I'm not going to say too much about this book, except that I didn't care enough about the characters to not flip to the end to see what happens. It ended the way I thought it would. This has your typical teen horror movie plot: kill the young, good-looking people off one by one, making each killing more gruesome than the next. Zzzzzzzz.And how did such mutants come to live even in a ghetto where people keep to themselves? You would think that after 20+ years of people in the neighborhood missing...

Updated to 5 stars. The first like 20 pages wasn’t my favorite, but the imagery illicited in this extreme horror was unmatched. I want to read every Keene book now 😂Yikes on so many bikes. This was gross. Vivid and graphic, but ultimately gross. Highly recommend if you like Jack Ketchum’s Dead River series.

At night, there were monsters on the streets.And even worse things in the shadows.Ick! What a macabre freak show. This novel is, quite simply put, a gore-fest. Or a crash course in taking an already terrifying situation, and making it worse. Oh, so much worse.Bloody saliva dripped from his open mouth, leaking around gums that had receded from his black, broken teeth.This is horror stripped down to the bare nuts and bolts. Is it frightening? YesIs it bloody? YesAnd that is the gist of it.The woma...

This flashback to the splatter-punk days of horror novels is a difficult book to compare to other horror novels. Why? Because all I can think of to compare it to are movies. Indeed, it feels like Roger Corman was looking over the author's shoulder and saying "Here's some money. Come back in 15 days and give me a script". Urban Gothic ends up being a bloody mixture of movie ideas: The People Under The Stairs meets The Hills Have Eyes meet every other mutant cannibal movie.Not that this isn't any

I have dreamt about reading this book for months and once I got it I read the sucker in half a day. The good part - it's full of icky, gross horrific stuff that makes horror books fun, the not so good part - I wasn't crazy about it. The character development was shallow and maybe if the six kids who get stuck in the bad part of town at night weren't so stupid and lame, I would have liked the book more. It's hard to relate to someone who acts in a way that gets them in trouble in the first place,...

Brian Keene channels Richard Laymon with Urban Gothic. At one point he even uses Laymon's favourite word as a homage "rump". The thing is, Keene out-Laymons Laymon here. Urban Gothic is a major achievement. The pace is break-neck throughout and you come to care for the characters as they deal with horrors scarcely put to paper. It is ultra-violent; one character dies in a way I have never read before; but shit when you run into a whole subterranean cannibal civilization there is bound to be bloo...

Originally published on Not Now...Mommy's ReadingI just finished Urban Gothic today. It starts off interestingly enough, six teens from the suburbs are leaving a hard core rap concert when they decide to take a detour through the seedier parts of town to score some weed. Of course, teenagers + hard core rap + drugs always equals a bad idea and this is confirmed when the teens end up with a flat tire and are soon approached by another group of teens whose attire of sagging pants, gold chains

Run and don't look back! WELCOME TO PHILADELPHIA'S UNDERGROUND Kerri, Tyler, Stephanie, Brett, Javier and Heather, were getting back from a concert and they have the poor choice of trying to get some weed......bad mistake!Since they got a car break and now they are running for their lives in a macabre house and also in an impossible dark underground where they'll get no mercy or rest, against a lethal mutant society.Since the beginning you'll realize that they aren't fooling around and tha

Straight up the most weird and filthy and disgusting horror novel i have ever read. and i have read a lot. my only complaint, it coulda been about twice as long and it woulda scored higher. characterization was just lacking.

What I like about urban gothic is how they were driving and they end up in this bad part of the neighborhood and there car breaks down and this group of kids come walking up to them and then they all run for it. They run into this abandoned house which they think nobody lives in it until this beast comes out of nowhere and attacks Tyler with a sledge hammer to his head. Then the beast attacks stephanie with the hammer and smashes her skull in. In one part of the book they go through this door an...

I don’ t know why I got so link-happy in the review.How to describe Urban Gothic? In a word: icky.The premise: Six white teens from the suburbs are returning home from a concert when they end up lost in the ghetto of Philadelphia. Their car breaks down in a dangerous neighborhood. When they’re approached by a group of black teens who act in a threatening manner. One of the white teen panics, calls them the ‘n’ word, and runs.Sidebar: This didn’t ring true for me. Believe me when I say that this

Haunted houses litter the horror genre, but URBAN GOTHIC, by Brian Keene, takes the subject and slams it on its head. Ya see, this starts off as if this is your garden-variety haunted house tale. That is until you meet the residents of the "haunted house". Ya see, this house is full of backwooded-hillbilly-cannibals that are thirsty for some fresh meat. (Oh, I forgot to mention that it is located in da hood.) And these BHC are so grotesque from inbreeding and lack of sunlight that they are not s...

Urban Gothic is a full on screaming, head caved in with a hammer, fingers bitten off by a monstrous dwarf kind of horror that is fucking wincingly good horror and a barrel load of fun. This is the Wrong Turn horror films diverted into a suburban street in Philadelphia and landing up in a house that has more doors, passages and secret rooms with murderous psychos than Horror Kill House 16: Revenge of the freaks. If you want to be chased round by an grotesque 7ft monstrosity named Nigel, wielding

My IQ dropped nine points over the course of this novel.

Absolutely off its face nuts, extra star for going the extra mile on how messed up things got. Pure entertainment

"Shit happens."That may be a wee bit of an understatement for the unfortunate group of friends who get trapped in a house filled to the brim with a brood of deformed cannibalistic penis pus dripping, leathery vagina human skin wearing giants and mutant midgets bearing knives, razor sharp teeth and a taste for human flesh. That will teach them to have their car break down in the hood.As a Brian Keene homage to Edward Lee, I went into this one expecting pretty much what I got and honestly, I kind

A splatterpunk gore fest. If you like cheap, cheesy gore filled horror movies, then you should like Urban Gothic. Not the best novel I have read by Brian Keene but nevertheless entertaining and excelling at descriptions of gore. The ending is rather abrupt and anti-climactic after going through the harrowing underground pursuit.

This book is pure grind-core. And I will admit it is not one of my favourite genres. So aside from not liking the subject matter, Keen did a wonderful job with the writing. Maybe that’s why this story turned my stomach. And it’s very rare that a book turns my stomach.So grind-core lovers rejoice and pick this story up and enjoy the gore.

Sometimes you just want to see teenagers getting smashed to a pulp by sledgehammers wielded by grotesque mutant cannibals. Thankfully, Urban Gothic, Brian Keene's loving tribute to extreme horror author Edward Lee, has this in spades. (Urban Gothic is, in fact, dedicated to Lee, who, Keene writes, "once gave me crabs...")The set-up is familiar - a group of whitebread high schoolers are returning from a hardcore rap battle concert when their car breaks down in the middle of a rough inner-city Phi...

Wowza! This was my first Brian Keene book and definitely will be reading more. It was a brutal and gory read packed with a lot of action. I would say it was kind of a Wrong Turn type vibe to it and flew through the pages. This is a book that will keep your attention through every page.