Ghost Walk by Brian Keene

"[Keene] is the conscience of our times."

Richard Henry has lost his wife and his job. He’s about to lose his home, but he still has to eat. He goes hunting in LeHorn’s Hollow and finds a half-buried stone covered with deeply carved ancient writing he thinks he can sell to a museum for enough money to put his life back on track. When he touches the stone, he wakes something, something inside himself, something beyond time and space, something that hungers for what Richard Henry and every living thing around the burned blight of LeHorn’s Hollow can provide.

LeHorn’s Hollow has been the focus of all manner of evil and fantastic tales going back hundreds of years, even before Europeans came to the area. This Halloween with the opening of the Ghost Walk, Ken Ripple’s charity project to honor his wife Deena who died of cancer, the darkness waiting to gain entry into this universe breaks through and changes everyone and everything it touches.

Author Brian Keene has a way of showing how the horrors and dark secrets of everyday life go hand in hand with ancient evils dredged from the myths and legends of antiquity. In Ghost Walk Keene returns to familiar ground in Pennsylvania, this time to once prosperous York County where he plumbs the deeply hidden shadows of the soul to populate his tale of timeless horror. The people populating Ghost Walk give voice to the anger and disappointment and fears that characterize these unsettled times, adding depth and subtle currents to the story and providing connections to earlier works, like Ghoul. This time Powwow, a cousin to Hoodoo and other magical disciplines, unleashes the horror, feeding on the evil that men do to each other and to themselves. It may be the only power strong enough to beat back the darkness.

Keene is adept at lighting up the dark corners of the human soul and serving up hard truth without stepping outside the context of the story. Ghost Walk proves once again that Brian Keene is not just a horror writer. He is the conscience of our times.

Reviewer: J. M. Cornwell