A Real Keeper

My lastest challenge to check of my list is 'A Book By A Female Author', after finishing The Keep, by Jennifer Egan. First of, the title of this post is both true and a pun intended. I had to read The Keep for my speculative fiction class. All the book I have to read for that class can be found here and I highly recommend checking them out since it's a great selection. 

The Keep is a wonderful modern adaptation of the gothic genre. As we all know, authors are influenced by past ideas, writing styles and stories. There are common ideas that pop up all throughout literature such as renewal by water, the power of words, and castle = creepy that we all know. Jennifer Egan makes full use of these ideas to recreate a genre in a more palatable way. Many people don't like gothic literature because it's wordy, far fetched and superstitious but by putting the gothic in the modern day, beside cell phones and prison cells, we rationalize the insanity and view it as someone would have viewed Poe's 'Fall of the House of Usher' in the 1800's: plausible is odd. 

This has been one of the best books I've read in a while. I don't know how to describe the plot with out giving juicy details, or allusions to them, so here is the summary for Barnes and Noble. Take a look and give it a try. Maybe you'll enjoy it as much as I did!

Award-winning author Jennifer Egan brilliantly conjures a world from which escape is impossible and where the keep –the tower, the last stand –is both everything worth protecting and the very thing that must be surrendered in order to survive.

Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a childhood prank, reunite twenty years later to renovate a medieval castle in Eastern Europe. In an environment of extreme paranoia, cut off from the outside world, the men reenact the signal event of their youth, with even more catastrophic results. And as the full horror of their predicament unfolds, a prisoner, in jail for an unnamed crime, recounts an unforgettable story that seamlessly brings the crimes of the past and present into piercing relation.

Take a look and give it a try. Maybe you'll enjoy it as much as I did!