2009 TBR Challenge for October: The Keep by F. Paul Wilson

October Challenge: Horror

It's April 1941 SS Officer Erich Kaempffer is a man on his way up. He's preparing to begin a plum assignment setting up a new death camp in Ploiesti, Romania. After serving for a year at Auschwitz he feels confident that he's the right man to increase efficiency by building the new camp and he's looking forward to the task.

Unfortunatley for Officer Kaempffer he has made enemies on his quick rise through the ranks of the SS and there are those who would love to see him fail. As a result he is given a mission to complete before going to Ploiesti. He must take two squads of his einsatzkommandos and check on an Army unit sent to guard an isolated pass in the Transylvanian alps. The unit was sent to occupy an ancient stone structure overlooking the pass, which the locals refer to as the Keep. It should have been a routine, even boring, assignment but within a week of their arrival their leader, Captain Klaus Woermann, sent a disturbing message to headquarters. It read only:

Request immediate relocation.
Something is murdering my men.

Kaempffer has a negative history with the Army officer and looks forward to succeeding where Woermann has apparently failed. However, when he arrives at the Keep he finds that something is indeed killing the men and it does not seem to be human. Rumors are running rampant that the killer is a vampire. The already desperate situation is made worse by the fact that the two officers are barely able to tolerate each other and there is almost no concrete information available about the history of the Keep.

The local innkeeper finally suggests that they bring in Professor Theodor Cuza, a scholar who has spent time at the Keep and knows the history of the region. Woermann enjoys the irony of the fact that their only hope is a Jewish professor, but he worries about what Kaempffer will do if Cuza is unable to provide the answers they need. He's especially concerned about the fact that Cuza is in such poor health that his daughter Magda must travel with him. The Keep is a military barracks and even under the best of circumstances it's no place for a lone woman. Tensions are already incredibly high in the Keep and the two newest residents may make the complex situation impossible to control.

Unbeknownst to the people at the Keep there is one more player in the unfolding drama. A man with red hair and blue eyes knows what has awakened in the Keep. He'll travel thousands of miles to meet the destiny he knows awaits him, and possibly more that he does not expect. The question is whether he'll arrive before it's too late to prevent the evil from spreading beyond the pass.



I went through a Steven King phase in high school, but since then I've read very little horror, so I initially thought about selecting a random book from my TBR for this month. Then I remembered that I'd gotten several recommendations over the years for F. Paul Wilson's Repairman Jack series and decided to finally give it a try. The Repairman Jack books are an offshot of a series known as The Adversary Cycle, and The Keep is the first book in that series so I decided to start there.

I felt that The Keep did what I think a good horror novel should do. It created atmosphere, suspense and a sense of the creepy and made me want to keep reading to find out what would happen. I liked the idea of 20th Century evil pitted against much older evil and the ways that evil finds to manipulate the humans for it's own purposes. Unfortunatley some of the characterization wasn't as good as I would have liked. A couple of the key characters fell flat and there's a romantic subplot that didn't work as well as it needed to. One other thing worth noting is that the body count remains fairly low until near the end of the book. That was fine with me since I don't like a lot of blood and gore, but I know some horror fans don't agree and would likely find this disappointing.

Grade: B

Will I read the next book in the series?: Yes. I found this book interesting enough to be curious about where the story goes next. Also, the next book in The Adversary Cycle is The Tomb, which is where Repairman Jack makes his first appearance.