Jack’s Magic Beans is the title story of a small collection by extreme horror writer Brian Keene. A small group of of people are trapped in supermarket walk-in freezer as the world outside goes murderously insane. The big twist? The four people, the only characters not murdering, are on prozac. Prozac might be what keeps them from going mad.
The action starts quickly, with one of those sentences for which authors are always patting themselves on the back: ‘The lettuce started talking to Ben Mahoney halfway through his shift at Save-A-Lot.’ It tells him to curbstomp an old lady, which he does, after which Ben is killed with a broom-handle. ‘Then everybody started dying at once.’ Which doesn’t happen, of course. In this story, people die sequentially; in quick succession, perhaps, but not at the same time.
‘When Jack woke up, people were screaming. Several of them, by the sound.’ Of course there were several of them – hence the plural noun ‘people’! Much of Jack’s Magic Beans is littered with either tautologies like this, or strangely bald, artless descriptions that, much like your new girlfriend’s weird dad, suck the air from the room. “His head had been bashed in by a coffee-maker. Jack knew because the bloody appliance lay next to the corpse.” “Dead bodies littered the floor, sometimes three high. The few areas without corpses were littered with pieces of them.”
By the time the title story was over, I had somewhat acclimatized to the writing, which is short, pulpy, and bland. I sailed through the rest of the collection very quickly. After the first story, there was a a quick romp about a man who is graphically unable to kill himself, although the real horror might be how miserably unhappy he is with his fat wife. Two connected tales after that about a serial killer (“I am an Exit,” and “This is not an Exit),that might be killing to keep the world safe. They’re decent, but the killer sounds a little too much like a comic-book villain to inspire fear or even the cheap heebie-jeebies (‘Indeed, I prefer to act quickly these days. A shot in the dark. A knife to the back. Burn them as they sleep.’)
The final story is a little better. A man and wife (and they’re unhappy. I think Brian Keene would be at his best writing a long-form novel about the horrific breakdown of a marriage, although he’d have to improve his writing) go see a play in which famous dead musicians star as characters from tales by Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, and Robert Chambers. Hearing those famous horror memes (Carcosa, Hyades, The Lake of Hali) is invigorating, but in the end the functional horror is quick and cheap.
In his many notes, Keene writes that most of these stories were older, and that he’d brushed them off for this collection. If that’s so, I’d like to read something recent that he’s really worked on, like Girl on a Glider.
