EDGY AND TRANSGRESSIVE FICTION AND NON-FICTION
Blood Crazy: Aten In Absentia
Blood Crazy Series Book two
MORE MURDER AND MAYHEM WITH YOUR UNFRIENDLY NEIGHBOURHOOD CREOSOTES!
THREE YEARS AGO, EVERYONE OVER THE AGE OF NINETEEN BECAME MURDEROUSLY INSANE.
THEY BEGAN KILLING – ESPECIALLY THEIR OWN CHILDREN.
AND NOW THE NIGHTMARE VISION OF A WORLD DESCENDING INTO BRUTAL VIOLENCE CONTINUES.
Beleaguered settlements of young people fight to stay alive in a world of increasingly scarce food and fuel. Crazed adults still roam a dangerous landscape. They are pathologically hardwired to eradicate young people…
Jack Ranzic returns from a search for supplies to find that his village has been attacked by the Creosotes. His friends lie dead on snow-covered fields. Jack discovers his best friend, Gorron, has survived the carnage yet is suffering from a mystery illness.
Jack is faced with not only escaping the dangerous adults but finding somewhere safe to live in in a perilous world. In an old industrial complex, he encounters an individual that Nick Aten knew well, and who will join him on this savage journey. And another shadowy figure is looking for Jack – an extraordinary survivor from his childhood past.
Jack and his friends will face adventures and danger. They will be besieged by thousands of murderous adults. But it gets worse…the adults are transforming…changing into something utterly different.
AFTER TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS, THE LONG-ANTICIPATED CONTINUATION OF THE BLOOD CRAZY STORY IS HERE!
AND BOOK TWO CONTAINS THE FIRST THREE CHAPTER OF BOOK THREE AS BONUS MATERIAL!
‘I'm a massive fan of post-apocalyptic novels, and Blood Crazy is one of my absolute favourites.’ – Tim Lebbon
‘Blood Crazy is a seminal work that transcends genre and provides an original, fresh, and chilling take on the postapocalyptic theme. A compulsive page-turner and required reading. One of my all-time favourites!’ – Brian Keene
‘Blood Crazy is a truly terrifying look at the generation gap. This is cutting edge dystopian horror at its finest! Simon Clark is a horror legend. His work is essential reading for fans of the genre!’ – Paul Kane
‘The first part of Blood Crazy depicts the horror, the second the isolated communities of survivors, the third part, revelation, explanation and resolution… It's very persuasive and justifies the horror that comes before it. Not that it needs to be justified, but it's even more satisfying when the experience of horror is put to a purpose and not just used for sensationalism.’ – Noel Megahey
More information about the Blood Crazy Series in News
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Blood Crazy
Blood Crazy Series Book One
GET THIS MESSAGE INTO YOUR HEAD. YOU, TOO, HAVE A MONSTER TO KILL. NO, MY FRIEND. WE’RE NOT OUT OF THE WOODS YET.
EXPERIENCE FOR YOURSELF THIS STRIKING NIGHTMARE VISION OF A WORLD DESCENDING INTO BRUTAL VIOLENCE.
EVERYONE OVER THE AGE OF NINETEEN BECOMES MURDEROUSLY INSANE.
THEY BEGIN KILLING – ESPECIALLY THEIR OWN CHILDREN.
Saturday. An ordinary day. People out shopping. Going to the movies. Eating fast-food. Just an ordinary Saturday. Right?
Wrong. Twenty-four hours later, civilization has been torn apart. Adults begin roaming the streets in howling mobs. They have become murderously insane and nobody under the age of nineteen is safe.
Running through the burning ruins of cities is seventeen-year-old Nick Aten. Nick has discovered that his brother has been murdered. And now he is fleeing tens of thousands of homicidally deranged adults who will, if they catch him, tear him apart.
THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS!
NOT ONLY ARE THE ADULTS BLOOD CRAZY…TEENAGER WILL SPILL THE BLOOD OF TEENAGER. THIS IS A NEW WORLD OF TERROR. A NEVERENDING BATTLE TO SURVIVE.
BLOOD CRAZY IS THE POST-APOCALYPTIC HYPERSHOCKER BY ONE OF THE MOST POTENT FORCES IN MODERN HORROR FICTION.
‘Clark is worth seeking out’ — Fear
‘One of the best contemporary horror writers’ — Deathrealm
‘Blood Crazy changed my life. I saw the world differently after reading this novel.’
