Kevin P. Keating's Blog: Fiction, Essays, Commentary, Reviews, Interviews

Q: What first inspired The Captive Condition?

A: The Captive Condition began with two distinct short stories I’d written some years ago. The first concerned a lecherous professor having an affair with his troubled, alcoholic neighbor; the other chronicled the misadventures of two small children who visit a teenaged runaway living in an abandoned barn deep in the woods. From there I began to wonder how these two very different episodes might come together to form a unified narrative. The book evolved, slowly, over the course of two and a half years. The real challenge was getting to know the characters. It’s a bit like approaching a total stranger on the street and trying to develop a lasting friendship. Like the people we encounter in real life, fictional characters are often reluctant to reveal too much of themselves right away, and writers tend to learn about them gradually. There’s some irony to this. Somehow the writer must take these characters into his or her confidence—and then exploit their private experiences for all to see. A total betrayal!

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http://paranormal.suvudu.com/2015/07/...

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BOOK OF THE WEEK AND BOOK OF THE DAY.

"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 unsuspecting townsfolk. The comically formal tone of the first two-thirds shows Keating to be an astute student of spooky scene-setters from Edgar Allen Poe to Stephen King to David Lynch. But in many of the final passages, such as a horrific building fire, he proves to be at least their equal. It’s a mysterious novel, both in terms of its plot and its ambitions—the book’s biggest missed opportunity is that its world feels a bit too hermetic and detached from our own—but it’s also a darkly funny read and a stylistic tour de force."

"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 vocabulary, along the lines of Tristan Egolf's Lord of the Barnyard. VERDICT: Not an academic send-up à la Richard Russo or Jon Hassler but a highly literary look at the faces of evil in almost all of its guises. "

"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."

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http://www.clevescene.com/scene-and-h...

"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."

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http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/boo...

"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."

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https://litreactor.com/reviews/booksh...

"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."

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http://www.cleveland.com/books/index....

"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."

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http://www.mysteryscenemag.com/blog-a...

"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."

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http://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/...

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.

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http://fictionsoutheast.org/author-in...