Exploring The Labyrinth
In this series, I will be reading every Brian Keene book that has been published (and is still available in print) in order of original publication, and then producing an essay on it. With the exception of Girl On The Glider, these essays will be based upon a first read of the books concerned. The article will assume you’ve read the book, and you should expect MASSIVE spoilers.
I hope you enjoy my voyage of discovery.
8. Take The Long Way Home
A couple of decades ago, I had the enormous privilege of seeing Ken Campbell, in the back room of a south London pub, doing a stage show very loosely based on his then-current TV show Reality On The Rocks (1995). The show was about exploring the then-fashionable theories about quantum mechanics, and how much they overturned, or at least profoundly challenged, how we understood the universe to work. It was a serious TV show, in that it featured interviews with people like Stephen Hawking, and Campbell did a fine job as a pretty bright chap but non-subject specialist in trying to bridge the gaps between the planet sized brains and their thinking, and, well, the rest of us. The show was part stand up routine, part live version of a DVD extra, where he deconstructed his own performance, provided commentary and hindsight, and just in general was Ken Campbell in person, which was no small pleasure to be close to.
I found my mind returning to that show as I read this novella for two reasons. The first is that Campbell introduced (via Hawking) to my teenage brain the concept of the multiverse; i.e., the notion that for every single decision, made by every single living creature on the planet, there exists a separate parallel universe where a different decision was made. In one of the crowning moments of the show, he recounted how he’d been allowed one question that was not scripted by the researchers that he could ask Hawking, and how after great deliberation, he’d settled on asking the great man, in essence, if he really believed in these alternate universes as having a real, physical existence, as opposed to a theoretical one - the punchime being Hawking’s single word reply, “Yes.”
As the next book in this project will make utterly explicit, Keene’s work takes place in a multiverse, and Take The Long Way Home seems to me to be taking place in either the same one, or one immediately adjacent to White Fire. Here, as there, angels are real, and the end of the world is triggered by biblical intervention; specifically, the Book Of Revelation as interpreted by born again Christianity. In other words, it’s Keene doing the rapture.
We meet Charlie, Craig, and Steve (our POV character), who are car sharing on their home bound commute when the trumpet sounds, causing huge numbers of people to vanish immediately, and many of the rest to immediately crash into suddenly driverless cars. The scale of what’s happening is epic, but Keene keeps it up close and personal, letting Steve discover for himself just how big the event is. It’s a smart choice, allowing the immediacy and shock of the situation (including the obliteration of driver Hector’s head, courtesy of a pipe fallen from the back of a lorry, a thrillingly horrible piece of imagery that has lingered long in the memory) to play out in real time for the first 30 pages, complete with missing children, spouses, casualties, and psychological disintegration. It soon becomes clear to our small band that there’s no help coming any time soon, and they make the decision to walk the thirsty miles back home together.
From there the book is effectively a travelogue, bringing to mind both large sections of Lord Of The Rings and King-as-Bachman’s The Long Walk - the latter, especially, as there’s a sense of desperation and pressure that accompanies their march, the compulsion to push through physical endurance. Keene writes this well, giving a sense of the scale of the task and the drag of time, providing vivid descriptions of the surroundings and the deterioration of the walkers, yet keeping the narrative moving at a neat clip - I was given the sense of time passing, but the prose remains as readable and flowing as ever, and the story propelled me through the pages quickly.
And although the Bachman novel is dystopian sci-fi focussing on a fascist government rather than Take The Long Way Home’s societal collapse, there’s also a commonality in theme in terms of the thinness of the veneer of civilisation, and the dangerously close-to-the-surface cruelty, sadism, and violence that so many of us are capable of. There’s an encounter along the road with a small group of survivors and a man that’s been hung from an overpass (the sign around his neck proclaiming him to be a child molestor) that’s chilling, both in the ambiguity of the mobs responsibility (they deny it, but our traveling companions have their doubts), but also the more-or-less casual acceptance of the fact of it. It made me reflect on how our current rejection of public killings as punishment (in most countries), and certainly of extrajudicial violence is so recent; how few decades you need to go back to find postcards from hangings and lynchings, public torture and violence both in the name of ‘justice’ and straight up mob violence and terrorism against people of colour, or people who are in any way non-heteronormative, as just part of day to day life. It’s sobering to think about, and in 2019 a little scary to think about how close we might be to returning to that state of violence and fear. Civilisation (a word I have a very complicated, conflicted relationship with) is a very, very fragile thing, if history is any guide. Sure, the intervention in Take The Long Way Home is supernatural rather than man made; still, it’s hard not to reflect on the collective insanity unleashed on the world following the mass trauma that the horrific crimes of 9/11 inflicted on a generation (an event explicitly referenced in this book, and one that feels, appropriately, to inform so many of the whatever-the-plural-of-apocalypse-is that Keene clearly has a creative preoccupation, if not obsession with), and the attendant bonfire of civil liberties and war without end in the middle east, and feel a shudder of recognition and fear.
