- B R A M S T O K E R A W A R D W I N N I N G A U T H O R -
Kealan Patrick Burke
THE BOOKS
All titles are available in digital and paperback.
Sour Candy
ISBN-13: 978-1979533225
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At first glance, Phil Pendleton and his son Adam are just an ordinary father and son, no different from any other. They take walks in the park together, visit county fairs, museums, and zoos, and eat overlooking the lake. Some might say the father is a little too accommodating given the lack of discipline when the child loses his temper in public. Some might say he spoils his son by allowing him to set his own bedtimes and eat candy whenever he wants. Some might say that such leniency is starting to take its toll on the father, given how his health has declined.
What no one knows is that Phil is a prisoner, and that up until a few weeks ago and a chance encounter at a grocery store, he had never seen the child before in his life.
Kin
ISBN-13: 978-1479110490
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On a scorching hot summer day in Elkwood, Alabama, Claire Lambert staggers naked, wounded, and half-blind away from the scene of an atrocity. She is the sole survivor of a nightmare that claimed her friends, and even as she prays for rescue, the killers--a family of cannibalistic lunatics--are closing in.
A soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder returns from Iraq to the news that his brother is among the murdered in Elkwood.
In snowbound Detroit, a waitress trapped in an abusive relationship gets an unexpected visit that will lead to bloodshed and send her back on the road to a past she has spent years trying to outrun.
And Claire, the only survivor of the Elkwood Massacre, haunted by her dead friends, dreams of vengeance... a dream which will be realized as grief and rage turn good people into cold-blooded murderers and force alliances among strangers.
It's time to return to Elkwood.
In the spirit of such iconic horror classics as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Deliverance, Kin begins at the end and studies the possible aftermath for the survivors of such traumas upon their return to the real world -- the guilt, the grief, the thirst for revenge -- and sets them on an unthinkable journey... back into the heart of darkness.
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Jack & Jill
ISBN-13: 978-1981371129
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When they were kids, Gillian and John used to visit the local cemetery every Sunday after church. It was a curious place for children to frequent, but they had their reasons. The main attraction was the lofty hill that separated the cemetery from the elementary school, and the act of tumbling down it like Jack and Jill was a ritualistic escape from the abuse they were suffering at their father's hands. It was an escape that lasted only until John's tragic death.
Now, Gillian is all grown up. Married with two children, she has managed over the years to force the trauma of her nightmarish childhood into the darkest recesses of her mind.
But lately there are dreams, and in them Gillian sees impossibly vivid reenactments of the horrors she endured as a child. Nightly, she sees John die all over again, only not in the way she remembers. And something else is in those dreams, stalking her, a terrible figure with wire-hanger hands and a plastic bag wrapped around its rotten face. A monster whose reach starts to extend beyond the boundaries of sleep into the waking world, threatening everything Gillian holds dear.
A monster she once called Daddy.
The Tent
ISBN-13: 978-1985863781
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The perfect getaway...
The perfect place to hide...
Hocking Hills, Ohio is an oasis for campers, hikers, nature enthusiasts, and for those who just want to get away and lose themselves in the wild. And as long as you follow your guide's advice and stay within the permitted areas, you can expect to survive the night.
Because deep within the dark woods, something insidious awaits, something few have ever seen, something ancient, unknowable, and insatiable.
If you go down to these woods today, you won't live to see the sunrise...
Master of the Moors
ISBN-13: 978-1479135899
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Kate Mansfield and her blind brother Neil live in a manor on the edge of the Brent Prior moors, a dreary place populated by the dispirited and the disillusioned, where the young nurture desperate dreams of escape. And Kate is no different. But her plans to run away to the city are crushed one very ordinary morning by an inexplicable act of violence.
In the wake of the tragedy, Kate's beloved father is stricken by a strange illness, and she and her brother fall under the care of the manor's caretaker and maid.
Then, as if attuned to the melancholy that has stricken Mansfield House, a fog rolls in. Villagers begin to vanish. Lithe fleeting shadows are glimpsed in the mist, and a disfigured man arrives in Brent Prior.
A man who has come back to settle an old score.
A man who calls himself the Master of the Moors.
