Brian Keene

because he didn't have to.

I know Brian Keane and Christopher Golden kind of had to talk him into it because, and he says this in the introduction to The End of the World As We Know It, that he felt that kind of meant you were, if you were getting a tribute anthology, it meant you were old or dead.

He was kind of resilient, reluctant against that, but he had a change of heart about it and he wanted you know contemporary writers to kind of get in there and i was kind of like i was thinking about that yesterday because i was just like whether you feel old or dead or not um you have to be like carrie just had its 50th anniversary the other year like yeah you gotta understand like stephen king you have shaped modern horror as it is a half century my parents were kids you know when he was he started publishing and I'm in my 40s like you can't expect that to not have left a mark I'm glad he's allowing these to happen I hope there are more of them and if I'm very very lucky I'll get to be part of any more of them but I think it's cool that we're getting to explore these worlds that we grew up with

yeah

If you're enjoying our adventures through speculative fiction, give that like button a little love, subscribe to our channel, and ring that notification bell.

Because unlike Brian Keene's zombies, we promise not to hunt you down if you forget.

Probably.

Probably.

Give me a collapsing civilization, a desperate band of survivors, dwindling supplies, and hordes of flesh-eating monsters, and I'm probably going to be interested.

I don't know what that says about my psychological well-being, but there it is.

And I recently read The Rising, Brian Keene's first novel, and was honestly shocked that I'd somehow gone so long without experiencing it.

I mean, I've read a lot of zombie fiction, and here was this hugely influential novel published all the way back in 2003, and I'd somehow managed to miss it.

The reason I chose this one specifically is cause it's called the Knot Rake and we're going to be talking about the rake in episode four.

We talk about pop culture, um, uh coffee pasta you know creepy pasta monsters because the rake is actually a very new creation it's not something that's been around but it's kind of captivated pop culture but this would be the closest thing to what a rake would be it's like an active you know vicious you know goblin um there is an author that wrote the book ghoul um brian keen which has a thing where basically the ghoul takes up residence under uh a graveyard and basically it's got a it's got a bunch of burrows where from underneath

louisiana swamp monster

yep that that's that's also where the term pale crawler comes from

The, my last literature recommendation is friend of the pod, Nick Mamatas, who has written three amazing works of Lovecraftian horror.

Move Underground, which is about Jack Kerouac encountering horrors beyond our comprehension; The Damned Highway, which he co-wrote with Brian Keene, which is about, um, Hunter S. Thompson; and then I Am Providence, which is a murder mystery set at a Lovecraft convention, which is just very, very darkly funny.

And it's one of those things where everybody, including the victim, is a terrible person, and so everybody has a motivation to kill everybody else.

So it's just great.

It was the day before the shoot, and we needed boxes.

We were ripping apart, uh, Brian Keene's, uh, bookstore, Vortex Books and Comics.

We had to take everything out of this place and then f- you know, fill it with VHS shelves, do all the videotapes, everything, and then shoot the movie, then tear it down again, and then redress it as a store in, like, three days.

It was insanity.

That was months of prep.

Wow.

And then, uh, Brian Keene, our, our producer who ha- owned the store, was, was kind enough to, um, close the store for three days.

So he closed early on a Thursday.

Mm-hmm.

And I wanted to start with Brian Keene and end with Stephen Graham Jones, and then there's a sand- they're the bread, and there's a sandwich in the middle.

Yeah.

And I actually had more than 18 authors originally.