Keyhole Factory: A Novel

by William Gillespie

Set in an alternate present that is a slightly, if dangerously, skewed version of our own, Keyhole Factory tracks the interwoven destinies of disparate characters up to and beyond the end of the world-as-we-know-it, brought on by a global super-virus. Beginning with a biting satire of an academic poetry conference, the novel moves on to encompass the stories of a poet-astronaut, a microbiologist contemplating an exit strategy from her high-level job designing biological weapons, a sports-car-driving killer who stages the aesthetic murders of utopian commune-dwellers, and a lone pirate radio disc jockey who may be the last person left alive broadcasting her story to nobody. Allowing form and content to shape each other, William Gillespie pries open the confusion in a moment of total crisis through a narrative web-work technique derived from deranged fiction pioneer Harry Stephen Keeler.

Part imaginative free-for-all and part deeply felt examination of isolation and survival, the individual lives in Keyhole Factory shine through the chaos in all their beauty and tragedy. With his signature wit and originality, Gillespie spins a glittering fever-dream that questions our assumptions about the way we interpret events and our relation to the planet, without ever losing sight of the underlying experience of what it feels like to be a human being in the world we live in today.

Genres: Fiction, Dystopia, Science Fiction

416 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2012

Reviews

[zxvasdf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is it the house of God? You aren't sure, but there's nobody home. There are countless halls of countless doors. You understand these doors to be the souls of every person that has lived. A story lies behind each one. You try the first, the second, and many others. They are all locked, but there are keyholes...

You peer into a keyhole. You've come to the final chapter of mankind. It begins with a bad idea...

You go from keyhole to keyhole, rapt, at that first infection of a bad idea to the final thrashings of a stunned race trying to reconcile language to reality from the throes of solitude. Consensus reality is background noise, always available, not always consciously detected, and its absence is a massive psychic blow. You're left, like these lost people, trying to remember the shape of things, and failing that, dress yourself instead with stillborn inventions of social rules. Eventually words fail to describe. The world is heavy, her vault of lightning struck skies determined to eradicate all memory of yourself.

Each keyhole is a facet of the larger story; everyone is interconnected, though it is not always apparent how at first. There are horrors transformed into beauty by Gillespie's multi-voiced experimental prose. Wildfire vectors. They're so alone, the people that poured from his head onto his pages! He's killed our race, and documented it all, from the quick viral conflagration to the heat it makes of humanity's embers. He's shown us the mind of the world-killer and his many victims for whom hope has become an unflappable, completely re-used idea, because there was nothing else to think.

You're in awe of each unfolding chapter, and watch Gillespie outdo himself with the next one. How the voices must babble in his head! At the end, when you pull yourself from the last keyhole (you didn't think you'd reach it but you have, and find yourself incontrovertibly aged)the voices roar like a river through your thoughts. You wonder about the astronaut and his ex-wife. The man who was bitten in the neck. The driver of fast cars filled with guns. The empty cities slowly transforming into the green of a freshly scrubbed chalkboard. The wildernesses of new contexts. You wonder about the clown and his crystal ball rewinding by the serpent dancer Tina. The man who worries about his records during the end of the world. The oily stains found in every continent, every country, every city, every life, that mindless art of mankind's self-orchestrated demise: the virus.

For you, pulling yourself from the keyhole, it ends with a sigh like the closings of a book's final pages.

[Bruce · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a superb book except that half of it is not readable on my Kindle. The book shouldn't even be sold in ebook format, as the tabular formatting of parts of it, the collage format of some other parts, etc are just not readable.

The half the book that was formatted for an ebook reader is great. Very imaginative and well written.

[Melanie Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW

[Janet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent end-of-the-world experimental literature. Pairs well with Talking Heads.

[Anne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Jim recommended this book to me and it made clear to me that (and I hate to admit this), I just don't like or "get" experimental fiction. Wish I did, kind of....

[Doug · Rating 5 out of 5]

Strange, in the best, most artistic way possible. Definitely an adventure worth taking.

[Cam · Rating 2 out of 5]

Literary sci-fi for fans of poetry, this novel is really just brief glimpses into the lives of a few people in the midst of a catastrophic weaponized virus outbreak that has a 99% mortality rate for humans. Set in a dangerous alternative America where all brakes are off corporations and governments, a lab develops the ultimate viral weapon, and cannot control it (or maybe doesn't want to.) Chaos ensues, and we get to see how a few people experience it - from human test subjects to the lone astronaut returning from Alfa Centauri, broadcasting lonely poetry to an Earth that has disappeared during his expedition to test a planet-buster. Sounds more interesting than it was to read. There were other future-building ideas, but this is mostly only vaguely related stories more often written to explore a poetical or literary idea. Not for everyone, but OK for people approaching sci-fi from the modern literary side.

[Aengus · Rating 3 out of 5]

What begins as a dialogue on poetics quickly turns into a post apocalyptic parable. Multiple narrators tell the stories of their involvement in a n apocalypse caused by a genetically engineered virus. "Keyhole Factory" uses several elements of experimental fiction-oddball page breaks, scraps of poetry, dialogue that has to be read turning the book sideways. Some of it works, some doesn't. I'm not usually a fan of these things (see the tedious "House of Leaves"), but when I could figure out which narrator was speaking it was engaging.. For a smple here's the story of the astronaut/poet lost in space as the earth dies:
http://www.morpheus11.com

[Kathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like "World War Z" in that it is a dystopian story told from multiple voices, though in this case a bioweapon virus is spread by a disgruntled employee. The various storylines interweave, along with the idea of people as viruses, or ideas (good or bad) or even language as viruses or parasites that need people to propagate. Is the only way to kill a virus/bad idea through killing the host/humanity?

[Natasha Hurley-Walker · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Visit from the Goon Squad meets Station Eleven. Good! Would have preferred the connections between stories to be a little more explicit and the writing a shade less pretentious, but really it's just about right for post-literary post-apocalyptic post-modernism :o)

[Caitlin Batstone · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have GOT to stop reading so much dystopian fiction. freaks me out but i keep picking it up. I gave this 3 stars because I respected it, but didn't enjoy it. The experimental format either served no purpose, or was over my head.