Short Review of Brian Keene - Urban Gothic

Trapped in the wrong part of town when their car breaks down and confronted by a group of, what they believe are gangbangers, six friends decide to seek safety in a seemingly abandoned house. They soon realise their mistake, discovering the house is a filthy hovel with every kind of slime or secretion coating the walls and floors as well as home to a family of cannibalistic mutants, one of whom seems very keen on, quite literally, "f***king-your-brains-out".

This is one of the biggest gross-out books I've seen from a mainstream publisher. Almost every page dips with one bodily excretion/fluid or another. Okay, there might be little in the way of character-building, minimal background and little plot development, but you have to consider the timeline. The whole thing takes less than an evening from start to finish - maybe two hours of story time in total. In that time you would learn much about anyone.

In some ways you might consider it a one-dimensional slime-fest, but in Urban Gothic Brian Keene has served up an incredibly fast paced, adrenaline filled, romp of a novel. And boy, does he know how to disturb you!