Brian Keene (born September 22, 1967) is an American novelist, blogger, and host of the
The Horror Show podcast. His works typically fall into the categories of Horror, Crime Fiction and Comic Books. Keene grew up in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. After serving in the Navy, he took on a wide variety of jobs, including (but not limited to) truck driver, data entry clerk, dockworker, telemarketer, repo man, bouncer, disc jockey, and salesman, which he credits with providing a wide array of characters and personalities as inspiration for his work. His novels have won several accolades, including two
Bram Stoker Awards.
Keene's works include:
- The Rising series:
- The Rising
- City of the Dead
- Selected Scenes From the End of the World
- Dark Hollow
- Ghost Walk
- Castaways
- Ghoul
Works by Keene with their own pages include:
Tropes associated with Keene's novels:
- The Bad Guy Wins: While the titular antagonist from Ghoul is defeated it's revealed in Ghost Walk that he ultimately succeeded in continuing his species by impregnating Karin.
- Beware the Living:
- In The Rising series, while the zombies may be the most serious threat to the world, the various humans are nothing to laugh at either. In The Rising, a drug gang and a cannibal duo nearly kill three of the protagonists before the real bastards pop up: the Pennsylvania National Guard, who are mostly a brigade of psychopathic rapists armed with tanks and heavy weaponry. While City of the Dead puts the focus almost fully on the zombies, some humans again prove to be a Spanner in the Works. Selected Scenes From the End of the World has living humans fill the role as antagonists throughout the book until the penultimate chapter, owing to the world being burned to a crisp.
- In Dead Sea the human threat is mostly overshadowed by The Virus, but the one visit to the mainland results in a survivor killing two crew members, and before the boat sails most of Baltimore's survivors end up killing each other.
- Big Bad: The Rising book series has Ob, the leader of a demonic group of sort-of zombies that possess dead bodies and turn them against humankind. However, in the first book he is in a Big Bad Ensemble with Colonel Schow, the leader of an entire platoon of Sociopathic Soldiers. In the second book, with Schow dead, Ob takes his position as the true Big Bad once again.
- Downer Ending: The majority of his works' endings are varying shades of bleak.
- Eldritch Abomination: In Ghost Walk an all-consuming darkness is released onto the Earth.
- Hate Plague:
- The short story "Purple Reign" features purple rain that causes Ax Craziness in everyone who gets wet; it affects animals as well as humans.
- Jack's Magic Beans takes place in the same universe as "Purple Reign", but this time, the Hate Plague has no detectable cause and doesn't appear to affect animals or people who take Prozac.
- Perpetual Storm: In The Conqueror Worms, human civilization is destroyed when it starts to rain all over the world and never stops.
- Raising the Steaks:
- Dead Sea has examples of zombie seagulls, zombie fish and zombie rats.
- The Rising series has a whole selection of zombie animals spanning from birds to dogs. Zombie insects and zombified plants are also explored in The Rising: Selected Scenes from the End of the World and with zombified plants being hinted towards at the end of City of the Dead.
- Sand Worm: Man-eating giant earthworms begin crawling on the surface in The Conqueror Worms after an endless rainstorm forces them out from deep underground.
- Sewer Gator: In City of the Dead, some zombie alligators attack the fleeing humans as they travel through the sewers.
