Brian Keene: A Master in the "Darkness"

I'll be the first to admit this: I'm a spoiled English major brat. Give me your Hemingway, you Plath and whatever literary figure you can chuck my way and I'll give you an opinion. Keep that genre bullshit away from my sights because I'll frown upon you. I'll feel superior to you in all ways. Your selection of garbage fiction disgusts me. Something you buy at the airport to accompany you on a long flight. Something you pick up because it was on the New York Time's Bestseller List. Something Oprah told you was worth reading. 

Yes, after all these years of being told that I was a spoiled English major brat, ruined by professors in the department, stripped of creativity by the creative writing instructors - I'll be the first to admit that I'm spoiled rotten. Spoiled rotten to the core. 

Sure, I might pick up a Stephen King novel or an Anne Rice book from time to time, for the hell of it, because I don't want to think about what I'm reading. They aren't filled with anything intellectual. They won't pass the test of time. 

But oh no! Just leave it to someone like Brian Keene to have to go and prove me wrong. I've read a book by Keene in the past, if you recall. Besides being a literary nutjob, I'm also partial to zombies - movies, that is. Other than World War Z, Dead Sea was the only book I've read dealing with the subject matter.

As for Darkness on the Edge of Town, Keene once again proves the awesome powers he has a horror writer, incorporating his take of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Following the lives of Robbie Higgins - the narrator - his girlfriend Christy and neighbors Russ and Cranston during an supernatural occurrence, the book details the horror that lurks in the unknown - a popular Lovecraft theme, I may add - and the inner darkness that plagues our most primal instincts and depraved desires.