BLANKY by Kealan Patrick Burke_Review & Tour

"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.

Blanky by Kealan Patrick Burke
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Review of BLANKY by Kealan Patrick Burke

Accomplished author Kealan Patrick Burke achieves yet a new level in his newest novella. Horror is rife--both the native horror of the human condition, and otherworldly horror (jump-out-of-your-skin, shudder-and-shiver, screeching terror). But the gift this story gives me (whenever the author wasn't scaring me witless) is character evolution. Mr. Burke superbly develops, delineates, and evolves {some would submit "devolves"} his protagonist through a horrifying series of events.

Stephen Brannigan is a perfectly ordinary man: decent, diligent, warm-hearted. A school-teacher in Columbus, Ohio, Stephen is appreciated by students and principal. He marries Lexi and they produce an adorable infant daughter. Then tragedy: infant Robin inexplicably smothers in her crib. Lexi moves out, and Stephen's formerly colorful world fades to various shades of grayness. This is only the beginning of Stephen's evolution, as life first offers him hope, then more tragedy, then obsession, and unending horror.

In the space of a novella length, I was wrung out, given hope, scared senseless, and pondered the meaning of beyond-death. Author Burke reached my heart and rung all its chords.

Born and raised in a small harbor town in the south of Ireland, Kealan Patrick Burke knew from a very early age that he was going to be a horror writer. The combination of an ancient locale, a horror-loving mother, and a family full of storytellers, made it inevitable that he would end up telling stories for a living. Since those formative years, he has written five novels, over a hundred short stories, six collections, and edited four acclaimed anthologies. In 2004, he was honored with the Bram Stoker Award for his novella The Turtle Boy.

Kealan has worked as a waiter, a drama teacher, a mapmaker, a security guard, an assembly-line worker at Apple Computers, a salesman (for a day), a bartender, landscape gardener, vocalist in a rock band, curriculum content editor, fiction editor at Gothic.net, and, most recently, a fraud investigator. 

When not writing, Kealan designs book covers through his company Elderlemon Design. 

A number of his books have been optioned for film.

Visit him on the web at Kealan Patrick Burke