Rating: 2 1/2 stars

Six friends returning home from a hip-hop concert, take a detour to Camden to score a little weed. A few wrong turns later they find themselves right in the middle of a neighborhood they have no business being in; especially after dark. Just as they realize their directional faux pas and possible threat to their well-being, the car breaks down.

Six teenagers, six cell phones and not one ounce of common sense among them; nobody calls for help. Suddenly a group of intimidating boys approach them, inquiring at to their reasons for being there. Fearing the worst, the six run towards an abandoned house; never hearing the pleas for them not to go inside.

Once inside, the teens find themselves enveloped in complete darkness with no way out. While arguing over what to do next, the kids meet their host; a giant, vile smelling, cannibalistic, mutant –and there’s more where he came from. What ensues is a marathon of attempted escape through a pitch black house, whose exits have all been bricked over. Throughout the book, the reader is bombarded with explicit descriptions of each monstrously misshapen being. Continued attempts to assault the senses using narratives of infected penises dripping pus and yellow, liquefied feces spraying the faces of the pursued are also included for your reading pleasure.

Anybody picking up a Brian Keene book isn’t looking for depth or content, they’re looking for blood and splatter and lots of it. Not one to keep his readers waiting, Keene had the first head bashed in by page 20, with the promise of more to come. The author’s writing style is all surface, never wasting time with character development – why bother when they’re simply bait for whatever murderous ghoul is waiting in the dark.

When reading a splatter book, you have to take it on its own merits; you either like them or you don’t—and for me, this one just didn’t hold up. However, the Keene fan is a different breed. Keene fans catch the hidden nuances that are woven throughout many of Keene's books; the subtle references to his other work, as well as that of classic authors such as Lovecraft. However, for a non-Keene reader, Urban Gothic will just feel like a never-ending, gratuitous gore-fest.
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Pub. Date: July 2009
Publisher: Dorchester Publishing Company, Incorporated
ISBN-13: 9780843960907
ISBN: 0843960906