Review: Urban Gothic

Apparently the Fed is now regulating blogging, and I'm supposed to provide full disclosure or something like that. So let it not be said I'm not a law-abiding citizen, except for that one time when I got my speeding ticket, or that, um, download that we won't talk about.

Disclosure: I bought Urban Gothic by Brian Keene at the bookstore. I paid for it. I read it. I am going to review it. Suck on it, Fed.

I've enjoyed Keene's work in the past; I first picked him up because the man wrote decent zombie stories. By decent, I mean he's actually a good writer that understands plot, pacing, character development, etc - most of the zombie novels out there are total drek and desperately in need of a decent copy editor, among other things. He also writes a pretty decent supernatural story. Every few months I spot a new title by him and pick it up.

Enter Urban Gothic, which is essentially The Hills Have Eyes meets The Haunting (creepy inbred mutants take over old Victorian, hapless teenagers stumble across it, horrifics ensue).

One of the reasons I like Keene's work is that he generally creates interesting, sympathetic characters.

Not this time.

Our heroes are a pack of obnoxious kids that I really want to smack around. Basically, Urban Gothic succeeds in that these brats get exactly what's coming to them. Out of the six kids, I was rooting for exactly one of them.

There's a secondary storyline in there about some neighborhood kids and an old man who are somewhat worried about the trapped teenagers and have to decide whether to "take back their hood." I found them far more interesting.

I guess my gripe is with the leads, as usual. The secondary characters - Leo and Watkins - are pretty damn cool. I've read a few stories where I despised the leads starting out and gradually came around to at least appreciating them, but...not here. I don't know. These kids have no redeeming qualities - they're not even funny.

As for the mutants, they're never fully explained. The house apparently sits atop a massive system of tunnels and caverns where I suppose the freaks live - the house itself is one massive booby trap. People go into it and don't come out. Hotel California and all that. There's this tiny throwaway scene where one of the girls riffles through some '30s-era photographs of the house, but other than that, there's no explanation of how the mutants got there, what they're doing, anything like that. I like explanations. Or at least attempts at it. "They've been living in the sewers for a billion years" is too much The People Under the Stairs for me.

Urban Gothic is also considerably over-populated by gratuitous grotesqueness. Keene is great at describing the gross, the nasty, the deformed, etc. He uses it to fantastic effect in his other novels. But he's just too over-the-top for me here. Yeah, me. I, the gross one, have been grossed out.

Anyway. 3/5 stars for me. It was an easy read, kept me occupied, but Keene is capable of much better.

...although now I have a hankering to watch that movie about the Mole People...