'Trigger Warnings' – Brian Keene

We’re on what, Week Nine now? Numbers and I have never really got on, I’ll just keep posting about the books as they arrive 😉

For those of you who haven’t come across these posts before, Brian Keene is running a ‘Reader Recession Relief’ programme where every week, a different book of his is made available, for that week, for 99c (or whatever your equivalent is). Everyone wins 😊 I thought it would be fun to read along with each book as they came along, filling in a few gaps and revisiting a few old friends at the same time. This week, we’re all about ‘Trigger Warnings’ and it’s going to be a shorter post than normal. This week hasn’t finished with me yet but I still wanted to post about a book that has a little something in it for everyone…

This incendiary new non-fiction collection by World Horror Grandmaster Award winning author Brian Keene walks the line between profound and profane, poking and prodding everything from pop culture to politics. Whether it’s the downfall of America’s oldest mass-market publisher, the Second Amendment, advice on writing, marriage equality, crazed Internet trolls, writer’s organizations, the death of the Borders retail chain, misogyny in comic books, the history of the horror genre, or the apathy of a fading political system, Brian Keene shares his thoughts in that blunt, sardonic style readers have come to love. TRIGGER WARNINGS includes acclaimed essays, speeches, and articles such as “Roots”, “Seminal Screams”, “The Dorchester Wars”, “More Than Man’s Best Friend”, “Cold Warriors”, “How to Write 80,000 Words in a Weekend”, “Children Playing with Guns”, “On Rape and Repugnance”, and many more. Brian Keene’s TRIGGER WARNINGS. Don’t say you weren't warned.

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned about Brian Keene and his writing, it’s that anything less than his heart and soul on the page isn’t good enough for Keene, no matter what the cost to him personally. You can’t help but respect that (I don’t think I’ve come across anyone so searingly honest) and that feeling of respect only intensified upon reading ‘Trigger Warnings’. I think this is Keene at his most honest yet. He takes absolutely no prisoners here and while I’m not going to really go into the nature of the content (a lot of it is very personal and I think it’s wrong to comment on personal stuff as part of a review), a few things do stand out.

Keene clearly knows his stuff and when he’s talking about the state of publishing, the horror genre, writing as a career and politics, it really feels like it’s coming from a place of real considered thought on the matter. If he’s saying it, you can’t help but listen. And it may just be me but it really feels like some of that honesty, that I mentioned just now, comes from a place of respect as well. The reader doesn’t deserve half a story or argument, that would be wrong, and if you’re reading then you’re clearly up to taking his thoughts on and seeing if they fit you or not. I like that, it feels like there’s a real sense of conversation here (I’m guessing because most of these essays first appeared on Keene’s blog and discussion was encouraged).

The only thing that didn’t work for me was Keene’s habit of taking chunks of old speeches and re-using them in other speeches. I get the approach, if you’re delivering similar topics to different audiences on different dates, but I felt like it didn’t work so well in a book where you would come across these speeches fairly quickly, one after the other. That’s a minor quibble though, it really is. ‘Trigger Warnings’ has given me a lot to think about and was exactly the book I needed this week, delivered in bite sized chunks of essay that I could fit around everything else. And as of right now, it’s only 99c, I’d take advantage of that if I were you…