The Keep

Rating:
Summary: Boring and strangely old - fashioned....not a keeper.
Review: ...I approached this book with high expectations. ... The excerpt really caught my interest. Even the cover looked rather good. I thought this book might be something really gripping, and a little removed from the ordinary....

... This book is boring. Yes, I probably wouldn't have rated it so low if my expectations hadn't been so high...but still, ... Don't get me wrong, the start is brilliant. The topic sounded really great. But when I started reading, boy, did the eyelids start to droop. This is more of a romance than a horror book. And after a promising start, the author does everything wrong. The plot starts to get staid and boring. Ho hum, the beautiful young girl staying at a hotel, her father at the near-by keep (house made to look like a castle, apparently) and the nazi's relentlessly grilling said father for his knowledge about what may or may not be killing their men each night.

I don't like Nazis, so I wasn't too fazed when the "thing" starts killing them.

After a while, I didn't like any of the characters. The father is selfish and whinging. The writer's portrayal of the one woman in the book, is downright stupid (her breasts heave "shamelessly?" when she breaths? when no one is watching? Yeah, whatever)

The daughter is apparently brave enough to sneak into the keep through a grimy tunnel, but quivers at the sight of a rat in broad daylight (there is other stereotyped stuff like that, but I'll spare you) And the guy who built the place doesn't know he can enter it via the tunnels to kill the stupid monster thing?

Then the woman has to try to kill the thing, because the hero is too incapacitated? And then the hero suddenly decides he might be up to it after all, and goes running and climbing high up on the turrets? Sure.

All this in flowery, and at times, monotonous prose. Ugh. As I said, a huge let down. There are no scary passages in this book. And the author doesn't mention the villagers till the end, and then hastily introduces us to illustrate a stupid scene where they all go crazy, apparently.

Save your money. Yes, horror fiction can at times be bad. It can be hackneyed, lurid, strange, and derivative. But this writer commits the worst crime in horror writing; he has written a book that is not scary at all. I wouldn't have been nearly so hard on this book if it wasn't that I wanted a good horror book to curl up by the fire with, and instead I feel I got a classic romance. Great for those who enjoy it, but not what I was looking for. It's not gritty or involving, nor is it interesting or suspenseful. There is no sense of creeping horror (which is what I expected) The monster is badly drawn and just not frightening, imho (this is the image I got of it - I imagined it as grey play doh with those stuck on eyes you see on pet rocks) After I had finished "The Keep," I felt more as if I had just finished a short story or a novella...there's just not that much substance.

My advice? Don't trust your impressions of this particular book ... It kind of turns into a different book. Check it out in a store or library first.

Rating:
Summary: A good read, expected more though.
Review: A friend of mine suggested The Keep and mentioned that it was a horror classic. The Keep takes place in Romania during WWII where German Troops occupy a Keep for use as a lookout point.

The troops discover a hidden room and when that room was opened it unleashed a horrible entity which starts to kill the troops.

It is a good book, but honestly, I expected more out of a "horror classic". I did enjoy it, it had an alright ending and it reads fairly fast. Like I said though, I expected something more from the Keep. Perhaps it just did not live up to the expecations I had previously placed on it.

If you want a decend read, then definately read the Keep.

Rating:
Summary: What's the big deal?
Review: After reading rave reviews of THE KEEP I felt compelled to check it out. Then, inside the book, I found there was a website. After checking out the message board filled with adoring fans, I started the book with high expectations. Perhaps that was the problem. The premise is certainly very original and the new spins on vampire folklore were very creative. I failed to find the story to be at all scary as I did in books like SALEM'S LOT. The mysterious "hero" who spends nearly half of the book racing to get to the keep because time is of the essence,does no more than sit in the bushes and stare at it for several days... I'll give the author one more chance with the next book in this series THE TOMB but I'll be sure to buy it...at a discount.

Rating:
Summary: Nazis unearth something more evil than they were.
Review: The Keep does not seem to be the kind of story to launch a six book narrative cycle, but it did. During the height of the Nazi regime, an outpost awakens an entombed evil. Wilson manages a few surprises and some good scares, but he would go on to write better novels, still I can't not recommend it, considering its importance in the Adversary Cycle.

