11/12/2025 Exploring the Labyrinth by Kit Power: URBAN GOTHIC, essay 20

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, The Triangle Of Belief, and End Of The Road, 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.

*A Note from Kit Power and Uncomfortably Dark: These essays will be moving to every other Wednesday as Kit works through the completion of the series and gets ready for the launch of Exploring The Labyrinth, Volume One.

URBAN GOTHIC

Content note: discussion of extreme violence, including sexual violence.

So, I mean, firstly, holy fucking shit.

Urban Gothic is a staggering novel. I mean that literally. Several times as I was reading, I felt a sinking dread; a sense of escalation that led me to ask, not infrequently, why I was putting myself through reading it. Not, to be clear, because it’s in any way badly written - quite the reverse - but because, like the experiences of the unfortunate protagonists of the story, the novel frequently felt like an endurance test; the horrors unfolding remorselessly, descending ever deeper into hellish environments populated with increasingly deranged monsters.

This fucker is dark.

The setup is, as the title suggests, both classic and contemporary. A small gang of white teenagers, friends since elementary school, now paired off (Kerri and Tyler, Stephanie and Brett, Javier and Heather), returning from a Hip-Hop concert that sounds pretty fucking great, take a detour on the way home to score some drugs. After a road closure throws the driver off his route to Camden, NJ, their car breaks down ‘in the middle of the ‘hood’. They are approached by a group of black youths (Markus, Leo, Chris and Jamal), and, after a tense standoff, one of the white kids (Brett) drops the N-bomb. At which point, the white kids abandon their car and flee into The House At The End Of The Street.

So, okay, there’s clearly an essay worth of stuff to unpack there, and I do want to spend some time on the carnage (because hoo, boy, is there some carnage), so let’s get into it.

The first chapter does feel… difficult. Keene is showing us the black teens through the white teens' eyes, and the white teens are scared, and the fear comes at least partly from a place of prejudice. The way Keene builds to the moment, describing the increasing deterioration of the neighbourhood as the car gets more and more lost, has already built up an almost dreamlike sense of menace. We see versions of this across horror fiction, hell, genre fiction in general; I was powerfully reminded of Kings You Know They Got One Hell Of A Band, where the bickering married couple get hopelessly lost, before discovering the small town with the greatest live show of all time, but I suspect only because that’s where I saw it done first; and while, with Keene, the environment is a city, rather than an increasingly narrow country road, the message is the same; the teens are Crossing Over, and where they end up, the rules aren’t going to work the same.

And the problem with that is, or seems to be in chapter one, that the ‘new territory’ is not a fantasy realm, but one that actually exists. ‘The hood’ is not something made up by movie and TV execs to sell adverts and soundtrack albums; most US cities of any great size have areas of severe deprivation, often, because of historical and ongoing racial injustices, disproportionately populated by people of colour.

So, I’ll admit to a feeling of escalating tension in how the first half of chapter one was playing out that had little to do with the narrative per se. The tension I was feeling was, essentially, trying to figure out how the hell this scene was going to play out without, at best, falling into some pretty troubling stereotypes.

And the characters themselves are wise to this, which in and of itself should have given me the hint that Keene had a handle on what he was doing. When they’re approached by the teens, Javier actually says, in so many words, ‘you guys automatically assume that just because they’re black, they’re gonna mug us?’ - and his sense of outrage at Brett’s racist outburst is palpable. Nonetheless, Keene is canny enough to let the reader sit with the situation and examine their own discomfort. And it is, finally, the prejudices within the white teen group that lead to them all fleeing into the apparently abandoned house at the end of the street. One of the black teens even tries to warn them off, but of course, by then, it’s too late.

By the end of the first chapter, we’re left under no illusions that the fleeing teens are about to pay a very, very heavy price for their idiocy.

