Originally published in The Substack Review on April 17, 2026.

I’ll forever associate Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (1959) with the laundromat. I read it between cycles, entranced by the boundless varieties of religious experience that human history had to offer, all while lodged in the mundanely pleasant present moment of the spinning machine as it recycled my workaday clothes. I was reminded of it while reading Brad Kelly’s The Earthen Dark (2026). I suspect Campbell featured heavily in the research phase of the book. The back cover reads:

File under: literary psy-fi, blue collar cosmic horror, McCarthyian Weird Fiction, Borgesian thriller, the good stuff.

Invoking Borges and McCarthy is big talk indeed. I went in eyebrows raised, wondering if Kelly could reach the bar he’d set for himself. I found myself driven to actual exclamations of amazement multiple times over the next 252 pages. The novel’s engine churns like a cement mixer of high-brow, deep-time horror grounded by a realistic portrait of the drudgery we, the living, currently inhabit. This washing machine spins in sync with the earth’s core.

The plot centers on Jim Murray, a professor of anthropology disgraced by a brief but intense skirmish with viral infamy. This aspect feels a tad rushed, as Jim is essentially “cancelled” for minor misunderstandings, and the diagnosis of inscrutable groupthink fueling the phenomenon is given a few scant paragraphs, which excise it from an enormously complex political context.

After resigning from the university, the only job Jim is able to scrounge up is labor-intensive sewer repair with a team of men brandishing years of experience under their belts: Ray, Wheezy, and the Captain. This trio are excellently fleshed out specimens of what we’d call “traditional masculinity.” Kelly colors these characters with enough sympathetic realism to stand them above the flat cannon fodder normally sacrificed to grind a heedless bodycount.

Jim’s time on the job is typical; he’s too slow and sore. As a husband and father, his chief struggle is the age-old yoke of the weary breadwinner. His masculine insecurity burbles beneath saccharine scenes of familial bliss. These moments are endearing. Jim’s young daughter Shelly is, of course, a cherubic idol glittering at the center of the maze, waiting for her father to cull meaning from this mess. Kelly is setting up more than our protagonist’s motivation; the author makes it clear from the first page that this story concerns postmodern man confronting the harsh truth of the universe in all its unmoored chaos.

The manhole like a throat dilated to take him, a snake’s throat and a snake is all one throat and is what all the stories meant.

After a lovely introduction to the disgusting nature of sewer work (there’s quite of bit of sludge talk, and the description of concrete as skin-like is delectable), it doesn’t take long for The Weird to seep in and explode the crew’s reality-tunnel into a fractal maze of malevolent potential. The characters react to the transformation with disconcerting realism; I enjoyed the dialogue of their fumbling attempts to maintain composure. There’s something so nakedly human about their desperation and madness.

Each man stares into the void from the trembling center of his ego—and his role in the superego—but the focus remains with Jim, our hero of a thousand faces. My favorite aspect of the whole novel is the random interspersal of real anthropological details interrupting the story’s continuum as Jim’s intrusive thoughts. Spurts of wisdom accrete from mankind’s genetic memory, like reflective dew on our family tree’s foliage.

The moment I knew I was in good hands was Jim’s own reaction to The Weird. I won’t give it away, but he makes a choice that exposes a deep part of himself, a shadow self. Jim seizes upon the opportunity that The Weird presents, hoping to carve out a world where he has more control. It’s an amazing early twist that stitches unearthed human nature into the fathomless Tehom (Hebrew for The Chaotic Deeps from which God formed the universe). I appreciated Kelly’s declaration in this choice: The Weird is not an invasion of The Other from beyond, but an externalization of The Truth inside every man. Of course there’s still a monster in the maze. How else are you gonna sell tickets to the show?

The sense that he slipped down underneath time and time kept barreling on above him, heaving and rolling and cooling stiff at its edges like lava.

Some comparisons: the subterranean setting reminded me of Hailey Piper’s novella The Worm And His Kings (2020). When the turn came, I thought of Jorge Luis Borges’ iconic story “The Aleph.” Kelly warps a similar wondrous premise into rich, fathomless horror, so maybe the back cover blurb knew what it was talking about. As for McCarthy, the poetic treatment of suffering did its damndest to stretch beyond the border of Cormac’s shadow; there are definitely tasty pearls before the swine. The characters’ predicament also echoes the film Coherence (2013), but with the larger scale that prose allots.

But most of all, The Earthen Dark’s deep fried blue collar cosmic horror brings to mind the excellent videogame Still Wakes The Deep (2024). Both stories dissect working class characters facing down eldritch bullshit, which guts them physically and mentally. Kelly actually cares about the poor souls he puts through the thresher. Their suffering creates more meaning than their deaths, which speaks to the philosophy being explored.

And that’s the thing; it’s difficult to write cosmic horror that successfully grapples with cosmicism itself. That is Kelly’s direct ambition, and he succeeds where many others fail. Jim’s adventure is a pluriform web tethered to the same source. His conflict is not simply “find the path home” but “define home.” Unnameable forces compose our identities, carving the edges of our particular jigsaw self. So, what decomposes us and builds up something new? Kelly has his characters descend into that question like the manhole at the opening of his maze. And the answer is complicated, naturally.

He thought about how every way to make a world is fat with cruelty. He wondered if we bury our dead to hide our guilt.

The cycle of life could be summed up as the faulty willpower of man smashing against the callous tides of time, rising and falling like a careless washing machine. Thus, the book deals with our relationship to death, with the earth from which we sprout and to which we return when the rent on our bodies is due. Kelly handles this with astounding, reverent prose.

As things get denser, some chapters feel like unnecessary dead ends, but that’s what mazes are made of. You can’t get lost without repetitive frustration. Kelly juggles the ebb and flow with a deft hand. The novel’s pacing is a steady pulse, syncopated with the hero’s unbroken tread. Because in truth the journey is not a maze, but a labyrinth, which offers a single path leading in and out. The only Way there is. The only self we can rely upon… and one we can fear.

There was a hominid who saw in still water only the face of a strange dream-ape and there was another who saw itself clear and from that moment split two species though they may have looked the same a hundred thousand years.

This is cosmic horror as it should be written: not a speculation of alien powers roiling above man’s knowledge, but an affirmation that those powers have always been twined with human activity, feasting like a siphonophore on the inexhaustible resource of our willpower. Jim’s trial reminds the reader to strike a careful balance of confidence and humility in the face of doom, which waits in the wings of every world we make and break with each decision. I was wondering if Kelly could stick the landing after all this buildup, and I’m happy to say I cried out at the final two paragraphs, an amazing punchline to a wonderful strange tale.

Hopefully I’ve enticed you to sink in yourself. You can grab a copy here.

Mythology—and therefore civilization—is a poetic, supernormal image, conceived, like all poetry, in depth, but susceptible of interpretation on various levels. The shallowest minds see it in the local scenery; the deepest, the foreground of the void; and between are all the stages of the Way from the ethnic to the elementary idea, the local to the universal being, which is Everyman, as he both knows and is afraid to know.

—Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (1959)

David Kane writes Weird fiction and psychotronic articles. He is the author of Drippy Trippy Doom and a performer of absurdist theatre. He’s been published in Cosmic Pulp Zine, I Have That On Vinyl, and psychopomp.com. Follow him on Substack or at doompunkdispatch.com, if you’re a true blue doompunk.

Brad Kelly is a fiction writer from the Detroit area. He is the former host of the Art of Darkness podcast and the current host of Method and Madness, a show about books, the people who write them, and the labyrinth between the words. He is the author of HOUSE OF SLEEP (2021) and THE EARTHEN DARK (2026)