Kevin P. Keating: Fiction, Essays & Commentary

Interview in Fiction Southeast : Q: The book contains an amazing balance of dark comedy and horror. Was this difficult? A: I think the lines demarcating one genre from the next are unnecessarily artificial. Life is both horrifying  and  funny, and sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish between the two things. What is comedy but horror gone wrong? And what is horror but comedy gone wrong? I have always been deeply inspired by the films of Stanley Kubrick, and I think you can view each of his films as simultaneously comedic and horrifying. A great example is  A Clockwork Orange . Kubrick’s depiction of Alex, the protagonist as played by Malcolm McDowell, is laugh-out-loud funny and, at the same time, incredibly disturbing. For me this tension between comedy/horror has always been sort of natural and intuitive. Read the Full Interview Here

From  The Barnes & Noble Review: "The Captive Condition  is a violent, disturbing book, but it is also a joyful one, a tribute to the pleasures and stylistic tics of an old and unkillably popular genre. One supposes that writers as varied as Hawthorne, Lovecraft, and Stephen King would be proud." READ THE ENTIRE REVIEW

From  Mystery Scene Magazine: " Literary novels, horror, and humor seldom mix—fantasist Christopher Moore being one of the rare exceptions—but now comes Kevin P. Keating to deliver a brilliant novel so dark, yet so laugh-out-loud funny, that he’s close to inventing a new genre... Keating first broke on the literary scene with the highly praised  The Natural Order of Things , which was described as a combination of Jack Ketchum and Jonathan Franzen. This second book, every bit as masterful, illustrates what might have happened to Holden Caulfield if he had wound up in Normandy Falls instead of the relatively virtuous New York City." Read the Entire Review

From the Cleveland Plain Dealer : A carefully crafted, darkly humorous work, pulsating with our passion for revenge. It drags  us up out of the muck, dripping with all of our human weaknesses, failures and cruelties, and says, "Take a close look at how far we  haven't  come." Early on, the protagonist says he wants one day to write "an enigmatic, ruthlessly apocalyptic, elegantly filthy dirigible of a novel." And now – with Keating as his amanuensis – he has done so. READ THE ENTIRE REVIEW

From  Lit Reactor: "I like weird. No, actually, I love weird. If a book contains quirky Lynchian characters, occult ritualism, and en masse drug usage, generally speaking, I’m in. Luckily,  The Captive Condition  contains all of this in spades. Every character would be right at home in a Lynch film. But don’t get me wrong, even though I’ve mentioned Lynch twice in the same paragraph (and now a third time.),  The Captive Condition  isn’t a rip off of a David Lynch film (now four times), because Kevin P. Keating has created a wholly original and intriguing universe in the bizarre world of Normandy Falls." READ THE REVIEW HERE

From  Open Letters Monthly : "The Captive Condition  is a big, smart, showy Grand Guignol feat, an order of magnitude more accomplished and more interesting than  The Natural Order of Things , but it’s also involvingly funny. This is the book that renders it now impossible to ignore – or even safely categorize – Kevin Keating as an author, and in a publishing season full of too many near-cloned novels, that’s a wonderful arrival." READ THE ENTIRE REVIEW

Publishers Weekly "Picks of the Week": THE CAPTIVE CONDITION : "This week, dirty Seinfeld fan fiction, a David Lynchian campus novel, and Kim Stanley Robinson's latest..." READ MORE HERE

From Cleveland Scene by James Renner: "Let’s get this part out of the way: this is a breakthrough novel, one that makes a career... The plot is juicy but it’s Keating’s wordplay that draws a reader in. Early reviewers have already compared his command of prose to Franzen or David Foster Wallace... But anyone who’s read classic horror can quickly see he’s more influenced by the words of Poe and Lovecraft than those pretentious Writer’s Lab types... This new novel is a hallucination and certainly reads like a terrible trip, like some early Cormac McCarthy. And it was a hallucination I was delighted to be captivated by for a while." READ THE REVIEW HERE

