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, The Triangle Of Belief, and End Of The Road, 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.
14. Kill Whitey
Back when I wrote about Keene’s sophomore novel, Terminal (a subject I hope to return to, if recent public hints from the author bear fruit), I commented that I felt that Keene had an amazing ‘pure’ dark crime novel in him, should he ever decide to try his hand at it. And while Kill Whitey isn’t that, exactly, it certianly did nothing to dispel that belief.
Kill Whitey starts out as blue collar noir, complete with warehouse workers, strippers, and the Russian Mob; led in this case, locally, by the eponymous Whitey. Our POV character, Larry Gidson, is a classic Noir Lonely Man, complete with drinking buddies, TV dinners, a cat, and not a whole hell of a lot else.
Again, as I first noted in Terminal, Keene is exceptional when it comes to writing about working class poverty. In the same way that James Hurbert could (sometimes) pen amazingly vivid portraits of working/underclass characters (who, admittedly, then mostly got eaten by rats), Keene foregrounds people, and lives, who are still chronically underrepresented in most fiction, genre and otherwise. More, he is brilliant at putting his finger on the dull existential horror of working a bone crushing job for wages that barely cover the rent, leaving you too exhausted and broke to do much more than the odd outing for brews with the boys. And again, I’m struck by how he does this by inhabiting the scenes, the characters; nobody in Kill Whitey is moping around, feeling sorry for themselves; they’re working stiffs and they just get the fuck on with it. Larry would probably look at me like I was an asshole if I called him depressed to his face; yet the crawling, muted despair is there between every single line of the early part of his narrative. I’ve noted before that Keene plays his own personal politics fairly close to his chest (and, to be clear, fair enough), and I’m not sure he’ll thank me for or agree with this observation, but in his commitment to honestly portraying, without sentiment or varnish, the day-to-day grind of skin-of-the-fingernails employment, these works are for my money both deeply political and stand as a stark condemnation of an economic system that perpetuates such human misery on a (literally) industrial scale. And it achieves that, not by preaching theory or examining structures, but by simply staring right into the belly of the beast, pulling out individual lives right at the bleeding edge, and just reporting what he sees. And I know I’ve banged on about it before, more than once, but it’s foregrounded so powerfully in this novel that I couldn’t in good conscience ignore it.The other feature the novel has in common with Terminal is the portrayal, in the above context, of male friendship. Yet again Keene creates vivid pen portraits of this small gang with enviable efficiency and lethally readable prose. In a very small number of pages, we know all four men, mainly through a small set of key, telling details - and, you know, it’s the kind of thing it’s very easy to take for granted, but again, Keene does it as well as anyone and better than most.
And of course, it’s brews with the boys that catalysis the narrative, in the form of a visit to a Russian mob run strip club (which, in a lovely detail, doesn't have an alcohol license, exactly the kind of well-researched telling detail that makes the whole piece bleed with authenticity), and a Lust At First Sight encounter with Sondra Belov.
It feels like a neo-Noir update of the 30’s bar singer moment, and there are also elements of Miller’s Sin City comics here, for my money. And I mean, at what point does a trope (in this case, Falling For A Stripper) transcend cliche to become an archetype? I don’t know, but I do know that as I examine the idea with my writer brain on, I can both see that it Has Been Done, and also that it has… possibilities.
And for my money, Keene makes it work for two reasons. The first is we’re back to that honesty. Like Dark Hollow, Kill Whitey is, at least partly, a novel about cis hetrosexual male sexuality, and Keene brings his trademark unflinching honesty to bare, with deeply uncomfortable results.
And I want to be clear about what I am saying and not saying, here; in this context, I am talking about honesty in the sense that Keene is honestly describing a lust reaction that turns to obsession on the part of the character he’s writing. I trust anyone who has reached the point in this project will understand that distinction, but just to put my finger on it, here; I am not Larry, and I don’t think like him… but I recognise him, very well, and the contours of his thoughts and arguments are uncomfortably familiar to me, because I too grew up male and straight not too long after Keene did, and in societal circumstances with more similarities than differences, frankly. So, as with Keene’s politics, I have no idea about how much Larry’s feelings and thoughts match Keene’s own (and, again, it is categorically none of my fucking business, either) but I’m willing to bet the answer is ‘not a huge amount, actually’. But, more’s to the point, I do know that any ‘critic’ who makes assumptions about Keene as a result of Larry’s thoughts will get the hard stare from me, as well as a mental note to ignore anything said critic has to say. Because that’s not how any of this works.
That said, holy shit this part of the book is really uncomfortable. Keene does such a masterful job of foregrounding Larry’s humanity, and establishing the loneliness of his life, that I was left with deeply conflicted feelings, as Larry walks the (very) fine line between ‘regular customer/fan’ and ‘stalker’, and the fact that he is fully aware of that tension himself exacerbates the discomfort. Larry is not powerless before his lust, but he is compelled by it in ways he knows are unhealthy, and Keene neither dresses up the conflict, nor judges it, but rather transmits it on to the page, letting the reader sit with the building discomfort, until the inevitable tension bursts, and Larry discovers Sondra in the car park, sobbing, and she asks him to help her.