And it’s worth talking about that supernatural underpinning here, because it’s another key concern of the narrative, and it’s one that, as you might expect given the subject of my debut novel, I have some interest in. Born Again Christianity, especially in it’s American, self-help-and-capitalism-yay form, was somewhere between a fascination and mild obsession for me during my teenage years. As a then-committed atheist, I found it to be a deeply disturbing, alienating movement, so unfamiliar to my Church of England schooling as to be unrecognisable. The witnessing and evangelism seemed aggressive and gauche to me, and the emphasis on earnings and the ostentatious wealth of so many of the preachers seemed corrupt, cultish; even blasphemous, which is an odd reaction for an atheist, but, well, cultural Christian, I guess.
And perhaps one of the most cultish elements is that it has its own prophecy of apocalypse, based on an (IMO) very confused and contested read of the Book Of Revelation; The Rapture.
In The Rapture (a phrase that appears a lot in born again literature but nowhere in the bible), the theory is that the already-saved (i.e. those who are Born Again Christians) are called immediately to Heaven, while the rest of us have to deal with an AntiChrist who leads a one world government through 7 years of hell of earth, with fires, floods, famine, all that groovy stuff, before God returns for a final judgement and a bunch of people get the lake of fire treatment. I’m being flippant, but the dark side of this is that millions and millions of people across the world, and especially in America, believe this is a real thing, and most of them believe it’s likely to happen imminently, i.e. within their lifetime. This belief has has a profound impact on how these people live their lives, and, in many, many cases how they vote; in the eyes of many preachers, any move towards internationalism at any time is one step closer to that one world government, and therefore the end of the world, and a result, there’s an intense, instinctive distrust of international bodies of any kind, and a tendency to vote with anyone who claims to stand against them (and, as a consequence, also standing for nativism and isolationism). Similarly, if you sincerely believe God will trigger the end times by calling the faithful to heaven, you’re probably not going to be that concerned about the environmental impact of fossil fuel use, to pick one frightening relevant current example.
And look, Keene talks in the afterword about how he has extended family who are hardcore Baptists, and how he was raised by people of faith. He also states, with disarming honesty, that he feels like the Biblical God is, if his self appointed interpreters are correct, basically the bad guy, and that comes across in a lot of his work, White Fire and Terminal being strong earlier examples. But what Keene is doing with Take The Long Way Home is asking the question ‘what if it’s real? What if they are right?’.
Which brings us back to Ken Campbell, Stephen Hawking, and multiple universes.
In his concluding monologue, Campbell confessed that, despite Hawking’s certainty, he himself could not quite bring himself to believe in the notion of infinite alternate realities as concrete fact; he found it to boggling, too troubling, just too damn much.
However, what he had hit on was the notion that he could suppose it was so.
And what Campbell said he found was that supposition was enough to allow him to explore the ideas, without being driven mad by the implications.
Keene is a master of such supposition, and through his work so far, we’ve been acquainted with the end of the world in a number of imaginatively awful ways. With Take The Long Way Home, we’re shown what happens if people I am compelled to think of as the bad guys (maybe not intentionally, but by their fruit shall you know them, and all that). Through the eyes of a secular Jewish character, we see the Born Again end of the world. His horror is our horror. His disbelief is our disbelief. And his righteous fury and fear are all ours too.
I can’t be objective about this one. I bloody loved it. And it reminded me that those who look forward to the end of everything are often the scariest people of all. Keenes’ obsessions with the end of the world, on the other hand, strike me fundamentally as creative acts of love for what is - for life, in all it’s tapestry of joy and pain, love and horror - coupled with an acute awareness of the fragility of our existence, and the inevitability of our abrupt, and in most cases untimely, ends.
That’s basically always going to be my jam. And I found Take The Long Way Home to be an exemplar of the form.
KP
13/4/19
In this series, I will be reading every Brian Keene book that has been published (and is still available in print) in order of original publication, and then producing an essay on it. With the exception of Girl On The Glider, these essays will be based upon a first read of the books concerned. The article will assume you’ve read the book, and you should expect MASSIVE spoilers.
I hope you enjoy my voyage of discovery.
