Monument Maker

In a dizzying gyroscopic vortex of inner archeology, David Keenan sifts through spiraling past lives to unearth his provocative vision of the future. A colossus of imagination – LENNY KAYE
Prepare for a reading experience like no other. Visionary and prismatic, gloriously hallucinatory although grounded in the material, Monument Maker’s grand sweep takes in distant historical subterrains, a shimmering summer of the present, the transient, the eternal, the profane, the divine. David Keenan is a blazing, deviant, fearless force and just a total one-off – WENDY ERSKINE
I sometimes think David Keenan dreams aloud. His prose has the effortless enigmatic, unsettling quality of dream * EDNA O’BRIEN *
A masterpiece – WILLIAM BASINSKI
A masterpiece – WILLIAM BASINSKI
At once sacred and profane, high-minded and foul-mouthed, seemingly etched in stone and writhingly alive, David Keenan’s 808-page Monument Maker is the kind of novel that somehow affirms your faith in fiction while putting you off from reading it entirely. It is beautiful and bewildering, formally daring and frequently confounding … Trying to neatly categorise Monument Maker is a fool’s errand. The book is at once a bravura exhibition of cross genre-writing; a multi-layered occultist phantasmagoria; a revelation of the “subterranea of the moment, the very scaffolding of reality”; a philosophical investigation into the limits of art and the experience of being in time; and a deeply personal attempt to “turn history into dust” and “rescue the disappeared” … sit back and marvel at David Keenan’s colossal ambition, at his singularity, at this monumental achievement * TLS *
David Keenan has become one of the most prolific and innovative new literary stylists of the last five years … At this stage of his game Keenan can make his books do pretty much anything … Keenan’s most ambitious and accomplished book yet. He has has built a monument, turning history to dust in the process, and delivering a hefty instalment of a literary career where literally anything is possible * IRISH TIMES *
His visionary aesthetic reaches its grandest expression yet in his new novel, Monument Maker, a garrulous, gargantuan and ultimately elusive magnum opus * FINANCIAL TIMES *
A text of colossal ambition … at times, it feels a little like reading Yeats * LITERARY REVIEW *
An experimental novel informed by religion, art, the occult, sex, Tarot, alcohol, signs, symbols and other experimental novels. It evokes the work of Malcolm Lowry, Clarice Lispector, Leonora Carrington, Arthur Machen, Philip K. Dick and even John Fowles. Like them, Keenan is a literary disruptor … This is not an easy or straightforward read, but it crackles with the energy of someone challenging themselves to make something new, meaningful and personal with the tools at their disposal. By turns it is obscure, romantic, terrifying, funny and - an underrated and unfashionable literary virtue - sincere * SPECTATOR *
Adventurous readers, devil-may-care readers, readers who are in it for the long haul - roll up * BOOKMUNCH *
Don’t read it. Smoke it. Snort it. Swallow it. It’s not a novel. It’s an acid trip. A freaky, feverish dream set in print. Baroque and bizarre, Monument Maker is a literary cathedral designed by Mad King Ludwig II, with help from Burroughs and Arthur C. Clarke * CHEERIO *
Keenan is the kind of writer who can look forward to being lovingly over-interpreted into perpetuity * THE SCOTSMAN *
Occult, transformative, difficult, fantastic: Keenan is smashing through so many borders * NEW STATESMAN *
Abandon what you know, choose your door and enter David Keenan’s cathedral. Surrender yourself up to this monument of stone in ink and paper … It’s visceral, bursting with psychic energy and utterly essential … with Monument Maker, Keenan has killed the novel and brought about its resurrection. This act of librecide has set literature free, opening a portal, through which nothing can be the same again. My book of the year, probably the most incredible book released in my lifetime * Concrete Islands, #1 Book of the Year *

David Keenan is the author of six critically-acclaimed novels; the cult classic This is Memorial Device, which won the London Magazine Prize; For the Good Times, which won the Gordon Burn Prize and was shortlisted for the Encore Award; The Towers The Fields The Transmitters, Xstabeth, which was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, Monument Maker, which was a Rough Trade Book of the Year and Industry of Magic & Light. He is also the author of England’s Hidden Reverse, a history of the UK’s post-punk and Industrial music scenes. He has been writing about music since he was seventeen years old, most consistently for The Wire, and between the years 2004-2014 he co-ran the cult Glasgow record shop Volcanic Tongue. His selected music writing was published in 2025 as the collection Volcanic Tongue.

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