Stage Whispers
ISBN-13: 978-1482333923
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STAGE WHISPERS is an omnibus collection of novellas featuring Timmy Quinn, who made his first appearance in the Bram Stoker Award-winning story THE TURTLE BOY in 2004. Over the course of thirty years, we follow a boy cursed with the ability to see ghosts and doomed to serve them, into adulthood, as he battles murderers and monstrous revenants in his struggle to find those responsible for violating the veil that separates the realm of the living from the land of the dead. From the sunlit banks of a pond in the American Midwest to a haunted, wind-ravaged island off the coast of Ireland, STAGE WHISPERS represents an epic voyage through the darkness both supernatural and all-too human.
Included in STAGE WHISPERS, you'll find all four novellas in the series: THE TURTLE BOY, THE HIDES, VESSELS, and PEREGRINE'S TALE, the short story “Genesis”, and a new introduction by the author.
The Number 121 to Pennsylvania
ISBN-13: 978-1481030090
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The lonesome sound of a long forgotten train draws an old man to memories of a horrific past...A journalist makes the mistake of visiting a website where real-life executions are the order of the day...At the foot of an old tree, an insidious evil awaits two boys digging for treasure...A browbeaten salesman finds hope and a possible escape from the banality of his world when he returns home to find a fairytale beanstalk sprouting from his garden... A man resists the social pressure to quit smoking and puts himself at an unimaginable risk...A high school student accepts a dare to ask out a disfigured girl and enters a world of pain and violence...A comedian finds himself faced with a most peculiar and deadly audience...The pariah of a village accepts an offer of peace at his mother's funeral, but the olive branch may have hidden thorns...A bunch of barflies doomed to murder sinners get together for one last drink in a dying town...
These are just some of the passengers, headed for a ride through the dark uncharted regions of the heart and mind...on The Number 121 to Pennsylvania.
Secret Faces
ISBN-13: 978-1535187442
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"If you are hiding from yourself, don't expect anyone else to see you."
Everyone has a secret. Everyone is someone else when the world isn't looking. Sometimes that person is good, sometimes that person is not.
In SECRET FACES, Bram Stoker Award-winning author Kealan Patrick Burke's latest terrifying collection of short stories, you'll meet thirteen people who discover the horror of what happens when those secret faces are removed and the true darkness that dwells within us all is unleashed.
"one of the most clever and original talents in contemporary horror" - Booklist
Milestone: The Collected Stories, Vol. I
ISBN-13: 978-1978260870
Somewhere out west there is a town called Milestone.
You won't find it on any map.
If you're lucky, you won't find it at all.
Once a thriving mining community, the few souls who still dwell there know nothing of hope and everything of damnation. Because Milestone may appear near-death, a ghost town in the making, but it is very much alive. There are the stories of invisible barriers that open and close the borders on a whim, sometimes fatally, the whispers of a man in a top hat who comes cycling up out of the darkness of the abandoned mine to change the fate of the town, the buried music box that summons him, the people with unnatural powers, the old man who counts stacks of pennies and prays they never fall...and the fires that burn brightly with the sounds of screams.
Milestone is very much alive, and those unlucky souls trapped within its borders have little choice but to learn the true nature of their prison, or become its latest victim. And even as they fight against the inevitable, the borders continue to expand.
Milestone is growing.
Included in the following book are the novellas "The Witch", "Saturday Night at Eddie's", "Thirty Miles South of Dry County" and "The Palaver".
Blanky
ISBN-13: 978-1977550446
In the wake of his infant daughter's tragic death, Steve Brannigan is struggling to keep himself together. Estranged from his wife, who refuses to be inside the house where the unthinkable happened, and unable to work, he seeks solace in an endless parade of old sitcoms and a bottle of bourbon. Until one night he hears a sound from his daughter's old room, a room now stripped bare of anything that identified it as hers...except for her security blanket, affectionately known as Blanky.
Blanky, old and frayed, with its antiquated patchwork of badly sewn rabbits with black button eyes, who appear to be staring at the viewer...
Blanky, purchased from a strange old man at an antique stall selling "BABY CLOSE" at a discount.
The presence of Blanky in his dead daughter's room heralds nothing short of an unspeakable nightmare that threatens to take away what little light remains in Steve's shattered world.
Because his daughter loved Blanky so much, he buried her with it.
A new novella from the Bram Stoker Award-Winning author of SOUR CANDY and KIN.