8. Take The Long Way Home
A couple of decades ago, I had the enormous privilege of seeing Ken Campbell, in the back room of a south London pub, doing a stage show very loosely based on his then-current TV show Reality On The Rocks (1995). The show was about exploring the then-fashionable theories about quantum mechanics, and how much they overturned, or at least profoundly challenged, how we understood the universe to work. It was a serious TV show, in that it featured interviews with people like Stephen Hawking, and Campbell did a fine job as a pretty bright chap but non-subject specialist in trying to bridge the gaps between the planet sized brains and their thinking, and, well, the rest of us. The show was part stand up routine, part live version of a DVD extra, where he deconstructed his own performance, provided commentary and hindsight, and just in general was Ken Campbell in person, which was no small pleasure to be close to.
I found my mind returning to that show as I read this novella for two reasons. The first is that Campbell introduced (via Hawking) to my teenage brain the concept of the multiverse; i.e., the notion that for every single decision, made by every single living creature on the planet, there exists a separate parallel universe where a different decision was made. In one of the crowning moments of the show, he recounted how he’d been allowed one question that was not scripted by the researchers that he could ask Hawking, and how after great deliberation, he’d settled on asking the great man, in essence, if he really believed in these alternate universes as having a real, physical existence, as opposed to a theoretical one - the punchime being Hawking’s single word reply, “Yes.”
As the next book in this project will make utterly explicit, Keene’s work takes place in a multiverse, and Take The Long Way Home seems to me to be taking place in either the same one, or one immediately adjacent to White Fire. Here, as there, angels are real, and the end of the world is triggered by biblical intervention; specifically, the Book Of Revelation as interpreted by born again Christianity. In other words, it’s Keene doing the rapture.
We meet Charlie, Craig, and Steve (our POV character), who are car sharing on their home bound commute when the trumpet sounds, causing huge numbers of people to vanish immediately, and many of the rest to immediately crash into suddenly driverless cars. The scale of what’s happening is epic, but Keene keeps it up close and personal, letting Steve discover for himself just how big the event is. It’s a smart choice, allowing the immediacy and shock of the situation (including the obliteration of driver Hector’s head, courtesy of a pipe fallen from the back of a lorry, a thrillingly horrible piece of imagery that has lingered long in the memory) to play out in real time for the first 30 pages, complete with missing children, spouses, casualties, and psychological disintegration. It soon becomes clear to our small band that there’s no help coming any time soon, and they make the decision to walk the thirsty miles back home together.
From there the book is effectively a travelogue, bringing to mind both large sections of Lord Of The Rings and King-as-Bachman’s The Long Walk - the latter, especially, as there’s a sense of desperation and pressure that accompanies their march, the compulsion to push through physical endurance. Keene writes this well, giving a sense of the scale of the task and the drag of time, providing vivid descriptions of the surroundings and the deterioration of the walkers, yet keeping the narrative moving at a neat clip - I was given the sense of time passing, but the prose remains as readable and flowing as ever, and the story propelled me through the pages quickly.
And although the Bachman novel is dystopian sci-fi focussing on a fascist government rather than Take The Long Way Home’s societal collapse, there’s also a commonality in theme in terms of the thinness of the veneer of civilisation, and the dangerously close-to-the-surface cruelty, sadism, and violence that so many of us are capable of. There’s an encounter along the road with a small group of survivors and a man that’s been hung from an overpass (the sign around his neck proclaiming him to be a child molestor) that’s chilling, both in the ambiguity of the mobs responsibility (they deny it, but our traveling companions have their doubts), but also the more-or-less casual acceptance of the fact of it. It made me reflect on how our current rejection of public killings as punishment (in most countries), and certainly of extrajudicial violence is so recent; how few decades you need to go back to find postcards from hangings and lynchings, public torture and violence both in the name of ‘justice’ and straight up mob violence and terrorism against people of colour, or people who are in any way non-heteronormative, as just part of day to day life. It’s sobering to think about, and in 2019 a little scary to think about how close we might be to returning to that state of violence and fear. Civilisation (a word I have a very complicated, conflicted relationship with) is a very, very fragile thing, if history is any guide. Sure, the intervention in Take The Long Way Home is supernatural rather than man made; still, it’s hard not to reflect on the collective insanity unleashed on the world following the mass trauma that the horrific crimes of 9/11 inflicted on a generation (an event explicitly referenced in this book, and one that feels, appropriately, to inform so many of the whatever-the-plural-of-apocalypse-is that Keene clearly has a creative preoccupation, if not obsession with), and the attendant bonfire of civil liberties and war without end in the middle east, and feel a shudder of recognition and fear.
