Letters From the Labyrinth 474
Good morning. I’m Brian Keene and this is Letters From the Labyrinth — a long-running weekly newsletter for fans, friends, and family that comes out every Sunday morning. I am currently drowning in work, so this will be a short one this week.
Behold the cover to the Italian language translation of NEMESAI — a dark fantasy novella by myself and John Urbancik — which went on sale in Italy last week, published by Plutonia Publications.
It starts with the red dreams. Everyone has them every night. But they’re just a precursor, because something deep within the bowels of the earth has awakened—something we defeated and sent back thousands of years ago. First, there are scouts which decimate cities, and the armies of humanity find their weapons impotent.
Enter Atiya Destine, professional adventurer and mercenary. She and her team will venture deep into the middle of China to follow the scouts back to where they came from: a hole in earth once protected by thousands of warriors awaiting the return of humanity’s Nemesai. Enter Jane, a survivor of the destruction of Shanghai. Enter Stefan, trying to put down the unstoppable Nemesai with his fists.
They’ll enter the tomb of China’s first emperor, untouched for thousands of years, with rivers of mercury and pearls as stars in its sky hiding an underground city. Somewhere in that tomb, Atiya Destine hopes to find a way of driving back the rising army before it’s too late.
Enter the Nemesai. They cannot be stopped.
Italian Language Paperback: Amazon US - Amazon Italy
Italian Language eBook: Kindle US - Kindle Italy
And although it’s been out for a while here in the U.S., in case you missed it or in case you are new to my books:
English Language Paperback: Amazon - B&N - BAM - Waterstones
English Language eBook: Kindle
John and I have talked about maybe writing a sequel at some point, and we even mapped out an opening scene with Atiya gunfighting for money in a teetering-toward-apocalyptic landscape.
This week, for Women In Horror Year, I covered books by Sephera Giron, Sarah Langan, Doris Piserchia, Katherine Silva, Gretchen Felker-Martin, and Judith Sonnet. You can read those (and all the others) via the index for Women In Horror Year.
Manages to get a podcast episode recorded while at StokerCon:
John Langan, Michael Cisco, Tim Waggoner, and Wile E. Young — KEENEVERSATIONS — Episode 47
The "Old Guys" or just "The Guys"? That is the existential question as Brian, Tim Waggoner, John Langan, and Michael Cisco come to grips with where they now find themselves in their careers, and Wile E. Young gets some foreshadowing for what he can expect twenty years from now.
Available on Patreon, Spotify, and Brian Keene dot com. As always, new episodes are paywalled for the first month.
Currently Watching: Disclosure Day, Obsession, From season 4, Widow’s Bay season 1, Across 110th Street ( rewatch), The Last Castle (rewatch), A Force of One (rewatch), Return of the Living Dead (rewatch), and Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.
Currently Reading: Gandolfini: Jim, Tony, and the Life of A Legend by Jason Bailey and Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep by Paul Tremblay
Currently Listening: Love of the Common People by Waylon Jennings, Into the Fire by Bryan Adams, and Just Look Around by Sick of It All.
Given the subject matter and the director, Spielberg’s Disclosure Day was easily one of my most anticipated films this year, which just makes the sting of my vast disappointment in it all the more strong. I’d hoped for a dense, layered, nuanced treatise on UFOlogy, humanity, history, and our place in the universe. Instead, I watched a dull, lifeless, by-the-numbers car chase thriller drowning in “woo” and New Age psychic MacGuffins that finally trots out an alien for the last two minutes of the film. It felt like a rightfully rejected pitch for The X-Files. I loved The X-Files — even the dud seasons. But if I want to watch X-Files, I can go watch X-Files. What i’d hoped for with this film was, sadly, not something it delivered. Which is kind of a metaphor for the frustration myself and my fellow UFOlogists feel regarding the current administration’s “attempts” at “disclosure”. If that is what Spielberg was secretly trying to do, then bravo. But I doubt he was. Okay, but never mind the aliens. Does it work as a human drama? No. Not, it doesn’t. We never get to know these characters for more than a brief one paragraph description. One character feels that she abandoned her father with parkinson’s. Another was going to be a nun. Another used to work for the film’s fictionalized version of Wackenhut / Lockheed / Bigelow / etc all and now he doesn’t. And on and on. Hell, four days later and I can’t even remember any of their names. The movie doesn’t even work as the thriller that it’s supposed to be. Other than one cool moment with an invisible fire engine and a bit that culminates in a scene with two trains, there’s nothing we haven’t seen before. And while the film tries to include real-life sightings and incidents (Nixon at Wright Patterson, Roswell, Kecksburg, the Tic-Tac) there’s very little disclosure (within the fil;m’s reality) of how they all tie together or what it all means.
I dunno. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I thought the film fell flat. It would be one thing had Spielberg swung for the fences and missed. But it feels instead like he bunted and then walked to second base before just shrugging and sitting down.
Obsession, on the other hand, was fantastic. The way it veered from deep character study to devastating brutality in the drop of a hat was unnerving. Fine acting all around, particularly from Inde Navarrette and Curry Barker (in a just world, they’d get Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor nods, and we now live in a world where Sinners won at the Oscars and Daniel Kraus got a Pulitzer Prize for a horror novel, so maybe…)
Backrooms and Obsession have been a wonderful back-to-back box office experience.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a delight! A funny, bizarre flick about a time traveler trying to stop social media and a super-AI from destroying society. The less you know about it, the better. Avoid YouTube recaps and summaries, and just go in cold. If you like surreal science fiction like 12 Monkeys, Brazil, or Time Bandits, then you’ll love this.
Currently deep in edits on the second draft of FALLING ANGELS: THE LABYRINTH Book 4 in the afternoons, and finishing up those commissioned LOST LEVEL stories in the mornings. Still slowly posting classic episodes of THE HORROR SHOW WITH BRIAN KEENE to their new permanent home on my website. And, in between those, working on some other stuff behind the scenes that can’t yet be talked about.
That does it for this week. Thanks for reading. See all of you back here next Sunday.
Thanks for the Disclosure Day heads up. I’m waiting for Supergirl and the End of Oak Street.
It felt like every was too deferential to Spielberg and no one pushed him to go further. “Yes, sir, the big reveal is cool, but, um, ah, what is that happened 30 minutes in? I suspect people are going to want to do exactly what the last line asks, and instead of answers they’ll get credits. And what would the impact be of broadcasting this particular very special guest? What do they have to say and what does the world do about it?”
That’s the movie I wanted to watch.