You can’t ever discount the value of a good title. When Brian Keene’s KILL WHITEY hit my radar, I was a bit ambivalent. Keene’s work represents that great unknown that you find a lot of in the books reviewed here: genre titles that often transcend genre. 

So now from Cemetery Dance, we have KILL WHITEY: snazzy title, evocative of a ’70s blaxploitation movie. Even the back of the book had me wondering. That was my mistake. With Keene, you just got to trust him. He always delivers on making his evil interesting and his situations twisted.
 

This book is going to move based on word of mouth — or maybe just a B-movie someone makes out of it. There’s so much more in the pages than the title, and even the synopsis reads like, well, a bad rap video. Larry Gibson falls in love with a stripper named Sondra Belov. Hilarity and the Russian mob ensue. You’re probably still wondering how something you can see in any low-grade flick turns interesting. 
 
The twist is the titular Whitey, crime czar of the Russian mafia. Here’s a hint: He’s the bastard offspring of Rasputin. Any fan of history — or gruesome details — knows that next to Trotsky — who got an ice pick in his skull — the Rasputin whacking makes the top 10 of macabre killings. The guys who tried killing the Mad Monk were old-school thugs, preferring to execute him at dinner. They tried poisoning him with cyanide, but some accounts theorize his body was one of the few who excreted a natural enzyme against it. One of them quickly pulled a pistol and shot him. They left only to find him crawling away in the snow. He was promptly shot four more times. Still, he crawled until they wound up beating him to death and tossing him into the Neva River. When the body was found, the autopsy revealed he actually drowned.
 
Whitey is one of the Mad Monk’s kids and knows the chilling mystery of his invincibility. And then along comes likable Larry Gibson, who forgets the first rule at a strip bar: Never fall in love with the dancers. Now he’s being stalked by a nightmare who cannot die. Very TERMINATOR-esque. 
 
The only drawback of the book — aside from the black character’s dialogue, which made me wince at times — is the ending.  I wanted more, especially out of Sondra, the stripper. In a book with only really three key players, you tend to crave motivations for them. Sondra’s character conceals more than she ever really reveals. Perhaps it’ll be changed when the book goes through its 10th or 12th reprinting, because KILL WHITEY is going to be sought after for years by readers who demand a little more from their authors. —Matt Adder

Buy it at Amazon or Cemetery Dance.
 
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• THE CONQUEROR WORMS by Brian Keene
• DARK HOLLOW by Brian Keene
• DEAD SEA by Brian Keene
• TERMINAL by Brian Keene