Kevin P. Keating: Fiction, Essays & Commentary

From  Zocalo Public Square : For 10 years, on and off, I worked in those mills as a union boilermaker, earning my way through college and graduate school. At 7 a.m., with an acetylene torch in hand, I would climb into the black asbestos pit of a dust collector and begin cutting through enormous pieces of warped and rusted metal, all the while thinking of my unsmiling professors and how they remained unimpressed by the latest draft of my master’s thesis, an unwieldy tome by a 27-year-old pseudointellectual who’d fallen under the sway of Joseph Campbell. While my blowtorch melted the inch-thick sheets of steel, I tried to remember Campbell’s words: “Life is a wonderful, wonderful opera. Except that it hurts.” Read the Entire Essay Here

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