08/19/2026 Exploring the Labyrinth by Kit Power: ALONE, essay 30

Candace Nola

Aug 19

7 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.

ALONE

Essay 30

Daniel Miller owns a website and hosting company. His husband, Jerry, is a mortgage analyst, and they have a young daughter. Daniel is enduring the ravages of middle age (grey pubic hair, a potbelly, and, worst of all, Bon Jovi now being considered Classic Rock by the asshole Harrisburg DJs) with grim acceptance, if not actual good humour.

And on the morning (or possibly afternoon) the story begins, Daniel wakes up in bed alone.

Thirty stories into this journey, it was immediately apparent to me (and I suspect to most readers) that something very, very bad is happening, or has happened to Daniel. This makes the opening quarter of the book an exercise in tension, with a healthy side dose of a feeling familiar to horror fans - wanting to yell at the protagonist.

It’s not his fault, of course; the clues are piling up fast (tasteless food, no power in the house, the inability to urinate), but Daniel has no frame of reference at all, just an increasingly mystifying collection of facts that create a picture that’s terrifying, in part, because it’s so nonsensical.

And I love the way Keene handles this; the confidence with which he lets the story play out. He mentions in the afterword that this novella was inspired by an all-time classic single-sentence horror story (one I’ve heard King repeat in interviews from time to time as a favourite of his, too), and what I enjoyed the first time through was a feeling that Keene clearly knew exactly what was going on, and was essentially ‘rolling tape’ on Daniel as he wandered, with increasing desperation, through a familiar seeming landscape rendered strange by a series of absences: his husband and daughter, of course, but also his neighbours, technology (in addition to the power cut, the car won’t start, a moment reminiscent of A Gathering Of Crows), and even the sky and horizon, both of which have been replaced by a thick grey fog.

It’s hard for me to put into words just how goddamn eerie this one is; stripped of his usual splatterpunk action horror tools, Keene instead has to lean hard on his ability to invoke atmosphere (or, really, a lack of atmosphere). The confidence and skill with which he does so is extraordinary, creating a very different horror experience from the usual Keene fare of adrenaline and mortal dread; here, it is instead an escalating sense of flatness, of wrongness, that builds in Daniel - and, by extension, in us, the readers - as he tries to make sense of the impossible-yet-familiar environment he’s been dropped into, without clue or explanation.

I love it. I love how long Keene lets it play out. I loved the guessing game it was forcing me to play, the way my imagination kept throwing out analogies and metaphors that captured some, but not all, of what was going on.

In the end, Alone turns out to be a meditation on mortality and speculation as to what a vision of the afterlife might look like, and it absolutely works on those terms, delivering a story that is both melancholic and poignant.

But as satisfying as the conclusion and the narrative route to it is, it’s the utterly alienating weirdness of the first third that’s stuck with me the most strongly.

Because, dig it; it could be a metaphor for profound depression. The feeling that nothing is real, that nothing you do in the world has any weight or consequence, is a key component of big D Depression; as is the experiencing of basic biological functions like eating as joyless and pointless, as I think about it. And everything looking grey, listless… many people have described the feeling as like being inside a glass bubble filled with fog, and, yeah, that’s a good way of putting it, and a pretty accurate description of the first third of this novella.

And then there’s the matter of abandonment, and this is where the pieces really started snapping together for me.

Because Daniel wakes up and his husband and daughter are both gone.

Now, it takes him a long time to get to grips with the reality of that, because he spends a lot of the opening section of the story rationalising what’s going on (and a significant period after that bargaining in a way that looks a lot like rationalisation), but, slowly but surely, the reality of that settles over him (I also think part of the reason it takes him longer than it should is that he’s no longer experiencing a physiological reaction to his ‘feelings’, as he no longer has a heart rate to feel trip up or blood pressure to send surging; no adrenaline dip, no endorphin rush, no dopamine crash - emotions are inherently physiological, if you really think about it, both in terms of cause and affect; it’s an interesting philosophical question to ponder how/if we feel when we can no longer feel).

But I couldn’t help but think about depression, and specifically, depression triggered by separation.

As we know from The Girl On The Glider, this story was written shortly after Keene’s second marriage collapsed. And while that process wasn’t as acrimonious as his first divorce (according to the man himself, talking on his Secret Histories YouTube series), it is, as I believe I may have already discussed at slightly too much length, an inherently painful process.

It can feel a bit like a hellish inversion of that Talking Heads’ song, Once In A Lifetime. In fact, to speak personally for a second, that song bugged the fuck out of me when I was married, precisely because there were moments I could relate to it pretty hard. I’d never imagined myself as a married-with-kits, white-picket-fence kind of guy, that’s all, and some of the reasons why were ideological (hell, some of them were political, if I’m honest)... but some of it was rooted in a pretty deep-seated depressive mentality that said I could never have something like that, because I wasn’t capable of being unbroken enough to sustain it, and because I didn’t deserve it.

Fast forward to 2025, and one of the first books I end up reading, following the collapse of my marriage and as I move into my late father's house, is Alone.

And, yeah.

And look, I appreciate the concern, but I’m okay; thankfully, turns out the growing up I did in the last, holy shit, twenty-eight years since I was a depressed teenager wasn’t illusionary, or not entirely; I’ve heard whispers and echoes of that old depressive voice over the last few months, but echoes is all they are; turns out, whatever many flaws I still possess, that particular dragon got well and truly slain, and good fucking deal.

But my reason for bringing all that up is just to say that I really do get what’s going on with Daniel in the opening of this novella. The horror so big it can’t be named, or even acknowledged, the creeping shroud of wrongness that coats everything, sucking out the colour and joy and sensation, taking out the meaning, leaving a chilling void in its wake…

Yeah. Yeah, I’ve been there. And though, touch wood, me and them days seem to have parted for good (and if the Universe is planning a tougher acid test for me to find the deeper truth of that supposition, I’d request it hold fire until, ideally, after I’m dead), Alone, in the opening third, gave me one of arts most extraordinary gifts; the ability, through the eyes and mind of another, to revisit one of the most profoundly unpleasant and dangerous feelings I’ve ever experienced, in the ultimate ‘safe space’ of a horror fiction novella.

I find it fantastically unlikely that this is the effect Keene was aiming for when he wrote this. And to be clear, I think Alone does succeed as the kind of story Keene describes in the afterword as wanting to tell.

But we’ve come too far, and the hour’s too late for anything but honesty, so I gotta tell you; I felt this one down to my bones (and, if I have one, my soul).

15/7/25

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:

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.