43. The Keep by F. Paul Wilson

For some reason, I thought this book was a big deal in the Paperbacks from Hell world, but it turns out to get only a passing mention (and a photo of the cover).  I guess it's infamy in the film world is more likely where I heard about it.  The movie adaptation by Ridley Scott was a famous production disaster and bomb, though of course, now somewhat more appreciated for its efforts.  I've seen it and it really is a mess and it's too bad too because the book if done well would make a great movie.

This book has a minor history for me as well.  It was quite hard to find a copy and I finally came across one at The Monkey's Paw in Toronto.  I was pleased because The Monkey's Paw is a unique little used book store that sells more "antiquarian" books and the genre books are extremely curated.  Unfortunately, I was with my sister, a chaos agent and after I had gotten about a quarter of the way through, I somehow lost the book on a trip to an estate sale with her.  I never lose books! It was quite vexing and took me a while to get through it psychologically and several years before I found another copy.  I made sure I was not travelling and kept this one only at home and am quite satisfied that I finished it.

The setup is excellent. A troop of wermacht have been sent to occupy a stone fortress in the remote mountains of Romania.  It is built into such a steep environment, across a gorge from a small village, that it only gets a few hours of sunlight a day.  Even more odd, it is in pristine condition and utterly abandoned.  Captain Klaus Woermann, an old soldier whose loyalty is to the army and Germany and not to the Nazis, is growing sick of the war and questioning their leadership. When he arrives, the caretakers warn him that nobody is allowed in the keep.  Things go bad fast as each night, one of his men is brutally murdered by something that seems to walk through walls.  After much agonizing, he sends a request to Germany to be allowed to leave, but instead they send an SS Major Kaempffer, an old colleague (and adversary because Woermann saw that he was a coward) from the previous war.  Kaempffer is on his way to Romania to set up a big new location for a concentration camp, a significant step up in his career but he first has to deal with this issue in the keep to demonstrate to his superiors that he is competent.

So we have an old German soldier with some honour squaring off against a cowardly and sadistic SS officer in an ancient redoubt with some supernatural power that is killing them all.  It is very satisfying to watch the Nazis go from sneering, sadistic arrogance to shit in your pants fear (and getting their throats ripped out).  As an aside, this book was written in 1981 when I was an adolescent and while there was much anti-Semitism back then, it was an era where WWII and the evil of the Nazis was still very present in Canadian culture.  I think part of this is why so many older people were (and are) still sympathetic to Israel and buying into their propaganda that their behaviour towards the Palestinians is somehow justified.

The Nazis learn of a scholar in Bucharest who may be able to decipher the writing scrawled in Nazi blood on the wall and the history of the keep in general.  He is super sick with some degenerative nerve disease and so his beautiful and resourceful daughter also has to come along. They start to figure out what is going on and try and use this against the Nazis.  The father also wants his daughter to flee out of Romania because he knows what is coming, but she refuses out of love and loyalty to him. Finally, we get brief snippets of a guy who was working as a fisherman in Greece when he suddenly has to leave, digs up a long package and a money belt full of various gold pieces and starts making his way across war-torn Europe to Romania.  All these exciting elements come together in an epic clash that will decide the future of mankind!

I quite enjoyed The Keep, especially the first 3/4.  It's always tough to end these sorts of supernatural books, because we now have so many narratives in all media of some great evil that has to be put down.  The Nazis and the context of being in Romania in 1941 make it quite interesting.  There are enough details and history to make it all fit well.  The ending was well done but didn't totally rejoice me as it possibly could have.  Overall, it's a well-constructed 1980s page-turning horror adventure.