THE CAPTIVE CONDITION launches at the 2015 San Diego Comic-Con International on July 9! Kevin P. Keating  has received starred reviews for  THE CAPTIVE CONDITION   (Pantheon Books,  7/7/2015 ) , including this from  Library Journal:   “A weird and wonderfully rendered universe . . . . A highly literary look at the faces of evil in almost all of its guises . . . . Oh, and many characters here are constantly high on psychedelic carrot juice.”  Emulating a modern day Edgar Allan Poe, coupled with the creepy brilliance of HBO’s True Detective, THE CAPTIVE CONDITION is at once chilling, deliciously dark, and quirkily hilarious. As a boilermaker turned author, Kevin has a fascinating and unique take on thriller writing. Kevin appears on the  Horror/Thriller panel  on  Thursday, July 9 at 4 pm  ( Room 25ABC ). READ MORE HERE

From Library Journal : A Catholic school preppy enrolls in a seemingly idyllic Midwestern university that is anything but. Academic troubles doom him; his pompous and prolix mentor snubs him; and he comes to work for a medium-level criminal known as the Gonk, at the power plant, aka the Bloated Tick. Then, the mentor's mistress drowns drug-addled in her pool, her creepily prescient twins come to live with the mentor, trash his house and then freeze to death in a barn, after which their ghosts doom their seaman father to freezing. Then the Gonk takes revenge on his ex and her new love, who becomes the first of two in this book to be buried alive. The preppy takes revenge on the mentor, but only after all the other Tick workers die at sea. Oh, and many characters here are constantly high on psychedelic carrot juice. You get the idea. Many complicated plots weave and intertwine in a weird and wonderfully rendered universe. Also, there's heavily cadenced prose and A-level voca...

FROM  Publishers Weekly : Keating’s sophomore novel (after The Natural Order of Things ) is a black comedy that transcends its own offbeat energy and becomes truly disturbing. Jesuit-educated Edmund Campion is attending graduate school in the small Midwestern town of Normandy Falls. When his master’s thesis topic is rejected by his self-important advisor, Dr. Kingsley, Edmund drops out and takes a job as a campus groundskeeper, working for a brutal supervisor known only as the Gonk. Meanwhile, Kingsley’s lover, Emily Ryan, is found dead in her swimming pool, and Kingsley and his amateur bodybuilder wife end up taking in Emily’s disturbed twin daughters. Morgan Fey, Edmund’s ex-girlfriend, takes a job in a French restaurant, where the chef brews up the hallucinogenic carrot juice that is the town’s drug of choice. This is only the beginning: hauntings, murders, live burials, and imprisonment in underground chambers are just some of the fates that lie in store for various unsusp...

Now Available for Pre-Order! Releases July 7, 2015: From a thrilling new voice in fiction comes a chilling and deliciously dark novel about an idyllic Midwestern college town that turns out to be a panorama of depravity and a nexus of horror. For years Normandy Falls has been haunted by its strange history and the aggrieved spirits said to roam its graveyards. Despite warnings, Edmund Campion is determined to go there and pursue an advanced degree in literature. At first things proceed wonderfully, but Edmund soon learns he isn’t immune to the impersonal trappings of fate: his girlfriend Morgan Fey smashes his heart, his advisor Professor Martin Kingsley crushes him with frivolous assignments, and his dead end job begins to take a toll on his physical and mental health.   One night he stumbles upon the body of Emily Ryan, a proud and unapologetic “townie,” drowned in her family pool. Was it suicide, Edmund wonders, or murder? In the days following the tra...

From  Cleveland Magazine : " Keating's debut novel,  The Natural Order of Things , was a finalist for the 2013 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes' Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. The St. Ignatius High School graduate set the darkly compelling series of 15 interwoven stories in a familiar place — at a Jesuit all-boys school in a Midwestern industrial city. The novel landed Keating, an adjunct professor at Baldwin Wallace University, Cleveland State University and Lorain County Community College, a book deal with Random House, which will release his second novel,  The Captive Condition ,  in July...." READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE

From River City Reading : "Ten Books I Can't Wait to Read in 2015" READ ARTICLE HERE

From  Library Journal : "People in the know are talking about this new work from Keating, a former steel mill’s boilermaker who became an English professor and literary journal regular until his small-press first novel,  The Natural Order of Things , was named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction in 2012. The current publisher did the paperback reprint but is putting its energy behind this dark and edgy tale..." CONTINUE READING ARTICLE HERE

From  Publishers Weekl y: READ BLURB HERE