‘I actually loved Blood Crazy. Not just liked it but loved it.’ — Mark Morris, writing in Beyond
‘One of the greatest horror novels ever written is coming back into print! If you missed it the first time around, you have no excuse to miss it now. I'll never forget how this book made me feel as I closed the last page.’ — Wesley Southard, author of Cruel Summer and Disasterpieces
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Triskaidekaphobia
Whatever he does or doesn’t do, he will automatically seek out the doom which awaits him. There is no escape.
A collection of eight dark short stories containing unsettling themes…
A young man who fears anything associated with the number thirteen contemplates his thirteenth lover with ultimate dread.
A lonely, nervous woman believes that a work colleague is targeting her with obscene phone calls.
Extreme anger-management issues cause a road-rage sufferer to blame anybody but himself for his actions.
A horror writer discovers he no longer has the stomach for his own area of expertise.
A sexually frustrated housewife gets much more than she bargained for from her dream man.
A couple on a ski holiday find their lives upended in a flurry of snow.
In these noirish stories, Roger Keen explores manifold manifestations of dark psychology and behaviour, touching on impulsive violence, amorous transgression and the search for bespoke oblivion as an antidote to the human condition…with a touch of comedy to even out the mix.
‘An excellent piece of storytelling, reminiscent of Roald Dahl at his bleakest in the way it sets up the reader and protagonist. Great fun’ – Peter Tennant (referring to the title story)
'Keen has the ability to draw you in, exploring his own experiences and ideas while at the same time invoking and attacking the reader's own sensibilities, sensitivities and insecurities from every conceivable angle. Once you start on any of these tales, you are no longer on safe ground.' – Noel Megahey, To The Last Page
To find out more about the collection's origins click here
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Man of Letters
A Collection of fourteen psychedelic-themed essays
In his memoir The Mad Artist, Roger Keen details his past psychedelic experiences in the 1970s. As a result of its publication, he became part of the current alternative scene and wrote for magazines and websites, such as Psychedelic Press, The Oak Tree Review, International Times and Reality Sandwich.
His interest in countercultural history, avant-garde and psychedelic cinema, and the psychology of altered states manifests in this collection of essays, which touch on figures such as Thomas De Quincey, Charles Baudelaire, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, William Burroughs, Carlos Castaneda, Timothy Leary, Howard Marks and Will Self.
Using his media background, Keen explores many aspects of left-field cinema in depth, from early surrealism through to the French New Wave and Hollywood depictions of drug trips, to the equivalent movies of the twenty-first century, such as Enter the Void and Midsommar. He cites a long list of notable directors in this area, including Stanley Kubrick, Ken Russell, Roger Corman, David Cronenberg, Terry Gilliam, Jan Švankmajer, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Georges Méliès, Tim Burton, Christopher Nolan, Richard Linklater and Ben Wheatley.
The essays revisit the ‘Alphabet Wood’ hallucination of the Plym Woods in 1975, the mushroom-inspired ‘Cult of the Novel’ messianic quest to turn the world on to ‘reality fiction’, and contain updates to the ‘trippy movie’ coverage, including 2022 films Avatar: The Way of Water and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
'The author looks at subversive cinema and literature, as well as his own writings and experiences to take us on a vicarious trip into the vortex. His breadth of understanding as well as his velvety prose style, make for a fascinating and entertaining read.' — The Kissing Bandit
‘Man of Letters is a showcase of Roger’s talents as a writer, with creative non-fiction, literary criticism and film reviews neatly nestled together, highlighted by his admiration for a lineage of experimental drug writers from the 19th and 20th centuries. […] Much like some of the subjects of his essays – De Quincey, Baudelaire, William Burroughs – Roger has wrestled with the drug experience as a literary aesthetic that is as much visual as it is intellectual, and his writings are all the more intriguing because of it.’ – Robert Dickins, Psychedelic Press Journal XXXIX
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the Empty Chair
In a Bonfire Night vision, television director Steve Penhaligon sees his father, Harry, materialise in a burning chair, and soon afterwards psychotherapist Daniel places an empty chair before Steve, asking him to summon Harry for a reckoning. This uncanny, serendipitous coincidence not only starts Steve on the road to redemption, but also gives him the perfect opening for a film he is formulating, based on his own life. So he deals with the issues of a blighted childhood, a terrible marriage, drink, drugs, anxiety and depression, whilst simultaneously fashioning the material into a screenplay.
The process proves long and epic, taking Steve out of the 1980s and through the ’90s, where his love life and career improve, and he gets to direct an episode of Inspector Morse, before entering the world of feature films. As his initial goals become more palpable, Steve moves towards a reconciliation with Harry and the creation of a celluloid ‘fairytale of psychotherapy’ to reflect the happy event. But if and when he succeeds, how true will his version of his life really be?
