To The Last Page

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) conta...

As he demonstrated in his previous novel  Literary Stalker , Roger Keen is a master of the metafiction, using a complex narrative structure to delve more deeply into underlying and often troubling mental processes that can be otherwise difficult to unravel. He employs that device again to remarkable effect in The Empty Chair , blurring the lines between autobiography and fiction in a similar way to his first novel The Mad Artist , exploring individual hopes and aspirations running up against social conventions, artistic conservatism and impossible family expectations. Keen takes that one or two steps further here, merging reality with fantasy in an ambitious unconventional approach to narrative that is the only way of encompassing the range and depth of a subject that has very real and meaningful human concerns. It's certainly a clever idea to filter the majority of those concerns though the semi-fictional/semi-autobiographical character of Steve Penhaligon, working in the 1980s fo...

You shouldn’t ever confuse an author with his characters, otherwise I imagine you would find Stephen King a very disturbed individual and, judging by how many serial killers operate in the crime fiction genre, you’d need to be wary about attending too many writing festivals, conventions and book signings. I’d even give J K Rowling a wide berth, just to be on the safe side. I’m fairly sure however that Roger Keen is a nice guy, but you can never know for certain. I mean, how can you really know what goes on in the mind of a writer who imagines indulging in the stalking and brutal murder of critics, so-called friends and literary associates who he believes have ignored and slighted him over the years? Someone who not only imagines killing people in meticulous detail, but who seems to have put an awful lot of research into it. All for the sake of literature of course. Nick Chatterton (or should that be Roger Keen) not only indulges in such fantasies in Literary Stalker but he also sets a...

I should mention upfront that Roger Keen is a friend – at least in the Facebook sense if not of the "inner circle" type that he refers to in his book – and I have met him a couple of times. This is not as an excuse for giving his book a favourable review, which it richly deserves on its own merits (I purchased it myself and didn't not receive it as a gift or with the expectation of a review), but to point out that Roger, as anyone who knows him or has perhaps even read one of his film reviews on the internet will testify, is ever inch the perfect gentleman. Quiet, polite, soft-spoken, gracious and congenial with an intelligent and positive outlook, reluctant to criticise when there are favourable points that can be made – Roger is nothing, in other words, like the paranoid, LSD-tripping, dope-smoking, alcohol-fuelled aggressive, surrealist, hippy dopehead artist of the 1970s that he writes about in The Mad Artist , a fictionalised memoir of a past that I suspect that few ...