The genre of science fiction and fantasy has seemed to attract some of the most talented, versatile, and idiosyncratic personalities and made writers of them. David H. Keller pursued a varied and successful career as physician, military doctor, psychiatrist, and medical researcher. He published widely in the professional literature of his field. He also wrote fiction--but only for his family and friends. Then in 1928 Amazing Stories published "The Revolt of the Pedestrians," a long dystopian narrative that Keller had completed before Hugo Gernsback had even started Amazing. The story was such a success that Gernsback contracted for 12 more from Keller, and during the next decade or so 60 "Kelleryarns" were published in SF and fantasy markets. Weird Tales served as another primary outlet for the Keller stories. During the final two decades of his life, however, Keller returned to private publishing and almost continuous writing of stories and books that may or may not have been marketable. His overall accomplishment seems immense, individual, and idiosyncratic. Some of his stories are classics of the horror/weird fantasy variety. Much of his writing reads as pleasantly whimsical and expressive of the "humours" of his personality in the 18th-century sense. In many ways, especially in the final years of his life, he was like an 18th-century eccentric or country gentleman who loved and expressed wit, humour, and imaginative curiosity in both his living and his writing. In all ways, Keller was his own man; and it is perhaps too soon for a literary assessment of his work whether in abnormal psychology or in fantasy or humorous narrative.

Regardless of any later assessment of his large volume of rather whimsical writing, certain careful elements in his art are apparent. Keller is often very skillful in the subtle understated suggestion of the supernatural that creates the greatest chill of horror. He combines with this a fascination in the psychosomatic relations of mental disorder to behavior. Among the short, chilling masterpieces that embody these artfully controlled effects are "The Thing in the Cellar," "A Piece of Linoleum," and "The Dead Woman," all from the early 1930s. Keller writes, then, with a subtle control of statement and tone that is unusual in the early pulp markets of the genre. The other element in his art that is particularly impressive is his use of point of view. Many of his narratives are told in first person, and he is master of the ironic first-person narrator who gradually reveals his own insanity to the reader without realizing it himself. As in Swift's A Modest Proposal, a Keller narrator will often be condemning himself/herself while telling what seems to be his/her side of the story. The other kind of first-person narrator is Keller himself in the person of various point-of-view characters with whimsical names, such as Jacobus Hubelaire who writes his own autobiography that is really Keller's, or Colonel Horatio Bumble in The Homunculus. This last, strange little book gives a fictional picture in the first person of Keller/Bumble that may or may not be the real Keller. But it shows a 20th-century retired Colonel of the Army Medical Corps who dabbles in writing and in the supernatural and who resembles an 18th-century eccentric, such as one might find in a Smollett novel or in the person of Erasmus Darwin, much more than a modern writer. At the same time the book, in its way, treats fascinating themes of scientific methodology, married life, and writing itself. Keller is a puzzlement in the genre--unique, varied, and often extremely effective.