Jarret Keene is an assistant professor of English at UNLV, where he teaches fiction writing, American literature, and graphic-novel history. He edits the Las Vegas Writes anthology series for Nevada Humanities/Huntington Press and is the author of the dystopian novel Hammer of the Dogs as well as the middle-grade Decide and Survive nonfiction series (The Attack on Pearl Harbor, The Battle of Gettysburg) and Heroes of World War II: 25 True Stories of Unsung Heroes. In 2024 Wolfpack Publishing released his Kid Crimson westerns, and Dark Wolf followed with his 2025 story collection Gateways to Annihilation. Keene has been interviewed in Writer’s Digest, Publishers Weekly, EcoTheo Review, LibraryThing, Black Fox Literary Magazine, and on Coast to Coast AM.
Wanting to learn more about his career as well as his latest book, Gateways to Annihilation, I was able to interview Keene for ScifiPulse.
You can learn more about Keene by visiting his homepage.
Jarret Keene, Ph.D.
November 15, 2023
(Becca Schwartz, UNLV)
Nicholas Yanes: Growing up, what were some of the stories you loved? Are there any you still enjoy revisiting?
Jarret Keene: As a child, I learned to read with secondhand comic books, mostly reprinted stories by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko. I still collect the work Ditko did for Charlton Comics in the 1960s and ’70s, all those horror-suspense titles like Scary Tales, The Many Ghosts of Doctor Graves, and Ghost Manor. I also cherish his giant-ape series Konga, based on the 1961 British monster flick. Ditko’s storytelling is eerie and surprising. Even as a kid, I sensed a consistent imagination pushing the characters through a gauntlet of unsettling thrills.
Sometimes things end well; sometimes they don’t. Yet there’s never any sadism or nihilism. I miss that mode of storytelling. It’s something I gravitate toward in stories I read and the ones I tell. I was curious to see if I might avoid the now-trendy despair that tends to flatten the horror genre for me as a reader, a sensibility shaped by Ditko and other comic storytellers from my youth who, no surprise, I still enjoy revisiting today.
Yanes: When did you realize that creativity would be a cornerstone of your career? Was there a specific moment that crystallized this for you?
Keene: I’m lucky to have wonderful parents who nurtured my creativity. I was always drawing, writing, and performing music. The crystalline moment was at twelve, when I published my first essay in a National Junior Honor Society magazine. Receiving the publication in the mail along with a small check was enough validation to put me on a literary path.
I also placed my poems in my high school literary journal, which I helped edit. As a college English major, I joined the masthead for the student-lit magazine, publishing the creative works of my classmates. The combination of these moments sealed my fate, making creativity a cornerstone of my life and launching a career-inspiring love affair with writing.
Yanes: While you’re not in a creative writing department, you do teach fiction writing in UNLV’s Department of English. What advice do you have for people considering college because they want to become professional fiction writers?
Keene: I think college is a terrific idea, but not an absolute necessity. So many great writers have never set foot in a college-level creative writing workshop, and plenty of publishing opportunities are available beyond the academic setting.
That said, an undergraduate creative-writing program will open up a whole new world of writing, editing, and publishing. You can be artistic, experimental, and intellectual. If you can do college without taking on too much debt, it’s worth it.
Yanes: The competition to get published is only increasing. Beyond being a quality storyteller, what else do you think writers need to stand out?
Keene: Reading obscure stories by long-ago authors is my best advice for helping writers stand out in a crowd. Sci-fi writers should read W.E.B. DuBois’ “The Comet” (1920). Horror scribes should check out Charles W. Chestnutt’s The Conjure Woman (1899). Fantasists should study Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman (1951). There’s energy to be mined there. That way you can blend inspiration from the past and the present to generate something new and enthralling.
Yanes: Your latest book is Gateways to Annihilation. What was the inspiration behind this project?
Keene: I wanted to render a series of underdog horror tales, stories about people standing just outside the spotlight. Want a few examples? A sloppy comics collector tangles with a nefarious cult over possession of a rare publication. A human resources consultant uncovers a lycanthropic ritual taking place at an observatory fundraiser. A Japanese suit actor and Nagasaki survivor migrates to Hollywood to star in a series of very low-budget monster movies, never able to find acceptance.
I wanted each story to conclude on a bittersweet note instead of utter ruin and cynicism. And I wanted them to be fun and memorable, by introducing characters that linger in the reader’s mind, from an occult detective in 1920s’ Ybor City, Florida, to a deconstructed version of the biblical character Isaac.
Yanes: Many professional writers have several projects they start but don’t finish for various reasons. While developing Gateways to Annihilation, was there a moment when you realized the project was going to work and that you would be able to complete it?
Keene: It took a while, but after writing the first three stories, I had a vision for the book, even when the process was delayed over and again by other projects with deadlines. When you have sixty pages, the finish line is visible. When you see a destination, your confidence grows. You can reach it if you keep writing.
Yanes: Gateways to Annihilation contains 14 short stories. What was your approach to researching these tales? During your research, did you come across any interesting or surprising facts?
Keene: I discovered aggressively bizarre facts, and I was eager to include as many as I could in each story. I tend to begin with a general history of a subject—say, an overview of the yellow-fever epidemic in 1853 New Orleans for my story “Conjure Me.” Then I dip into the works cited to see if any other book or articles intrigue me. The brutal and useless treatments that doctors prescribed for fever victims were eye-opening.
I also waded into Celtic mythology for my story “Glandomirum,” with its horrifying and comical pantheon. After my research for that story, I didn’t skimp on incorporating problematic personality traits that seem to define and plague the god-characters, all of them hiding in plain sight in Irish pubs in Las Vegas.
Yanes: Reflecting on the stories in Gateways to Annihilation, are there one or two characters you’d love to revisit?
Keene: Heck, I adore every character in Gateways and could write multiple novels about each one. But I find myself especially smitten by the young high school necromancer Dash Kobran in my story “Dream Evil.” Dash is so much fun to write, and I sometimes find myself outlining wild plot summaries for stories I haven’t yet written starring the scruffy, horny, kid magician from downtown Las Vegas. I don’t think I’ll ever give him up!
Yanes: When readers finish Gateways to Annihilation, what do you hope they take away from it?
Keene: I hope readers take away a sense of wonder about the way the world operates now versus a hundred, hundreds, or thousands of years ago. I would like them take away a sense of how far the limits of the horror-suspense short story can be pushed and stretched. Gateways doesn’t read or come off like a typical collection of morbid tales, and my aim in writing it was for readers to feel transported and breathless from the experience.
Yanes: Finally, what else are you working on that people can look forward to?
Keene: At the moment, I’m powering through the writing of a dark superhero novel, but not at all like “The Boys” or “Invincible” TV shows. I’ve been describing the book as “The X-Men meets The Exorcist,” but with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s original idea of barely trained teenagers fighting grown-up, even ancient, forces of evil. I hope it’ll be as much fun to read a story about gifted adolescent outcasts squaring off against a Babylonian goddess of war as it is to write it.
Remember, you can learn more about Keene by visiting his homepage.
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