I have no idea where I read about this book, but I’ve been intending to read it for ages. I went to the library yesterday, ostensibly just to return Dark Shadows (which I realized once I got there I had left at the apartment), and I got maybe eleven books, which is pretty restrained, and out of all of them, I decided to read The Keep first.
I didn’t like it.
I really thought I must have missed something.
You know how sometimes you’ll watch a commercial, and you just can’t figure it out? The commercial ends, and you’re staring at the screen wondering what the point of that was, how that could possibly make anyone consider using the advertised product, when it doesn’t even make sense? And you think and think and think but you can’t figure out what you missed in that commercial that would have made it make sense? And you start having a hissy, and you’re going on and on about how stupid and pointless that commercial was, and the person next to you is all, Dude, chill out, that’s a totally normal commercial. And then after you’ve been breathing into a paper bag for a few minutes to help yourself relax, you ask in a quiet but vehement voice WHAT WAS THE POINT OF THAT COMMERCIAL? WHAT DID I MISS? and the person next to you explains it, and no, you were completely right, there wasn’t anything more to that commercial, you weren’t missing anything, it was exactly what it seemed to be.
This is what we call Not aimed at you. And that was The Keep. It was just not aimed at me.
It’s about a guy in prison writing about two cousins with a Past working together to restore an old castle with a keep and scary tunnels. Things are turbulent. Questions of freedom and imprisonment. It sounded so good when I read about it, wherever I read about it, and I was very excited that it was in at the library, and all the time it was never aimed at me in the first place.
Thus, no review I give will really be of any value, because the book was just so blatantly not aimed at me. Everyone else, please feel free to enjoy it. I was mightily unimpressed by the book generally and by all of the characters particularly, and I didn’t care at all what happened to any of them, and if Danny and Howie and Ray and Holly and Mick and everyone had all just fallen off a cliff, I would not have felt any more fulfilled when I reached the end than I did when I reached the real end with all the stuff that actually happened.
So oh well.