Roger Keen’s latest novel is a blending of the genres historiographic metafiction and autofiction. It sets a personal story of psychotherapy and a troublesome father/son relationship against a carefully detailed cultural background involving British film and TV from the 1980s onwards, looking at the changes in media life, the productions, their methods and the technology involved as the Digital Age comes into being. Political change also features, as the reign of Margaret Thatcher peaks and gives way to that of John Major and eventually Tony Blair. As in Roger’s previous books – The Mad Artist and Literary Stalker – the layering of narratives plays an important part, with the act of storytelling taking centre stage.
‘The Empty Chair is a big book, in more ways than one. Above all it’s big in its ambition and most impressively, it’s hugely successful in achieving what it sets out to do.’ — Noel Megahey, To The Last Page
‘[The Empty Chair has] probably the most remarkable ending to any novel that I have ever read, one I could not put down today. So emotional, so spiritual, so utterly Jungian and Proustian.’ — Des Lewis, The Gestalt Real-Time Reviews
‘The subject of dementia is beautifully handled, incorporating that dark humour which tends to be shared between family members in difficult situations, and the inevitable giggling when the alternative is tears...’ — Jules Lucton
More information here: The Empty Chair
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Literary Stalker
IF YOU VALUE YOUR LIFE, DON’T DARE
TO SUGGEST TO NICK CHATTERTON
THAT HE’S NOT A GOOD WRITER!
Nick is embarking on his latest crime/horror novel – a pastiche of the Vincent Price movie Theatre of Blood, where Nick draws up a hit list of his enemies in the writing world and gets his narrator to dispatch them according to the plots of classic crime and horror movies.
Top of the list is a writer who is both a superstar of the horror genre and who in Nick’s reckoning has wronged him the most. Nick first met Hugh Canford-Eversleigh at a reading more than a decade ago and fell madly in love with him, interpreting their encounter as the start of a magnificent affair. Nick’s feelings soon expanded into full-blown obsession, and he stalked Hugh, believing his love would eventually be returned. Nick was repeatedly rebuffed, much to his anger, but it was years later that his rage reached murderous proportions, due to an unexpected and outlandish twist of fate.
Now through his novel, The Facebook Murders, Nick is settling all his old scores, blurring the lines between autobiography and fiction – and with his obsessions reaching fever pitch, blurring the lines between writing about nasty stuff and doing nasty stuff for real.
Set within the milieu of British horror, fantasy and sci-fi writing, Roger Keen’s psychological metacrime thriller continues with the literary experiments of his previous book – the novelistic memoir The Mad Artist – involving self-begetting and nested narratives looping and interfacing with one another. As a horror/crime piece with liberal amounts of violence and multifarious nods to simpatico novels and movies, it plays with ideas of genre, and in the tradition of metafiction, it’s very ‘nudge-wink’, tongue-in-cheek and blackly comic.
“Literary Stalker works wonderfully as a genre thriller with a delightfully absurd comic edge…a clever piece of genre writing, self-aware and self-critical, but uncompromisingly entertaining. If there are any criticisms to be made about the novel, it would take a braver reviewer than me willing to risk pointing them out to the author.” – Noel Megahey, The Digital Fix, Geek Life
‘Suspenseful, impeccably researched, grisly, with judicious helpings of macabre humour, I relished this 'Russian doll' story-within-a-story." — Simon Clark, author of The Night of the Triffids and Vampyrrhic
"This is quite a wickedly written book where at times I just didn’t know if it was a story in a story or actually happening, What I did know was there were some pretty gruesome murders all carried out with total satisfaction for Nick. I really took to this story having seen the original movies when they hit the cinema so it was even easier to imagine the scenes that Nick created in my mind. Believe me they were disturbing the first time round and it didn’t change here. The author uses his obvious love and knowledge of the film industry for this book and it works extremely well." – Susan Hampson, Books From Dawn Till Dusk
"Keen could have taken the easy route and written this as a straightforward novel with a linear narrative, but Keen isn't your average writer, and his use of a story within a story multidimensional narrative is more than just a gimmick, it takes reading experience into a whole new level of cleverness." — Jim Mcleod, Ginger Nuts of Horror
Read an interview with Roger about his film career and how it influenced the novel: The Dorset Book Detective. "I find the best kind of inspiration comes from unexpected things which happen to me in life, weird and uncanny coincidences, and the kind of quirky incidents that sometimes occur that make you say: ‘You just couldn’t make that up."
More information here: Literary Stalker
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