A Gathering of CrowsBrian Keene
Leisure Books, July 2010
ISBN: 978-0843960921
Set in a small town in West Virginia, A Gathering of Crows brings back Levi Stozfus, an ex-Amish Hebraic witch featured in Keene’s book Ghost Walk. On his way to Virginia and stopping only for the night in Brinkley Springs, Levi inconveniently finds himself trapped within the borders of the forgettable hamlet as five demonic entities lay siege to the citizenry, ripping apart anyone and everyone they find.
A Gathering of Crows’ whisper thin plot seems more like an appendix for Keene’s burgeoning Labyrinth universe than a stand-alone novel. Filled with alternate earth time lines under attack by The Thirteen (evil forces sworn to destroy God’s creation), the Labyrinth is the Lovecraftian mythos Keene has constructed connecting his various books and the assorted cosmic horrors within. The inter-dimensional conflicts continually spill over into physical reality, unleashing zombies, giant worms, ghouls, and now soul-consuming revenants manifested in a murder of crows.
Keene could potentially profit more from abbreviating his enormous literary output and focusing on developing stories that operate on more than the primal nihilistic levels that he has explored ad infinitum. The notion that these cataclysmic events are happening simply due to vengeful antics of The Thirteen creates a redundancy of back-story that grows tiresome novel after novel.
Keene is somewhat of a name brand in the horror market, making him to some extent review proof. Ultimately, his fans will read him no matter what, and Leisure Fiction will continue to pump out his material. His next book, Entombed, already scheduled to drop in February, is a return to Keene’s zombie wheelhouse, and hopefully a homecoming for the sheer narrative velocity and character development of The Rising.
BRIAN KEENE is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rising, Fear of Gravity, the forthcoming City of the Dead, among other titles. He is also the fiction editor of Horrorfind.com and the popular Best of Horrorfind anthology series.