Rating:
Summary: Now this is storytelling
Review: As one reviewer stated, Wilson actually gets the reader to sympathize with the Nazis. Not an easy task but he pulls it off brilliantly. In fact, the most human character in the book is a German officer, even though he is not the hero. I wont ruin any surprises for the new reader but suffice to say this. This is a novel that reads like a brilliant movie. The words flow off the pages and it is so easy to see everything that happens. The last hundred pages fly by FAST. This was indeed made into a movie but it needs to be done again and done right. If the right director can work this, I see it is a potential masterpiece. A must read.

Rating:
Summary: One to keep
Review: "The Keep", it must be said up front, is one of the most engaging and fast-paced horror novels I have yet read. It would be an injustice to compare it to, say, Stephen King, since the novel already has Wilson's own unqiue voice. However, it's his fourth novel, if I'm correct, and not without its flaws that have obviously been corrected in later stories, most notably the Repairman Jack series.
Wilson acknowledges a debt to Lovecraft, Howard, and Smith, and indeed, "The Keep" brings the best elements of these giants together. The slithering menace and brooding malevolence of Lovecraft, the no-nonsense action and violence of Howard, and the dreamy vistas and horrors of Smith spring to life on every page.
The setting of "The Keep", the Romanian mountain pass, and its mists and village candlelight, is classic and has been unsurpassed in its description and atmosphere. The story itself is highly original, provocative even, since the reader is constantly forced in a dilemma of chosing sides, and is confronted with the notion of good and evil, black and white, opposites that have been bred into us since we have been children. And now, in knowing that the entity that slays German soldiers (the story takes place in the Second World War) is evil itself, but that the German soldiers are another evil personified, the reader feels discomfort: after all, one has to choose sides.
As said, there are a few flaws. "The Keep" is in essence an adventure in the tradition of the above mentioned writers. Sometimes, however, the story and prose halts a bit when it is concerned with the main characters. Even though Wilson has been daring in mingling black and white into grey, characters like Magda and Glenn do stay a bit superficial, only to flare up sometimes in overtly melodramatic behaviour. Of course, love and conflict are the ingredients of great adventure stories, but one just can't escape the notion that Wilson wanted to take the story's conclusion and the development of the characters into a slightly different and less happy direction. For instance, ambigous characters in the end get shoved from the story, while the good characters see the dawn of a new day in true (sugarcandy) Hollywood fashion, even more happy after the harrowing ordeals than before them.
Had Wilson persevered in his ambivalent plot straight towards the end I believe "The Keep" would have been an even greater story, but as it is, it is already a very entertaining tale that any adventure, dark fantasy, or horror fan (excuse my pigeon-holing) shouldn't be without. It's one of those books you take with you to bed at night only to find in the morning that you forgot there was such a thing as morning.

Rating:
Summary: The Keep is a definite KEEPER!!
Review: A great book that I'd recommend to any fan of the horror genre (with a very tiny dash of fantasy thrown in for good measure!!). I loved how Mr. Wilson created a truly original spin on the whole vampire legend and how the mysterious Glen character fit into it (I don't want to spoil "Molasar" for anyone who hasn't read the book yet, but expect some good twists!). I'm always fascinated by credible and creative retellings of famous legends/myths/mysteries.
My ony complaint is Magda - while I have no problem with her as a character, I had a problem with some of her dialogue. Sometimes it bordered on cheesy, the way she would describe her love for Glenn, or the predicament she was in.
Otherwise, this is a great book that I can see myself reading again a couple years down the road. I thank the author for keeping me up late at night watching the shadows for an entire week!

Rating:
Summary: not really scary
Review: This is a dreary novel, thin, neither very thrilling nor scary.

The Keep refers to a mysterious ages-old fortress in the remote Transylvanian Alps, the heartland of Romania's folklore. The purpose of the Keep and it's builders are a secret even to the inhabitants of its neighboring village. Each brick in the Keep carries an inlaid brass and nickel symbol resembling a crucifix. Nobody has been able to spend so much as a night in the Keep - nightmares interrupt sleep. That is, until the Spring of 1941 when the German army, fresh from its victories in Western Europe, marshals its forces for an eastward stab. With the nearby Dinu Pass a likely route for a German advance into Russia, the Keep becomes an obvious staging point, and the book opens with a unit of Wehrmacht troops moving into the silent fortress. Then German soldiers begin to die at the rate of one very night, their throats torn out, one man completely decapitated. Their commander, Captain Woermann is no lover of the Nazi cause, (which is why he's been sent far from combat, to Romania) yet has no choice but to call upon the hated SS. The Wehrmacht soldiers have no love for the SS troops who they feel are over-glorified executioners in dress-gowns - good for nothing but murdering large numbers of unarmed jews, gypsies and other undesirables, while the einzatskommando of the SS look down on their less than racially pure-minded comrades in army gray. When the gory deaths continue, both the SS and the Wehrmacht turn to Theodore Cuza, a crippled Jewish academic who has made study of the Keep his life's work. With Magda, his beautiful yet morose daughter in tow, Cuza is brought to the Keep to reveal its secrets for the Germans. The Keep, instead, reveals the embodiment of its evil to the professor, naming itself to Cuza and offering an alliance of sorts with him against the Germans. Meanwhile, a mysterious stranger, Glen, journeys across the Mediterranean to the Keep. On arrival, he strikes up a relationship with Cuza's daughter, but it's the monstrous resident of the Keep that he's really after. The stage is set for a battle between the enigmatic Glen and the dark resident of the Keep.