I was about to type that what happens to them in the house isn’t a surprise, but I think that’s not entirely fair; or rather, like saying the sea is wet, is at least inadequate. It’s a horror novel, and it’s the House At The End Of The Dead End Street, so of course, I was expecting Bad Things, and I was very much not disappointed. At the same time, the scale and depth of the violence and horror were of a level of invention and depravity I found tough to stomach, even eighteen books into a Keene read. The execution of Tyler that closes out the first chapter is sudden, brutal, and shocking on its own terms; but as a signifier for what’s to come, it’s really A Lot; Keene is not fucking around, here.

A far more welcome surprise comes at the start of Chapter Two, where, we unexpectedly for-me rejoin the black teens outside the house, opening the novel out into the dual narrative that persists for the rest of the story. It’s a smart choice by Keene for several reasons; firstly, by opening up a new perspective, we can see for sure what was hinted at in chapter one - not only were Leo and his friends no threat, they were just about to offer to repair the car and put the teens back on their way, when Brett’s outburst triggered the White Flight. It’s smart, too, having Leo replay the scene in his head, wondering if there was anything he could have done that would have led to things playing out differently; not because he was at fault, but just because he’s a thinking human being trying to find a way through.

  Another big advantage the duel narrative gives us is that we’re provided a deeper insight into the landscape painted with such garish colours in the opening chapter; the history of the neighbourhood, and in particular how abject neglect in terms of basic infrastructure and support (slim chance of getting an ambulance to turn up after dark, let alone a tow truck) creates a vicious cycle for the residents. We also, as the chapters unfold, get some of the history of the house at the end of the street, though here, Keene keeps his cards closer to his chest, letting rumour and inference paint a murky picture. Of course, there’s a way in which the house is a metaphor, a personification of the neighbourhood it’s hidden in - a death trap, or suicide rap, if you will - but there’s also the fact that such a house can only exist in a place that the wider world has abandoned. In that sense, then, it personifies the evil that creates such neighbourhoods, making the moment at the end when the residents decide to take the power into their own hands and burn it to the ground all the more poignant.

A third reason I found myself profoundly grateful for this dual narrative is that it provided occasional respites from seeing what was going on inside the house.

Because, and I really can’t emphasise this enough, fucking hell.

The kids trapped in the house undergo a descent into hell that I can’t immediately think of parallels for. Part of that will be because I don’t have a huge amount of experience of either Splatterpunk or extreme horror, despite having co-edited two award-winning anthologies of the former… but I don’t think it’s all that. Like, the only Rob Zombie film I’ve seen is House Of 1000 Corpses, and that’s the only real point of reference I have. I am aware opinions differ, but, for me, that movie did an excellent job of creating a sense of escalating, nightmarish dread, and I had a similar sinking feeling throughout Urban Gothic. The opening murder is brutal, of course, but far more disturbing to me was the fact of the exits being sealed by metal doors, and an increasing sense that the layout of the house itself was irrational and shifting. The discovery of crawl spaces and the discussion of a possible escape route via the basement added to the feeling that our plucky teens had wandered into an environment almost precision-engineered for escalating terror and torment.

And yet Keene sells it well; at no point did I feel like the environment veered from irrational to outright impossible, for example. Part of that is the vivid description, and part comes from the pacing, I think. There are many scenes of visceral, brutal horror as the novel progresses, but Keene does a great job of parcelling these out, and as much tension comes from the breaths taken between the explosions of violence, as the survivors' situation and mentality deteriorate, and the environments they move through become ever more hostile. Part of the attraction of horror fiction, for me, is examining what characters will do in situations where there are no good options, and Urban Gothic is in some ways exemplary of the form.

Except that’s not quite right, is it? We know the teens are trapped inside a Brian Keene horror novel death trap. They only know that they want to survive. Really, the best option would just be to find a relatively painless suicide method, but you’d have to know what you were in for, wouldn’t you? And, of course, they don’t. So, I realise, this is where a lot of that sick sense of dread comes from; the knowledge that these kids are almost certainly not going to make it, and that all the house has to offer them is a terminal downward spiral; the harder they struggle, the deeper they sink. The house/narrative weaponises their own survival instinct against them… and as readers, we see what they cannot, and that’s where a lot of the dread comes from.

