Brian Keene is an amazing horror novelist, especially if you like splatterpunk. Urban Gothic was pretty great, I finished it in two days.
After leaving a hip-hop concert in Philadelphia, three teenage girls and their boyfriends drive through a derelict low-income neighborhood searching for drug dealers who’ll sell them a bag of weed. Their car breaks down, and while trying to fix it, the teens are frightened off by a group of scary-looking black teens approaching their vehicle (later on, we learn the kids only wanted to help). Desperate to get away, the teens run into a deserted, boarded-up house.
Immediately after the group of white kids enters the house, they realize they’re trapped inside and there’s no way out. Then, a filthy, deformed, impossibly enormous man confronts them wearing a diaper made from trash bags and slashes one of the teens right on the spot. Chaos erupts, and all the teens run off in different directions to save themselves.
In a nearby house right down the street from the boarded-up house of horrors, an old man named Perry watches the scene unfold. He invites the group of black teens into his home, where Perry and the teens devise a plan to enter the house of horrors and rescue the white kids. Apparently, nobody has ever made it out of the horror house alive, and it’s time to stop the madness.
Inside the “Urban Gothic” house, each of the five remaining teens are literally running for their lives. It turns out that the house is inhabited by a large family comprised of terrifying, deformed creatures who have never seen the light of day, because they all live in the sewage under the house.
Brian Keene writes some of the greatest splatterpunk I’ve ever read. The story of Urban Gothic takes place in one evening, so the novel is incredibly fast-paced and addicting as a result.
The book is super disgusting. You can’t help but put yourself in the teens’ shoes and think about how you would react in their situation when it came to survival. The characters did a pretty good job of defending themselves in this novel.
I think my favorite part of Urban Gothic was when one of the girls battled deformed baby creatures in the “nursery.” I loved Keene’s descriptions of all the different freaks in the house. Urban Gothic is splatterpunk at its finest!
I also read and reviewed Castaways by Brian Keene.
Other books by Brian Keene include:
- Nemesai (2020) (with John Urbancik)
- Suburban Gothic (2021) (with Bryan Smith)
- Things Left Behind (2023) (with Mary SanGiovanni)
- Island of the Dead (2024)
Do you like the splatterpunk horror sub-genre, or do you recommend any other titles by Brian Keene?
Last Updated on November 16, 2025 by Sarah Ann
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