And here we come to the second reason that, for me, Keene pulls this narrative off; from the moment Larry is given the chance to play White Knight, the plot just fucking explodes into action, and basically doesn’t stop until the final page.
I really cannot emphasise enough just how extraordinary well paced the rest of the novel is; pacing has always been a strength of Keene’s work, including a seemingly instinctive understanding of the need to ebb and flow (we’ll return to this point in Ghost Walk, next essay) but I cannot think of a novel in his output as relentless as Kill Whitey - esseintally, once this thing starts moving, Keene just slams the accelerator down and veers into incoming traffic with a maniac giggle and just doesn’t stop. It is exhilarating and terrifying. The last time I can remember a novel feeling like this is probably King-as-Bachman in The Running Man, one of my all time faves in terms of shearer balls-out action horror. Yeah, that good. The novel just rips along, in a hail of gunfire, explosions, blood, sweat, and teeth grinding tension. I kept finding myself grinning with manic glee, wondering where on earth this batshit story was going next, where it even could go next - at least part of the joy comes from how Keene pulls out all the stops to continue to ratchet up the tension, taking a situation that starts at ball-crawling existential terror of the most immediate and adrenaline fueled variety and somehow keeps finding ways to deepen the hole. I am a junkie for this kind of narrative and Keene delivers some of the highest grade crank I’ve had in a long time.
And lurking at the back of that drive is our antagonist, Whitey himself. And while I still want that pure crime thriller someday, I couldn’t hlep but find Whitey adorable, in concept; a descendent of Rasputin who has inherited his supernatural ability to absorb punishment and keep coming, turning the final third of the novel into a splatterpunk retelling of The Terminator. I’ll confess it did change my reaction somewhat; for me, it did take away some of the tension I’d experienced when the whole story felt to be taking place in The Really Real World; but on the other hand, that final third was an absolute blast, and thinking back over it, it’s hard to find complaint at a story that brought me so much pleasure.
Because as much as the stuff I talked about up front really is there, present and correct, Kill Whitey is, at it’s core and by design, entertainment. And I have to tell you, feinds and neighbours, writing in August of 2020, I will take my escapist pulp joy wherever I can find it; and frankly, you should too.
Goddamn, this one was fun.
Next up: Ghost Watch
KP
7/8/20
Kill Whitey starts out as blue collar noir, complete with warehouse workers, strippers, and the Russian Mob; led in this case, locally, by the eponymous Whitey. Our POV character, Larry Gidson, is a classic Noir Lonely Man, complete with drinking buddies, TV dinners, a cat, and not a whole hell of a lot else.
Again, as I first noted in Terminal, Keene is exceptional when it comes to writing about working class poverty. In the same way that James Hurbert could (sometimes) pen amazingly vivid portraits of working/underclass characters (who, admittedly, then mostly got eaten by rats), Keene foregrounds people, and lives, who are still chronically underrepresented in most fiction, genre and otherwise. More, he is brilliant at putting his finger on the dull existential horror of working a bone crushing job for wages that barely cover the rent, leaving you too exhausted and broke to do much more than the odd outing for brews with the boys. And again, I’m struck by how he does this by inhabiting the scenes, the characters; nobody in Kill Whitey is moping around, feeling sorry for themselves; they’re working stiffs and they just get the fuck on with it. Larry would probably look at me like I was an asshole if I called him depressed to his face; yet the crawling, muted despair is there between every single line of the early part of his narrative. I’ve noted before that Keene plays his own personal politics fairly close to his chest (and, to be clear, fair enough), and I’m not sure he’ll thank me for or agree with this observation, but in his commitment to honestly portraying, without sentiment or varnish, the day-to-day grind of skin-of-the-fingernails employment, these works are for my money both deeply political and stand as a stark condemnation of an economic system that perpetuates such human misery on a (literally) industrial scale. And it achieves that, not by preaching theory or examining structures, but by simply staring right into the belly of the beast, pulling out individual lives right at the bleeding edge, and just reporting what he sees. And I know I’ve banged on about it before, more than once, but it’s foregrounded so powerfully in this novel that I couldn’t in good conscience ignore it.The other feature the novel has in common with Terminal is the portrayal, in the above context, of male friendship. Yet again Keene creates vivid pen portraits of this small gang with enviable efficiency and lethally readable prose. In a very small number of pages, we know all four men, mainly through a small set of key, telling details - and, you know, it’s the kind of thing it’s very easy to take for granted, but again, Keene does it as well as anyone and better than most.
And of course, it’s brews with the boys that catalysis the narrative, in the form of a visit to a Russian mob run strip club (which, in a lovely detail, doesn't have an alcohol license, exactly the kind of well-researched telling detail that makes the whole piece bleed with authenticity), and a Lust At First Sight encounter with Sondra Belov.
