I became aware of Todd Keisling through is novella Scanlines. I’m a fan of stories about haunted/cursed media and ended up liking the novella enough to want to give something else by Keisling a read. I decided on Devil’s Creek being my next read from Keisling because the summary grabbed my interest. I was not disappointed.

Stauford, Kentucky, like many places in the United States, has a history of bigotry, violence, and hypocrisy. The devout Christianity of many of Stauford’s residents is belied by their small-minded and sometimes vicious behavior. Fifteen miles outside of Stauford, near the titular Devil’s Creek, lies Calvary Hill and beneath it a gateway to something dark, otherworldly, and insatiably hungry. Jack returns to Stauford and its surrounds two weeks after the death of his grandmother Imogene, the woman who rescued him and his five siblings from horrific abuse at the hands of his father Jacob Masters and his cult known as The Lord’s Church of Holy Voices. Jack has been forced to confront the horrors of his early childhood in his nightmares many nights since the death of his father and the dissolution of The Lord’s Church of Holy Voices thirty years earlier, but returning to Stauford to deal with his grandmother’s estate will not only force him to confront those past horrors more directly than he has had to for thirty years but also set him on a path of new horrors he could never have predicted, one that will lead him inexorably back to that fowl place below Calvary Hill that haunts his nightmares. Jacob Masters never intended to let death be his end, or let it stop him from claiming Jack and his siblings as the final sacrifice to his god of “old-time religion.”Jacob Masters has returned and for his god he will transform Stauford, and then the rest of the world, into a landscape of flesh, fire, and blood.

It is very easy to see why this novel, begun in 2007 and finished in 2019, received a nomination for the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Award for best novel in 2020. It is tightly plotted with characters that are well-drawn enough to be both distinctive and relatable, and packed to bursting with horrific imagery. The novel begins at full intensity but does not entirely sacrifice character development or plotting for the sake of maintaining that intensity as some horror does. In my opinion, Keisling has skillfully walked the tightrope of creating a horror novel that deals with child abuse, including child sexual abuse, without that particular material feeling gratuitous or exploitative. Having never dealt with such abuse, muyjudgment on that matter may well differ from those who have. I have read other horror novels that deal with such abuse though and some of them felt as though they included such material purely for the sake of revulsion and shock value.

After finishing Devil’s Creek, I am very eager to check out more of Keisling’s work. The connected novella The Final Reconciliation seems like the next bit of Keisling’s work to move on to.

CWs for those who would like them: child abuse, child sexual abuse, blood, death, knife violence, gun violence, fire, insects, sexual content, self-injury, mentions of white supremacist bigotry, one use of the n word, limited descriptions of white supremacist violence