Onyx reviews: Terminal by Brian Keene

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 07/01/2005

Originally published in Insidious Reflections Issue Three

What’s the worst news you can imagine learning? That your aspirations to flee your moribund hometown and experience an adventure-filled life will never come to fruition? That you’re stuck in a dead-end foundry job, the only gig in town? That you’re doomed to an unremarkable, lifelong struggle to scrape by, forever deciding which bills get paid this month and which ones you can let slide until the next?

By the age of twenty-five, Tommy O’Brien has accepted this as his lot. However, fate isn’t content to permit him merely a life of quiet desperation. Because he has no health insurance, he’s put off seeing the doctor about the headaches and weight loss he’s been suffering. When he finally does go, he learns that he has terminal cancer. The measure of his unremarkable life now has a number: one to three months.

Ever the joker, fate delivers one final, crushing blow: Tommy is laid off from the dead-end job that was likely the source of his illness. He’s so overwhelmed by these revelations that he can’t find a way to tell his wife, Michelle. They have a young son—T.J.—and now it looks he’s going to go out not with a bang but a whimper. He’s going to die young and not leave behind a good-looking corpse, just a mountain of debt and no way to provide for his family.

The first section of the book has little action, but a great deal of characterization. Readers commiserate with Tommy as he tries to come to terms with the freight train fate has tossed in his path. He goes through the classic stages of grief: his rage at this undeserved fate, disbelief, and a desperate search for unlikely (and unaffordable) treatments, all the while protecting his wife from the news. The chapter where he “reconnects” with his religious past is so profane and sacrilegious that it is laugh-out-loud funny. It might be tempting to draw parallels between Tommy and his creator, based on Keene’s public persona and published rants.

Tommy goes so far as to plan his own funeral, the cheapest arrangements he can manage. In a very human moment, he tortures himself by itemizing the things he’s going to miss. He’ll never see the next X-Men film, never hear a new Wu Tang Clan album, never find out what his wife got him for Christmas, because he’s all out of Christmases, and birthdays, too—including those of his young son.

Some of the dumbest decisions in history were made in a bar over pitchers of beer. Tommy realizes he has nothing to lose. The only solution he can come up with that will allow him to leave a feeble legacy for his family is to rob a bank. His friends John and Sherm agree to help for their own reasons. Each will get a cut of the money, but the major beneficiaries are to be Michelle and Tommy, Jr.
Sherm has connections in the city where they can buy guns, using up the last of Tommy’s meager savings. Both John and Tommy admit that, at times, they’re afraid of their friend Sherm. The people he introduces them to on this hair-raising expedition reinforce their intuition.

Within minutes of the heist’s onset, their well-laid plans go awry. The armed trio ends up trapped with a group of hostages and little hope for a clean getaway. Sherm gets revved up and crazy. When the shooting starts, Tommy realizes the folly of tempting fate by thinking things couldn’t possibly get any worse.

Stockholm Syndrome sets in as the robbers, bank employees and customers form new relationships under the stress of a hostage situation. Sherm is the loose canon, whereas Tommy is the sympathetic voice of calm logic. This section of the book might remind readers of Stephen King’s novella “The Mist,” complete with a Mother Carmody-like character whose religious zealotry polarizes the group.

When one of the hostages, a young boy, claims to have healing touch (this is revealed on the back cover), there might be a way out for Tommy after all. However, Keene uses this subtle Green Mile-esque supernatural element in an unexpected way, eschewing the predictable in favor of a resolution that reinforces his theme that dying isn’t always the worst fate for a man.

Terminal is a mature, assured work by a writer who has found his voice. It is a strong voice, unflinching and true. We never for a moment doubt who Tommy O’Brien is, and we empathize with his plight even as we cringe at his choices. Readers who have come to know Keene through his zombie novels may bemoan the lack of horror tropes in this novel, but not this reviewer. Real life, as Keene so tellingly depicts, delivers worse horrors than any scary monsters can.