Triskaidekaphobia - Roger Keen

Roger Keen's writing has a way of getting under your skin. That's undoubtedly down to the nature of the approach that can be seen in the hugely ambitious semi-autobiographical and metafiction works The Mad Artist and The Empty Chair, books that are practically designed to enfold and wrap you in their rich complexity, but there are similar rewards to be found in the dark imaginings of genre work like Literary Stalker. A collection of some of his short stories confirms the impression that no matter what style he works in, Keen has the ability to draw you in, exploring his own experiences and ideas while at the same time invoking and attacking the reader's own sensibilities, sensitivities and insecurities from every conceivable angle. Once you start on any of these tales, you are no longer on safe ground.

So much so that I confess that halfway through the first title story I immediately checked the contents page to see if Triskaidekaphobia (the fear of the number 13) contained thirteen stories. It doesn't, only eight, but is this a sign of triskaidekaphobia that the author is afraid to include that many stories, or is it just Keen playing with your/my head? On the other hand, each of the eight stories that make up the collection do indeed add up to something more than the number or sum of their parts. As the author notes in his introduction, these early pieces are all of their time, touching on and related to subjects that we are familiar with and can respond to. Or get phobic about.

One thing that the short stories have in common with the author's longer metafictional and semi-autobiographical writing is how he takes an experience and imagines the possibilities of where it could go. This of course is what every author does when writing based on experience, but the results in Keen's stories are often unforeseen and go to unexpected lengths. Sure, in the title story we know the narrator's fear of 13 is going to end badly - as he indeed warns us at the start - when he embarks on an affair with his thirteenth girlfriend, but a vision of an attractive woman runner in 'The Runner' indulges in a similar flight of imagination to a completely different response that doesn't stray beyond poetic reverie. Another completely different spin on this can be found in 'The Photographer' where a frustrated housewife tries to convert her fantasies into reality only to be confronted with an unpalatable truth.

That idea is put into words at the beginning of 'North', "When I was a child I used to have incredible dreams of escape", and as an adult and a writer, there is a more measured (though not always cautious) sense of knowing when to hold back and when to let go in "the pursuance and greater discovery of such places". It's about letting the imagination take you to places that expand the experience of living beyond the lived reality, and figuratively making it happen. Even if it only takes place in your head, on paper, in a dream, on a drug or alcohol enhanced version of reality, it's still a valid personal experience. "I was trying to make my dreams become real - and who wouldn't want to do that?" That same impulse is pushed to the limit of road rage in 'All The King's Horses' (which ends on a cracking punchline), and in 'Real Horror', a writer of horror fiction is forced to confront the reality of the violence and gore he writes about when he experiences it in real life.

But let's not be too proscriptive. With that mindset these stories could go anywhere, and they do. The metafiction element turns up inevitably in 'Caught in the Labyrinth', where a lonely young woman being hit on by the unwelcome advances of a colleague tries to write a story about a lonely young woman projecting her fears/desires onto paper towards her teddy bear, She does so in a way that she hopes isn't too autobiographical, but in the process only manages to reveal even more about herself than she intended, the story cleverly looking in on the nature and pitfalls of writing. That's not the entire point of this or any of the stories either, just another means of exploring all the possibilities. There are other layers to be explored here, many of the stories for example also dealing with desire between men and women, which can be seen on a more general level of vicariously exploring the workings of the mind, often with a focus on how it reacts to pressure and stimulus. "A flirt with the nebulous edge of experience", as one character in 'Whiteout' describes his impulse to simultaneously push physical boundaries in response to extreme mental stress. 

Evidently this collection of short stories may not be as ambitious or as fascinating as the author's full-length works (a teaser opening chapter of the remarkable The Empty Chair is included here), but they can also be seen as developing ideas and themes that are calling out for greater expansion and exploration. That would be successfully achieved in the author's subsequent longer and more ambitious works, but each of these early stories in this diverse collection display that same highly creative, imaginative and distinctive voice and are entertaining in their own right.

Reading notes: Triskaidekaphobia and Other Noir Tales by Roger Keen is published under his own Darkness Visible Publishing imprint. As usual, I should offer full disclosure that I have met with Roger on several occasions while writing for DVD Times and The Digital Fix, and we still occasionally correspond via email. Apparently an excerpt from one of my reviews appears on the back of the paperback edition of Triskaidekaphobia, but I read a copy of the book purchased from Amazon in Kindle format. I was not asked to write a review of this collection, but bought it, read it and reviewed it purely for my own pleasure.