy, skate past them, picks out the target and advises on firepower. There’s an amazing, hilarious-but deeply scary sequence where they go to buy guns in the ghetto of York, and Eminem-worshiping John almost gets them all killed after the buy when he innocently drops the N-bomb, and I realise how that looks in summary, but for me, Keene nailed this sequence hard, and I found it to be a superb laughing-with-heart-in-mouth sequence.

There’s also my favourite sequence in the book - and indeed, my favourite so far in any Keene book (at the time of writing, I’ve also completed Earthworm Gods). Chapter Ten. Tommy goes to church.

Mass is over. He’s already found out his prescription is too expensive, and that his funeral arrangements won’t be much cheaper. It’s Sunday, but Mass is long over by the time Tommy walks into the empty church. Which is handy, because Tommy has some things to say.

I don’t know anything about Keene’s religious or spiritual beliefs - given how many episodes of The Horror Show have been and gone without him choosing to discuss it, I’d guess he wants to keep it private, and I respect that - but I can tell you, he understands the rage of a lapsed Catholic to a scary level of empathy. Tommy just lets rip, all his fury, frustration, and fear pouring out of him in a monologue that is painful to read in its raw honesty. This is the essence of mortality confronting the creator, and Keene knocks it out of the park and clear into a neighbouring town. It’s not showy, Tommy doesn’t magically gain 50 IQ points or an advanced vocabulary or a theology degree, and it’s all the more riveting because of that - as this fundamentally honest, decent man struggles to reconcile his own situation and prognosis with the concept of a loving God. It ends just how you’d expect it would, if you’re at all familiar with the book of Job, and it is, I think, magnificent.

Bleeding onto the page, indeed.

Which I guess brings us to the second half. Now, going in, it was a mortal certainty that something was going to go wrong with the heist - this is, as previously alluded to, a Brian Keene novel - but I have to admit that I was wrongfooted by how it would go wrong. I’d anticipated someone getting shot - some innocent bystander, probably an accident - and then perhaps a lengthy cross-country pursuit, or similar.

What I didn’t predict was a hostage situation.

It makes sense, of course, and is a dramatically interesting choice - essentially, at almost dead on the halfway point of the novel, the story pivots from dying-man-plans-a-last-desperate-job to bank-robbery-with-hostages, with the admittedly fun and unusual twists that unlike in the movies, the gang doesn’t have a super clever plan for getting out, especially as one of them is gutshot, another has apparently gone psycho, and the third is dying of cancer. And having the robbery’s failure in part triggered by John’s earlier disastrous performance at the gun buy is a nice dramatic touch, giving events the ring of preordained tragedy.

It’s a setup rich with potential and certainly dripping with typical Keene tension. Inevitably, Tommy begins to bond with the hostages, even as John is bleeding out and Sherm becomes increasingly unhinged and fatalistic.

We also meet a young kid who, it readily becomes apparent, can heal sick people.

And an old lady who is increasingly convinced this situation is a punishment from God for the wickedness of her fellow hostages.

Neither of these are bad ideas. The kid, in particular, I found pretty compelling, as a rebuke to Tommy’s scene in the church, and also a classic bit of Old Testament Godding - you wanted proof, well, here you go - what you gonna do now, asshole? It was the only time I became a little frustrated with Tommy, because he felt just a bit slow on the uptake, but I suspect that’s more my problem than an issue with the story - Tommy has no way of knowing he’s in a Keene novel, after all. And of course, it means John can live - better, so can Tommy. Only, whoops, because you’re in a bank with dead civilians and cops all around the place, and a lunatic handling the negotiations, so yeah, a nice long life in a cold cell - assuming, most hilarious of all, you don’t get the fucking death penalty, of course. Sucks to be you, Tommy.

Like I said, Old Testament.

The old lady, on the other hand, just didn’t work for me at all. For starters, in a book that has otherwise really taken on faith in genuinely three-dimensional, challenging ways, she feels irritatingly two-dimensional. Sure, I know there are people like her in the real world - believe me; I know - but she just didn’t add much to proceedings for me, and I found her gleeful malice towards the others borderline unbelievable, given the threat to her own life. It also reminded me uncomfortably of The Mist, where a very similar character in a not dissimilar situation causes all kinds of problems, and Martha, the old lady in this tale, does not come off well in the comparison. I will say, though, that I have to give Keene credit - the moment when Sherm kicked her in the face hard enough to make her dentures fly out gave me a surge of savage glee, followed by a deep shame, that arguably made the whole exercise worth it. Maybe.

That reminds me - before I get to the finale (and the fucking brilliant denouement), I should probably mention the humor. Because this is also, despite the subject matter, hands down Keene’s funniest book to date. From the brilliant, painfully well realised banter between the gang of three (opening with a legendary insight into John’s pubic hair) to Sherm giving his name to the hostage negotiator as The Real Slim Shady, to the aforementioned John-nearly-kills-everyone-with-a-well-meant-but-deeply-ill-considered-n-bomb scene, this one made me honest-to-God chuckle quite a bit - no mean feat, considering how grim the overall subject matter is, but also totally in keeping with that blue collar essence that the entire novel is infused with.

And while I didn’t find the second half quite as strong as the first - mainly because I felt Tommy became less decisive and frankly less bright than he’d been for the rest of the book, once Sherm’s true nature became apparent - I thought the conclusion was just brutal; vicious, bleak, and yes, okay, again, Old Fucking Testament to the max. The kid cures Tommy, the kid gets killed, and then, slowly, everyone the kid cured dies, in a similar fashion to the way they would have, and Tommy knows his life sentence ain’t going to be so long after all, and that’s no comfort at all. It landed on me like the best suckerpunch does, leaving me dazed, in pain, staring at the ceiling and wondering what the fuck just happened.

Oh, and it was published ten years before King published Revival.

Just saying.

Anyhow. So that was Terminal. A novel of two halves, for me, but holy shit that first half was some ferocious writing, and while there were elements of the second half that didn’t quite click with me, the final action sequence in the bank was superlative, and that punchline still has me shaking my head at its audacity and brilliance.

I think you’d have to call that a comfortable win - I certainly unreservedly recommend the book, if you’re the kind of sick maniac who reads a spoiler-filled article like this before reading the text in question. I also really hope, somewhere in my future, there’s a Keene story with no supernatural element, because, based on Terminal, I think Keene has a phenomenal dark crime novel in him.

In the meantime, bring on the worms.

KP

23/1/18

*Since this essay was originally written, the rights for Terminal were returned to Keene. Terminal: Author's Preferred Edition is now available and will be covered later in this series.

KP

10/6/25