Ugh! There is no originality, no human insight, just gross lazy simplifications about men and women and sex. One prominent weakness is the thoughtless, cliched romance that grows between Magda and that redheaded man - Glenn, at first - a relationship practically clipped with scissors out of a cheap historical or Harlequin romance novel, seemingly inserted to make the novel fit the bestseller mold: She had found the man unattractive in the extreme in addition to his odor and grimy appearance, there was a trace of arrogance and condescension that she found equally offensive. Much, much more.Īnd now The Keep begins to crumble. After finishing the novel, and at various moments throughout, I wished he had emulated those guys more. This is no surprise - The Keep's fictional grimoires, subterranean lairs, manly adventuring, and even some sword-and-sorcerering, find Wilson emulating those classic writers but not slavishly imitating them. There is nothing resembling science fiction in this highly-regarded (going by reviews on Goodreads and Amazon) 'novel of deep horror,' and it's dedicated to pulp horror/fantasy icons Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E.

Paul Wilson, who spent the 1970s writing science fiction tales when not practicing medicine (and apparently has spent the decades since writing a series that began with The Keep). So what do you get when you pit the SS against an unimaginably malevolent supernatural force that, with their stubborn reliance on 'rationality,' they can scarcely comprehend? You get The Keep, the first horror novel from New Jersey physician/author F. Nazism will forever be the benchmark by which all other human evil is measured (well, until something worse comes along).

The keep book f paul wilson