The Labyrinth

The dead do not rest. The rain does not stop. And behind every locked door in every world there is another door, and behind that one another, on and on without end — because reality is not a place but a Labyrinth, and everything Brian Keene has written is a room inside it. Here the walls between apocalypses are thin, and the same old hungers press against all of them. The corridors branch into distinct cycles. The Rising and City of the Dead give us the risen dead not as the infected but as the possessed — corpses ridden by the Siqqusim and their lord Ob, first among the Thirteen, the outer powers that gnaw at creation from the far side of the doors. Earthworm Gods drowns the world under endless rain and wakes what waits in deep water. The Lost Level strands its wanderers in a pulp wilderness of dinosaurs and dead civilizations with no way home. And the wooded dark of Lehorn's Hollow supplies the sprawl its recurring guide: Levi Stoltzfus, an ex-Amish practitioner of powwow folk magic who walks between worlds to fight what leaks through. The Rising took the Bram Stoker Award for a first novel and set the pattern. The register stays blue-collar and unglamorous — truck stops, coal towns, ordinary people — pressed against an appetite older than God. It is splatter and Pennsylvania-Dutch folklore fused to a Lovecraftian scale, told in a working-man's plain voice. There is no fixed order; the Labyrinth is built to be entered through any door. Begin with The Rising for the throughline and the Thirteen, or with Dark Hollow if you want Levi and the folk-horror path first.