Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Biography, Literature & Literary studies

THE CAPTIVE CONDITION

Kevin P. Keating

A seemingly idyllic Midwestern college town turns out to be a nexus of horror in this spellbinding novel—emotionally and psychologically complex, at once chilling and deliciously dark—from a thrilling new voice in fiction.

When Emily Ryan is found drowned in the family pool, pumped full of barbiturates and alcohol, a series of events with cataclysmic consequences ensues. Emily's lover, a college professor, finds himself responsible for her twin daughters, whose piercing stares fill him with the guilt and anguish he so desperately tries to hide from his wife. A low-level criminal named The Gonk takes over the cottage of a reclusive elderly artist, complete with graveyard and moonshine still, and devises plans for both. His young apprentice, haunted by inner demons, seeks retribution for the professor's wicked deeds. The town itself, buzzing into decadent life after sundown, traps its inhabitants in patterns of inexplicable behavior all the while drawing them toward a night in which the horror will reach its disturbing and inevitable conclusion. Delving into the deepest recesses of the human capacity for evil, Kevin P. Keating's masterful novel will captivate readers from first to last. After working as a boilermaker in the steel mills in Ohio, Kevin P. Keating became a professor of English and began teaching at Baldwin Wallace University, Cleveland State University, Lorain County Community College, and Lakeland Community College. His essays and stories have appeared in over fifty literary journals, including The Blue Lake Review, The Fifth Street Review, The Mad Hatter's Review, The Avatar Review, The North Coast Review, The Licking River Review, The Red Rock Review, Whiskey Island, Juked, Inertia, Identity Theory, Exquisite Corpse, Wordriver, and many others. His first novel, The Natural Order of Things, published by Vintage as a paperback original, was widely praised, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

Available products
Book Published 2015-07-07 by Vintage/Pantheon

Comments

Haunting and evocative, Keating’s impressive tale of seething hatred and simmering class warfare lurking under a small Midwestern town is lyrical and achingly beautiful. Beware though, there’s a very dark, ferocious heart beating within that will plunge the reader into darkness without warning, like Francis Bacon attacking a Norman Rockwell painting.

People in the know are talking about this new work from Keating, a former steel mill’s boilermaker who became an English professor and literary journal regular until his small-press first novel, The Natural Order of Things, was named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction in 2012. Read more...

Emotionally and psychologically complex, chilling and deliciously dark. Literary Fiction to Look for in 2015.

The comically formal tone of the first two-thirds shows Keating to be an astute student of spooky scene-setters from Edgar Allan Poe to Stephen King to David Lynch. But in many of the final passages, such as a horrific building fire, he proves to be at least their equal. Read more...

Kevin P. Keating is the Edgar Allen Poe of the rust belt, reinvigorating our abandoned factories and blighted warehouses, making that machinery work again to produce ornate, beautifully rendered, modern, gothic horror.

The roots of American fiction run dark and mad, and Kevin Keating’s The Captive Condition is the wicked blossom of that heritage, a rare achievement, bitingly intelligent, masterful in style, and of such horror as to chill the blood. The Captive Condition is an American horror story in the truest sense, a gothic vivisection of town and gown in the blighted Midwest. A frightening, gorgeous, and wickedly funny pre-mortem performed on both academia and the Rust Belt. Lovers of literary darkness should greet this novel and its author with joy and acclaim.

An unforgettable, creepy novel from the dark corners of Kevin P. Keating's imagination. Art and academia come under his scalpel as he dissects the frozen complacency in Normandy Falls, a Rust Belt town populated by more ghosts than people. It's a ‘place of dark and draggling horrors thick with spirits’ and Keating makes the most of this Gothic atmosphere. I was delighted to find the ghost of Poe haunting these pages with madcap glee.