Then there’s the detail that the book was written to be a World War 2-era supernatural thriller, already taking it further away from instantly-recognizable contemporary cultural references. (Good luck seeing it, though: The film is conspicuously absent from DVD format catalogs, and rumor has it that Mann himself isn’t too keen on reviving it.) Dig deep enough, and you will even find that it was adapted for the big screen in 1983 by none other than director Michael Mann. It’s been reviewed, retouched and reprinted, validated and enhanced along the way like few other early-eighties horror novels have been. There’s a trick, of course: The version of The Keep I read isn’t the version that was published twenty-five years ago. Paul Wilson’s The Keep still feels just as fresh today as when it was published in 1981. So imagine my surprise to find out that F. Even in Science Fiction or Fantasy, setting a story in the future or the past doesn’t necessarily erase the mark left by the writer’s present. Beyond contemporary settings, there are dozens of ways for books to be stuck in time: outdated social assumptions, unfashionable prose or crude genre conventions. To the dismay of anyone trying to write for posterity (if there’s such a thing when there are bills to pay), decades can be very unkind to any kind of fiction. I’m always impressed when the years move on and leave certain books unaffected.
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