Zee Bee & Bee (aka Propeller Hats for the Dead) by David James Keaton (A Review by Simon Jacobs)

Open Casket Press

148pgs/$10.99

“…And With These Hats We Shall Fly”

 1. “Shiver Moments”

The premise to David James Keaton’s novella Zee Bee & Bee (aka Propeller Hats for the Dead) ought to be enough: a themed bed-and-breakfast in which customers pay for an earnest recreation of a night-long zombie siege.  But really, it doesn’t matter, you just need to get this book; it’s the most gut-wrenchingly original thing I’ve read in a really long time.

This is destined to become some sort of monolith of cultural touchstones. Big rocks. Like a hyper-violent and gory episode of Gilmore Girls, many of the zombie/pop-culture references sailed over my head like a horde of hungry fruit bats (because they are the most adorable), destined for the fanatics among us, with whom I’m woefully unequipped enough to rub shoulders. We tongue each other instead. What? In any case, I’ve tried.

I only wish I had as much energy and verve as David James Keaton. Dude. No writer pokes into my brain chemistry quite the way he does.

The dynamic among the actor zombies reminds me of my three brothers and I. For at least six years, every fall we used to put on a haunted house in our extensive basement back home. There were all manner of places to leap out of, all kinds of contraptions with which we would kill each other in front of our guests. One year, we built a guillotine. We had this one old man mask that we always used as the head for a dummy, and he always bit it in our haunted houses.

When raising winged Satan in the last room, we had to cover up the duct-tape pentagram on the floor when our S.D.A. friends came over.

2. “Loki Is Playing Tricks Again”

I’m kind of a closeted romantic, and I think David James Keaton probably is as well, so I appreciated that element to Zee Bee & Bee. Everyone’s universally awkward, even if they’re pretending to be a zombie or pretending to be human.

We dressed our youngest brother up like a fake corpse, decked him out in a gator mask, winter gloves, a sweater, old shoes. We stuffed newspaper into his shirt, letting it leak out the sleeves and pant legs so he’d look all nice and stuffed and fake. He lay on the ground in the bedroom, arms and legs awkwardly sprawled. Then, when people sidled by, he’d lunge.

Got ‘em every time.

“More pulp,” says Davey Jones (aka Monkees singer aka David Bowie’s original 60’s stage name), at one point during Zee Bee & Bee, when shit’s about to get realer (or not).

Keaton’s writing glorifies pulp of the meatiest and most vivid kind, with guts to spare. I have no idea how he does it. You could tear off a piece of this with your teeth, gnaw through until you found the pulsing heart buried deep within. And all the while the whole thing would still be kicking.

The novella is full of nicknames, something aka something else aka something else. My brothers and I did this too, though I can’t remember any of them. I think one of us was Violin.

Our parents gave us a $100 budget for new stuff each year; we had an animatronic half-zombie that crawled forward on his arms across the floor, moaning. For some reason, we always put him in the bathroom.

3. “DJK is the Fucking Gilmore Girls of the Zombies”

Much of Keaton’s work fucks with reality in a really glorious way, where the dynamics and science and physiological properties of the world are gradually sort of shifted aside by the narrator in exchange for something off the rails. I remember it happened in “Swatter” as well. Now there’s a story.

Here, I’m referring to a scene with a particular claw.

We had a lot of props in our haunted house, my brothers and I. Many masks. Several strobe lights. A fog machine. Various ghoulies, a fake chainsaw. Caps for our one cap gun, which were surprisingly hard to find in Dayton, Ohio circa 2004. It was the most fun to shoot each other.

Several years, I played the tour guide, leading our visitors through the basement, except I always got killed by the monsters. Our shining moment was when we made a grown-ass woman cry and run away screaming.

It is, though.  Zee Bee & Bee is horrifying and oddly romantic and very, very disturbing and really funny at the same time. I can’t really tell, but I may have cried. Granted, this may have been the product of the mindset in which I read the novella, which was very late at night/early in the morning, stir-crazy, consciousness wobbly at best, wrestling with inner demons a little too fresh to be fully zombified. But still.

You will never forget this book, I can promise you. Lay hands on it straightaway.

*

Simon Jacobs is an undergraduate at a tiny liberal arts college in the Midwest. He curates the Safety Pin Review, a new, wearable medium for work under 30 words. He attempts to construct the perfect haunted house at simonajacobs.blogspot.com.