It feels like a neo-Noir update of the 30’s bar singer moment, and there are also elements of Miller’s Sin City comics here, for my money. And I mean, at what point does a trope (in this case, Falling For A Stripper) transcend cliche to become an archetype? I don’t know, but I do know that as I examine the idea with my writer brain on, I can both see that it Has Been Done, and also that it has… possibilities.
And for my money, Keene makes it work for two reasons. The first is we’re back to that honesty. Like Dark Hollow, Kill Whitey is, at least partly, a novel about cis hetrosexual male sexuality, and Keene brings his trademark unflinching honesty to bare, with deeply uncomfortable results.
And I want to be clear about what I am saying and not saying, here; in this context, I am talking about honesty in the sense that Keene is honestly describing a lust reaction that turns to obsession on the part of the character he’s writing. I trust anyone who has reached the point in this project will understand that distinction, but just to put my finger on it, here; I am not Larry, and I don’t think like him… but I recognise him, very well, and the contours of his thoughts and arguments are uncomfortably familiar to me, because I too grew up male and straight not too long after Keene did, and in societal circumstances with more similarities than differences, frankly. So, as with Keene’s politics, I have no idea about how much Larry’s feelings and thoughts match Keene’s own (and, again, it is categorically none of my fucking business, either) but I’m willing to bet the answer is ‘not a huge amount, actually’. But, more’s to the point, I do know that any ‘critic’ who makes assumptions about Keene as a result of Larry’s thoughts will get the hard stare from me, as well as a mental note to ignore anything said critic has to say. Because that’s not how any of this works.
That said, holy shit this part of the book is really uncomfortable. Keene does such a masterful job of foregrounding Larry’s humanity, and establishing the loneliness of his life, that I was left with deeply conflicted feelings, as Larry walks the (very) fine line between ‘regular customer/fan’ and ‘stalker’, and the fact that he is fully aware of that tension himself exacerbates the discomfort. Larry is not powerless before his lust, but he is compelled by it in ways he knows are unhealthy, and Keene neither dresses up the conflict, nor judges it, but rather transmits it on to the page, letting the reader sit with the building discomfort, until the inevitable tension bursts, and Larry discovers Sondra in the car park, sobbing, and she asks him to help her.
And here we come to the second reason that, for me, Keene pulls this narrative off; from the moment Larry is given the chance to play White Knight, the plot just fucking explodes into action, and basically doesn’t stop until the final page.
I really cannot emphasise enough just how extraordinary well paced the rest of the novel is; pacing has always been a strength of Keene’s work, including a seemingly instinctive understanding of the need to ebb and flow (we’ll return to this point in Ghost Walk, next essay) but I cannot think of a novel in his output as relentless as Kill Whitey - esseintally, once this thing starts moving, Keene just slams the accelerator down and veers into incoming traffic with a maniac giggle and just doesn’t stop. It is exhilarating and terrifying. The last time I can remember a novel feeling like this is probably King-as-Bachman in The Running Man, one of my all time faves in terms of shearer balls-out action horror. Yeah, that good. The novel just rips along, in a hail of gunfire, explosions, blood, sweat, and teeth grinding tension. I kept finding myself grinning with manic glee, wondering where on earth this batshit story was going next, where it even could go next - at least part of the joy comes from how Keene pulls out all the stops to continue to ratchet up the tension, taking a situation that starts at ball-crawling existential terror of the most immediate and adrenaline fueled variety and somehow keeps finding ways to deepen the hole. I am a junkie for this kind of narrative and Keene delivers some of the highest grade crank I’ve had in a long time.
And lurking at the back of that drive is our antagonist, Whitey himself. And while I still want that pure crime thriller someday, I couldn’t hlep but find Whitey adorable, in concept; a descendent of Rasputin who has inherited his supernatural ability to absorb punishment and keep coming, turning the final third of the novel into a splatterpunk retelling of The Terminator. I’ll confess it did change my reaction somewhat; for me, it did take away some of the tension I’d experienced when the whole story felt to be taking place in The Really Real World; but on the other hand, that final third was an absolute blast, and thinking back over it, it’s hard to find complaint at a story that brought me so much pleasure.
Because as much as the stuff I talked about up front really is there, present and correct, Kill Whitey is, at it’s core and by design, entertainment. And I have to tell you, feinds and neighbours, writing in August of 2020, I will take my escapist pulp joy wherever I can find it; and frankly, you should too.
Goddamn, this one was fun.
Next up: Ghost Watch
KP
7/8/20
KILL WHITEY BY BRIAN KEENE
In the Russian criminal underworld there is a man named Whitey. He is unstoppable and always gets what he wants. Some say he can't be hurt. Some say he can't be killed. Larry Gidson is about to find out. He is a dock worker on the run with Sondra Belov, a beautiful stripper. Whitey wants Sondra and he will torture and kill to get her. Larry, his friends, and even his cat will never be safe unless they give him Sondra - or they kill Whitey. From horror master, Brian Keene, comes a crime adventure filled with sex, gore, and guns.
