I didn’t know who this Stephen King guy was, but I knew right then that he was one of us. What really stuck out to me was the scene in Mark, the kid’s, room and he has all those Aurora model horror kits - Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Wolfman - and I built those same models as a kid. I remember reading it and thinking ‘This sounds like a vampire, but they’re going to cop out at the end.’ And then it turns out to be a vampire.

“They didn’t mention it was horror on the jacket copy, and you didn’t see the word ‘vampire’ anywhere, so I thought it sounded like an interesting mystery with some darker elements. “I got it through the Literary Guild,” he says, naming the massive mail order book club that circulated hundreds of thousands of copies of mostly mainstream fiction to American readers. He just didn’t see a big enough market for it. Paul Wilson had already written a handful of sci-fi novels, but his first love was horror. Painted in broad strokes on a big canvas, The Keep fits comfortably into a decade that would make literary rock stars out of authors like Anne Rice and Stephen King.Īuthor F.

A swaggering, World War II adventure story full of warring immortals, sneering Gestapo officers, magic swords, and Weighty Questions about Faith, The Keep arrived as the smaller novels of the Seventies started giving way to the massive blockbusters of the Eighties. The Tribe is a modern retelling of the legend of the Golem of Prague, whereas Wilson’s The Keep deals with Judaism more obliquely and in the guise of the big, fat, international thrillers authors like Robert Ludlum were popularizing in the early Eighties. Later books like Red Devil (1989) and The Gilgul (1990) used Jewish folklore and religious iconography to tell horror stories, but the genre made its bow at the height of the Catholic horror boom, courtesy of Bari Wood’s The Tribe (1981) and F.

The keep book f paul wilson