And, with one more content note for discussion of sexual violence, that brings us neatly to why they’re so doomed, and who/what is trying to kill, fuck, and eat them (and, like the gag goes in Firefly, with no real fuss about in what order). Back in my Castaways essay, I talked a little about the problematic history of the horror trope of the Hostile Tribe, but also the inherent attraction of it, especially when it comes to survival horror and splatterpunk. Well, here, for my money, Keene’s execution (pun, I guess, intended) of that trope is pretty much flawless. The Tribe/Family/Creatures that inhabit the house of Urban Gothic are absolutely fucking terrifying and grotesque; humanoid in some aspects, but also clearly Others both in appearance and behaviour. They reminded me of some of Barker’s more nightmarish creations, in some ways, but whereas Barker's creations in such circumstances tend towards the bestial, here there are often human levels of both intelligence and sadism. The fact that the victims are, amongst other things, eaten, means the entire house exists as a kind of venus fly trap for humans (though there are hints that some of the denizens also use the terrifyingly expansive underground tunnel system to hunt throughout the city), and that did trigger some initial questions for me about the sustainability of the houses ecosystem. But the dual narrative fills this in neatly, letting us know how the house serves as a shelter of last resort from those unaware of the legends, or too desperate to care.

In this sense, then, the house and its denizens represent… what? Suicide? Drug addiction? Chronic depression? For sure, a pit of suffering, typified by sadism, suffering, and an absence of any hope of salvation. If you end up there, your only remaining worth is measured in your entertainment value, and the calories carried in your meat and bones. And the fact that the tribe is a Family, complete with a patriarch, siblings, and an absolutely stomach-churning nursery, feels suggestive, too; the nuclear family is often portrayed in American culture as the standard unit and idea of society, after all. Here? This lot makes the Manson Family look like the Partridge Family. And, recall, located in the heart of the city's most deprived neighbourhood, the only place such an obscenity could plausibly survive; because the wider social structures, the alleged ‘civil’ society propaganda would have you believe is benevolent and all-encompassing, are either absent or antagonistic to the neighbourhood, and all who live there.

And in a story chock-full of horrific imagery, incident, and circumstance, this may have been, for me, the darkest point of all. Because the tribe of Urban Gothic are evil monsters, if that phrase has any meaning; delighting in violence, rape, and murder, treating such things as recreation, delighting too in consuming the flesh of their victims… and yet, also, they are recognisable as a family. There can be no coexistence with these creatures. The house must be burned to the ground, and if it were at the end of my street, I’d salt the earth into the bargain. But.

But.

They’re a family. I have no idea if, somewhere down the line, I’m going to get more information about where they came from. They’re clearly not ‘human’… but they’re also clearly sentient. It’s like they’ve been… poisoned, somehow. A poison that acts on the mind (and, if such a thing exists, the soul) as well as their bodies. Is there something a little bit squicky here about equating deformity and evil? Oh, sure, I guess, but/and this, here, is why. Are they human? Clearly not. Not… exactly.

But they’re not exactly not, either.

This is a novel that by the end of the first chapter leaves the reader neck-deep in grime, and by the end, I felt, honestly, in over my head. It is, absolutely, one of the darkest and most profoundly unpleasant narratives I have ever read. I would not recommend it to anything like everyone; strong stomachs and stronger nerves will be needed. But I think, I think, this is also a truly great Splatterpunk novel. Certainly, with the best part of a month's distance, the contents of this book, and the movie it projected into my mind, feel uncomfortably close.

And that’s Urban Gothic.

Next up: An Occurrence In Crazy Bear Valley.

KP

28/4/22

PRE-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.

Preorder 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.

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