Bloomberg.com: Muse -The Keep
a moldering castle in Central Europe; an angry crone in a tower; a boy abandoned in a dark cave; a medieval torture chamber; two small children drowned many decades ago; a bust of Medusa; a radio that is said to pick up the voices of the dead. ...a suspense tale drawing on a stockpile of gothic commonplaces [the above? the torture chamber, crone in tower, etc?] so stale the weariest hack might blanch at deploying some of them.
"The Keep'' is, in fact, madly enjoyable. yes.
She structures it -- once again following something other than the dictates of freshness -nice- as a novel within a novel. The inner story is the one about the (possibly) haunted castle and its towering keep. The outer one is about a prison writing class in which a convict named Ray is writing ``The Keep'' in installments for Holly, the teacher he is falling in love with. The prison is the harder of the two settings to shake off, the dread it engenders more acrid int, and the subject of writing is one that Egan -- obviously -- takes seriously.

In the story within the story, Danny, an aging New York hipster -- black clothing, black dye job, lipstick -- receives an invitation from his very rich cousin, Howard, to assist in the renovation of the castle Howard has bought with the idea of turning it into a luxury hotel. Howard's invitation comes at an opportune time, as Danny needs to get out of town fast, following a never fully explained incident involving some mob goons that has left him with a bum knee. But there's a strong possibility that friendly Howard still nurses a grudge against Danny for an evil and very nearly lethal prank from their teenage years. mm well done sum.

Danny is the perfect horror-story protagonist: an emotionally fragile smart aleck who, after years on the edge of the New York underworld, has developed a kind of second-nature paranoia. As a plucky but nervous mess, he belongs to the unlucky line descended from the young governess in ``The Turn of the Screw.''
When things start to go weird on him, as they do almost immediately, the weirdness may be the result of (1) supernatural powers; (2) elaborate payback by the seemingly affable but possibly vengeful Howard; or (3) the collapse of Danny's own mind. good.
When things start to go bad for Ray, the convict writer, the reasons have to do with the emotional tap he has opened by writing, with his ominous convict classmates and with Holly. When things start to go bad for Holly, they have to do mostly with Ray.
nice nice nice

"The Keep'' is a beach read of a very high order, but Egan has layered it with enough meanings to keep anyone who feels like scrambling for them busy. The decaying castle is Danny's decaying psyche writ large, and like Danny's psyche it houses an impregnable keep sheltering a woman (in one case an old girlfriend, in the other an old hag) whose presence is formidable. Howard has some appealing ideas (''Let people be tourists in their own imaginations'') that he is attempting to bring to fruition in his strange hotel. Et cetera.
But the surface was plenty for me. I loved the mildly hardboiled writing and the sensation of being manipulated by an artist who knows exactly what she's doing. These funhouse pleasures aren't so easy to deliver without making a reader (not to mention a writer) feel cheap. ``The Keep'' is anything but cheap, and calling it a beach read doesn't do justice to Egan's craft, which is so serious that it never feels serious at all.

(Craig Seligman is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)