...and it's still a horrible novel. F. Paul Wilson doesn't put much effort into writing a scary book. The resident of the keep, shadowy at first, eventaully reveals itself to Cuza. There are hints that the monster is being less-than open, but the "true" story as told by Glen isn't much scarier a revelation. (Wilson merely swaps one not-so-scary tale for another). Both Glen and the evil Molasar's version of their shred story hint at being the source of the vampire legend, but neither version becomes more than a generic derivative of it. Wilson merely swaps one not-so-scary story with another, and neither one is revealed in a way that generates chills. Another problem is the scary parts themselves - there aren't any. German soldiers drop like flies, but there's nothing scary about serial insecticide. The victims themselves seem no more defined than the anonymous soldiers who drop like flies in Chuck Norris movies, and those aren't scary either (unlike the people who repeatedly and compulsively watch them). Hard pressed to advance the plot while the soldiers die but before the climactic battle (and with the monster already revealed), Wilson creates conflict between Cuza (who sides with the demon with the idea that the monster, for its evil, can do the world a favor by turning Nazi Germany into his next feeding ground) and Magda (who trusts Glen's more ominous description of the demon and its motives), but nothing comes out of that. Then there's the final battle - let's call it the anti-climactic battle. Finally, the most critical error - the Nazis are supposed to be scary, but they're not. Wilson hints at the Nazi's atrocities, but the Nazis themselves aren't that scary, obviating the irony of one monster meeting another. With the war in its early stages, the Nazis have just begun their death-campaign , one that will rival for terror any of the vampire legends. The SS commander had been on his way to Ploesti, the site of a massive Romanian petro-refining complex. (The large number of rail-way junctions necessitated by the oil refineries also make the site an ideal one for building a new death camp, one to rival Auschwitz), but there's no hint to the inhumanities the SS commander has seen or contemplates, no hint of irony at the methodical annihilation of SS troops mirroring the death unleashed by those same SS. The Nazi's were the real vampires of Europe, but these blackshirts seem less competent than those you'd see on an episode of "Hogan's Heroes". If you want chills, rent John Carpenter's "Prince of Darkness", but keep this off your shelves.

Rating:
Summary: Wish it had been more
Review: Not bad. Not great either. Some parts were downright weak (I'm thinking here of the scene wherein we are introduced to the spinsterish, bookish, middle-aged heroine. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it blatantly didn't fit here. Methinks the author was under the impression that it was important to work in a description of her as quickly as possible. To be fair, he also worked in a physical description of the male lead as early as possible, and with equal awkwardness.) The ending was kind of... well, without spoiling, the most I can say is that you have seen this ending before, even if you've been living in outer Kurdistan.

This was all the more disappointing as the middle tantalizingly held out the possibility of a really surprising twist, and kept the suspense going. Suspense was definitely the strong point of the novel. The opening scenes, with the 'Something is murdering my men' hook, were quite good. The concept of a battle, not really between good and evil, but in trying to decide which is the lesser of two evils has a lot of real-world resonance.

Overall: Actually, I would recommend this one for a snack, but I'm being harsh with it because it could have been much more.

Rating:
Summary: Exciting and interesting, but not really scary
Review: The first 200 pages were absolutely engrossing. I was gripped by the incredible suspense that Wilson manipulates to amazing effect. The "Something is murdering my men" line is pure horror genius. However, the villain is essentially revealed halfway through the book, and he ceases to be scary anymore because he is now "out of the closet." I will admit that it was still exciting, but it ceased to be a horror novel at that point, and became more of a fantasy/adventure. And the ending did not live up to the hype on the back of the book. A good read overall, but don't expect to be terrified.