It can’t have been Kevin Keating’s ambition for his new novel, The Captive Condition, to be called a “beach read.” The book is influenced by Hawthorne and Poe, by H. P. Lovecraft and William S. Burroughs. Its plot belongs to the Grand Guignol; its humor is of the gallows variety; and its prose smells, as Emerson wrote of Sir Thomas Browne’s Urne-Buriall, “in every word of the sepulchre.” To describe Keating’s style as florid is not only to say that it is “excessively intricate”—which it is, not infrequently—but also to recall the word’s medical definition: “(of a disease or its manifestations) occurring in a fully developed form.” In other words, the guy can do a pretty solid impression of crazy.
Yet the book is, in its odd way, an ideal one to carry along on your next sand-and-surf getaway. It’s chilling enough to keep you cool, deranged and unpredictable enough to keep you entertained. Most important, it can be read with varying levels of mental engagement—as gross-out cartoon, as literary homage, as campus satire, and as an ingenious comment on the way bored young people invent their own legends.
The Captive Condition takes place in a college town, akin to H. P. Lovecraft’s infamous Miskatonic, Rhode Island. Keating, a former boilermaker and a resident of Cleveland, Ohio, transports his readers not to spooky New England but to a spooky industrial graveyard of the Midwest, Normandy Falls. His protagonist and narrator and author—for there is a framing device establishing this novel as a manuscript—is a grad student named Edmund Campion, formerly a pupil at a Jesuit academy located near the book’s fictitious setting. “Like Jonathan Harker to Dracula’s castle,” warns the Jesuit headmaster, with comical heavy-handedness, of young Campion’s decision to attend Normandy College.
What, pray, is so unspeakable, so ghastly, about Normandy Falls? Young Edmund’s headmaster spins a tale right out of Lovecraft about Nathaniel Wakefield, the founder of Normandy College, whose pioneering work in botany and genetics gave way to sinister sexual experiments, possibly also murder, possibly also necrophilia. His crimes, which occurred at a sort of ancestral manor called (no laughter) Twisted Willows, are the town’s Original Sin, the taproot of the pestilence that still plagues it. What Edmund finds in present-day Normandy Falls is more like the landscape of a Daniel Woodrell novel: hicks, moonshine, drugs, adultery, and unsolved mysteries.
Of course, this being a town-and-gown story, the first baddie we encounter is not a meth-addicted hillbilly but rather a teacher, “an associate professor of comparative literature” named Martin Kingsley. (The name is a reference to the novelists Kingsley and Martin Amis, though it is unclear what, if anything, is meant by it.) Married Martin is carrying on with his next-door neighbor, the uneducated but nevertheless sharp Emily Ryan, who is married to an often-absent seaman with the Merchant Marine. She has a pair of “abnormally sinister” twin girls: “Mass murderers of spiders, flies, moths, and the exceptionally brilliant brush-footed butterflies that sailed about the surface of the water, the girls constantly hunted for easy prey. They also proved to be accomplished mimics who delighted in doing impressions of adults,” especially Martin Kingsley.
Sexually adventurous academics, creepy twins, and so forth, may belong squarely to the realm of cliché, but what follows does not. Emily winds up dead under mysterious circumstances. Things become strained between Kingsley and his wife, and this is aggravated not only by their decision to foster the twins but also by Edmund Campion’s determined surveillance campaign: He finds the body before the EMTs do. His academic career in precipitous decline, Campion also goes the way of slumming academics before him and joins the groundskeeping crew at Normandy College. The twist is that the Department of Plant Operations, “known on campus as the Bloated Tick,” is also—just maybe—actually a secret society or cult.
There are also Campion’s vicious ex-girlfriend, Morgan; a restaurant whose head chef traffics in a decoction of psychedelic carrots; and a phantasmagoric “gentleman’s club.” There are mass casualty events. Here, matter and manner are expertly matched. Keating can sound as verbose and stilted as Lovecraft, but he is by far the better writer—he’s doing it on purpose, and it works. His opening salvo is a pitch-perfect riff on the flavor and vocabulary of gothic literature:
Just before daybreak, as the horizon began to pale, I emerged from the woods and plodded across a sloping landscape of false contours. Nothing had distance or scale. The light was flat and gray, and the wind sculpture crusts and cornices of drifting snow quickly transformed the campus quad into an uninhabitable tundra. I felt perfectly alone and anonymous, like a lost Arctic voyager, but even at that early hour, as I battled my way toward the Department of Plant Services, I saw in one of the cracked and filthy windows a yellow light flickering in the darkness and knew the Gonk was waiting for me.
This evokes Lovecraft—with Keating’s “landscape of false contours” and lack of “distance or scale” recalling Lovecraft’s “non-Euclidean geometries”—as well as the arctic hellscapes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. And then we get to that bathetic “Department of Plant Services” and are returned to the banal reality of our young narrator. Keating’s arch, allusive character names — Nathaniel Wakefield is a tribute to Hawthorne and his famous tale “Wakefield”—also provide a comfortable remove from the vivid horrors of The Captive Condition. It is a violent, disturbing book, but it is also a joyful one, a tribute to the pleasures and stylistic tics of an old and unkillably popular genre. One supposes that writers as varied as Hawthorne, Lovecraft, and Stephen King would be proud.
The Captive Condition is, in the final analysis, too funny to quite succeed as a horror novel. It is best read, perhaps, as a shaggy-dog joke at the expense of a familiar species of undergraduate nostalgie de la boue. (One of Edmund’s greatest aspirations is to be given a nickname by his depraved lawn-mowing colleagues.) Call it Blue Velvet syndrome: Spend enough time in a place boring enough, dead enough, and one feels a distinct temptation towish there were horrible things going on beyond closed doors, if only to make life a bit more exciting. If only that guy with the weed whacker were a dangerous cult leader; if only the local bistro chef were an even creepier version of Breaking Bad’s Walter White; if only, if only, your long-winded and supercilious prof were a cold-blooded murderer.
“Readers are at liberty to entertain their doubts,” warns Edmund, introducing his tale. “Regrettably, the best I can do is render one version of that unhappy fiasco, and I must rely on my imperfect memory, a thing that, like the Wakefield River, flows with maddening predictability in one direction, far from its mysterious and secret source.” But that is a wink and a nudge. The mysterious and secret source is imagination itself. At its darkest and best,The Captive Condition is a celebration of just how far it can go.