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.
Rating:
Summary: Good vs. Evil vs. Evil
Review: This pretty good vampire book poses the question: who are worse, vampires or Nazis. One might argue that the fact that both groups are such classic and obvious bad guys makes the premise too easy and unoriginal. However, it offers the interesting opportunity to compare ancient and modern concepts of evil. And I must say that it was quite satisfying to read about the SS troops soiling their pants with fear. I thought that the first half of the book was the better. Wilson does a good job writing about the Nazi soldiers setting up shop in an apparently unoccupied old keep in Romania, getting pick off one-by-one in particularly grizzly manners, and slowing coming to the unsettling realization that the offenders were not local resistance fighters or other human agents. The second half of the book focuses less on the Germans and more on a Jewish professor and his daughter, who find themselves caught between a rock (the Nazis) and a hard place (the vampire). The second half is marred by mistakes common to horror novels. First, the daughter develops a love interest, which is unnecessary to the story and takes up too much space. The book is a better read without it. (Fortunately, it's easy to skim over that stuff.) Second, Wilson fiddles too much with vampire lore, again unnecessarily. I won't go into the details for fear of giving away too much. It's enough to say that his fiddling extends beyond questions of how well garlic works as a vampire deterrent. In any event, despite its flaws, The Keep is a decent vampire book, which puts it above the vast majority of what's out there these days.
Rating:
Summary: Sheer terror
Review: Wilson is a master at characters and intricate fast paced plots. I read Deep as the Marrow first and know Dr. Wilson through his medical practice. I decided to purchase The Keep based on reviews by readers and was absolutely floored. Wilson's characters are full formed people who the reader can identify with and empathise with. Even the Nazis in this book, are in some ways, sympathetic figures. Something is killing the men... Eery description of the entity and a fantastic villian.. Molasar. I know how it really is spelled but why ruin it for the uninitiated. I could not put this book down and have read 4 other of Wilson's books and recommend all very highly. The Keep is one of the finest novels I have ever read.
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