And it’s worth talking about that supernatural underpinning here, because it’s another key concern of the narrative, and it’s one that, as you might expect given the subject of my debut novel, I have some interest in. Born Again Christianity, especially in it’s American, self-help-and-capitalism-yay form, was somewhere between a fascination and mild obsession for me during my teenage years. As a then-committed atheist, I found it to be a deeply disturbing, alienating movement, so unfamiliar to my Church of England schooling as to be unrecognisable. The witnessing and evangelism seemed aggressive and gauche to me, and the emphasis on earnings and the ostentatious wealth of so many of the preachers seemed corrupt, cultish; even blasphemous, which is an odd reaction for an atheist, but, well, cultural Christian, I guess.
And perhaps one of the most cultish elements is that it has its own prophecy of apocalypse, based on an (IMO) very confused and contested read of the Book Of Revelation; The Rapture.
In The Rapture (a phrase that appears a lot in born again literature but nowhere in the bible), the theory is that the already-saved (i.e. those who are Born Again Christians) are called immediately to Heaven, while the rest of us have to deal with an AntiChrist who leads a one world government through 7 years of hell of earth, with fires, floods, famine, all that groovy stuff, before God returns for a final judgement and a bunch of people get the lake of fire treatment. I’m being flippant, but the dark side of this is that millions and millions of people across the world, and especially in America, believe this is a real thing, and most of them believe it’s likely to happen imminently, i.e. within their lifetime. This belief has has a profound impact on how these people live their lives, and, in many, many cases how they vote; in the eyes of many preachers, any move towards internationalism at any time is one step closer to that one world government, and therefore the end of the world, and a result, there’s an intense, instinctive distrust of international bodies of any kind, and a tendency to vote with anyone who claims to stand against them (and, as a consequence, also standing for nativism and isolationism). Similarly, if you sincerely believe God will trigger the end times by calling the faithful to heaven, you’re probably not going to be that concerned about the environmental impact of fossil fuel use, to pick one frightening relevant current example.
And look, Keene talks in the afterword about how he has extended family who are hardcore Baptists, and how he was raised by people of faith. He also states, with disarming honesty, that he feels like the Biblical God is, if his self appointed interpreters are correct, basically the bad guy, and that comes across in a lot of his work, White Fire and Terminal being strong earlier examples. But what Keene is doing with Take The Long Way Home is asking the question ‘what if it’s real? What if they are right?’.
Which brings us back to Ken Campbell, Stephen Hawking, and multiple universes.
In his concluding monologue, Campbell confessed that, despite Hawking’s certainty, he himself could not quite bring himself to believe in the notion of infinite alternate realities as concrete fact; he found it to boggling, too troubling, just too damn much.
However, what he had hit on was the notion that he could suppose it was so.
And what Campbell said he found was that supposition was enough to allow him to explore the ideas, without being driven mad by the implications.
Keene is a master of such supposition, and through his work so far, we’ve been acquainted with the end of the world in a number of imaginatively awful ways. With Take The Long Way Home, we’re shown what happens if people I am compelled to think of as the bad guys (maybe not intentionally, but by their fruit shall you know them, and all that). Through the eyes of a secular Jewish character, we see the Born Again end of the world. His horror is our horror. His disbelief is our disbelief. And his righteous fury and fear are all ours too.
I can’t be objective about this one. I bloody loved it. And it reminded me that those who look forward to the end of everything are often the scariest people of all. Keenes’ obsessions with the end of the world, on the other hand, strike me fundamentally as creative acts of love for what is - for life, in all it’s tapestry of joy and pain, love and horror - coupled with an acute awareness of the fragility of our existence, and the inevitability of our abrupt, and in most cases untimely, ends.
That’s basically always going to be my jam. And I found Take The Long Way Home to be an exemplar of the form.
KP
13/4/19
take the long way home by brian keene
All across the world, people suddenly vanish in the blink of an eye. From their cars during the rush hour commute. From the shopping malls. Their homes. Their beds. Even from the arms of their loved ones. Airline pilots. World leaders. Teachers. Parents. Children. Gone. Steve, Charlie and Frank were just trying to get home when it happened. Now they find themselves left behind, and wishing they'd disappeared, too. Trapped in the ultimate traffic jam, they watch as civilization collapses, claiming the souls of those around them. God has called his faithful home, but the invitations for Steve, Charlie and Frank got lost. Now they must set off on foot through a nightmarish post-apocalyptic landscape in search of answers. In search of God. In search of their loved ones. And in search of home. Deadite Press is proud to make Brian Keene's long out-of-print critically-acclaimed Take The Long Way Home available to readers once again! Includes an introduction by New York Times-bestselling author John Skipp!
