09/17/2025 Exploring the Labyrinth by Kit Power: Jack's Magic Beans, essay 14
- Candace Nola
- Sep 17
- 7 min read
Exploring The Labyrinth
In this series, I will be reading every Brian Keene book that has been published (and is still available in print) in order of original publication 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.
Jack's Magic Beans
We’re on book fourteen of my trip through Keene’s work, and the world is ending.
Again.
That’s far from a complaint, by the way. As I discussed in a prior essay, what I’ve realised about Keene’s preoccupation with the end of the world is that it’s not simple prurience or morbid curiosity that keeps him coming back to this subject. Back in my essay on Take The Long Way Home, I put forward the proposition (backed up by the evidence of his non-fiction work, especially his podcast) that Keene’s obsessions come fundamentally from a place of love; an understanding of our inherent fragility, as a species and as a society, and how vulnerable some of our most cherished myths and venerated institutions of both structure and behaviour really are, when the shit starts hitting the fan.
That’s particularly apt this time out, as the apocalypse of Jack’s Magic Beans evokes Edmund Cooper’s All Fools’ Day - which is to say, all the psychologically ‘normal’ people become, at a stroke, violently insane.
The novella opens in a supermarket and follows one of my favourite pulp traditions; it introduces a series of characters, then has spectacularly nasty things happen to them. It’s another standout sequence of breathless pulp horror joy, as Keene takes us on a whistlestop tour of the mundane rendered bloody and monstrous via a series of effortless word sketches that bring characters to vivid life and then renders equally vivid and gruesome deaths. For me, the sequence evokes some of my favourite Keene moments to date; the path of the twister through the small town in Pale Fire, the first-third mad dash through the slow zombie apocalypse at the start of Dead Sea; even the fall of the tower in City of the Dead.
There’s a cinematic quality, Keene bringing the scene to life in the mind’s eye with ruthlessly efficient prose, a relentless sense of pace, kinetic energy, action - this particular sequence for me evoked the first Evil Dead movie, in some ways; deliriously, gleefully gory. I know I keep saying it, but Keene really does write this kind of action horror as well as anyone, and better than most. Perhaps even more impressive, though, is that it never reads like a retread or wheel spinning; for all that I’ve identified common elements in terms of the writing itself, part of what’s so impressive to me is the endless invention of both the vivid characters and their vivid fates.
Additionally, there’s a level of extraordinary creativity when it comes to the various murderous/suicidal insanities each person experiences in this story (“We are the lettuce. We know everything” was my personal favourite). Keene has a visceral imagination and is utterly unflinching in bringing every single splatter and slice to you in Technicolor surround sound and rumblerama. This is absolutely top drawer, glorious splatterpunk action pulp horror.
Following this opening sequence, the story reaches a natural breathing point, as a small group of survivors of the initial wave of violence hide out in the supermarket refrigerator, and try to figure out how and why they are unaffected. Again, it’s the kind of thing Keene excels at; the conversation flows naturally, as does the exposition, and virtually every spoken sentence pulls double duty; moving the understanding of the situation forward while revealing more about the differing personalities. It’s a great example of form following function, and allowing the characters to drive - it makes sense that, as soon as they get a chance to talk, the conversation would turn to trying to figure out what their common denominator was, and why they’d avoided the mass insanity that had so suddenly infected everyone else.
And the cause of the differentiation is as thematically resonant as it is arbitrary - the only people unaffected by the mass insanity are those currently taking Prozac - what main character Jack thinks of as his ‘magic beans’ of the title. As well as All Fool’s Day, I’m reminded of one of my favourite Stephen King short stories, The Eleven O’Clock People, where people who are trying (and failing) to give up smoking have just enough nicotine in their systems to be able to see through the disguises of shapeshifting creatures who are beginning to infiltrate society. And Keene provides a neat moment in this sequence of setting up what the characters are slow to realise is a ticking bomb, in the form of one of the survivors in the fridge who has run out of their prescription. It’s brilliant because it leaps out at the reader, while understandably not really resonating with the people hiding in the walk-in refrigerator unit, leading to a classic thriller tension as the narrative develops.
In the afterword, Keene talks about how he personally divides his work between the categories of ‘serious’ and ‘fun’, and notes that he tends to write ‘fun’ works after a serious piece as a kind of palate cleanser - in this case, Jack’s Magic Beans was written after Ghoul, which is undoubtedly a much heavier story, thematically speaking. What I found interesting about this is that I’ve recently found myself mulling over the difference between ‘comfort horror’ and ‘real’ or ‘disturbing horror’, and where those categorisations fit in terms of the twin pulp/literary traditions in the genre.
Whilst Keene has publically and proudly declared himself part of the pulp tradition, I’m fascinated by the fact that both Ghoul and Jack’s Magic Beans clearly form part of that tradition, even as Ghoul is a dark coming of age story taking in child abuse, generational alienation and childhood bereavement, and Jack’s Magic Beans is a glorious Technicolor splatterpunk romp, unapologetically extreme, gross, and funny. I think it says something about the enormous power and flexibility of the pulp tradition that it can incorporate both comfortably and, of course, speaks to the enormous versatility of Keene that he can achieve such brilliance in both styles.
Really, my only issue with Jack’s Magic Beans is a compliment to the writing; I wanted more. It felt to me that the narrative didn’t end so much as stop, and I found myself hungry for the rest of the tale; how our survivors coped in trying to locate more Prozac and then find or create a safe haven; if the general insanity was temporary or permanent, and if the latter, how and if any of it developed if some of the insane were somehow able to form functioning groups, etc. It felt to me like an idea that would reward further exploration - and maybe Keene does return to this idea at some point in the future - but, again, that’s really a complaint about what the story isn’t rather than engaging with what it is; a gory as hell, cinematic, splatter fuelled romp through a truly bloody and bizarre end of the world.
This edition also contains four short stories backing up the main tale. Without You takes us back to the desperation of poverty and domesticity of Terminal, with a recently unemployed blue-collar worker, a mountain of debt, and a failing marriage. In the UK, we call this kind of writing ‘kitchen sink drama’, but it’s less often the subject of horror; here, Keene demonstrates again just how well he understands the mundane horror of day-to-day blue-collar existence; the desperation, the vulnerability, the constant feeling of the walls closing in with no escape.
I Am An Exit is a superb noir first-person piece, about which the less you know going in the better. Just exquisite, the way good short horror sometimes can be. This Is Not An Exit is a sequel that provides more tantalising details, while also whetting the appetite for the potential novel discussed in the afterword.
‘The King’ in: YELLOW is glorious; a classic tale about slipping through the cracks in reality and coming face to face with the uncanny and unexplainable. It’s Keene, so it’s both grounded and bloody, of course; still, those elements combine with the uncanny to make a potently disturbing tale with one hell of a kick. It’s a stone-brilliant short story, and one hell of a way to end the collection.
Next up: The return of the killer crustaceans: Clickers II.
KP
4/4/20
LINKS TO WORKS BY BRIAN KEENE:
Order Brian Keene books and many other indie horror titles direct from Vortex Books:
Missing a Keene title and can't find it on Vortex, check out his Amazon page:
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
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