#Spooktober ‘Blanky’ by Kealan Patrick Burke

About the book…

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

Ok, so I am late, very late, to the Kealan Patrick Burke party but oh my god am I happy to be here!
From reading a Kindle sample of ‘Blanky’ to buying it was a matter of seconds, this man can write.

In the pages of this novella, lurks a story which is tuat, compelling and brutal. It deals with infant loss which is not glossed over, and grief, so this stands as a warning to those who might find this topic disturbing.

I have to admit that I was concerned as to how this was portrayed and whether it was used for a horrific effect,but the only horror that emanates from the loss of baby Robin is the endless waves of grief and the subsequent destruction of the relationship between Steve and his wife, Lexi.

It is a story both haunted and haunting, Steve lives in a house that is consumed with loss, he wanders from room to room drowning himself in alcohol and regret. Lexi, being unable to live in the house that their daughter died in, moves back with her parents. Neither is right or wrong in how they are coping, they are merely trying to rebuild a life as parents without a child, in a world which des not know how to cope with grief.

The ‘blanky’ of the title is a much loved, thought incredibly creepily described, comfort blanket-as most parents will know there is usually one item without which a child will not sleep and many agonising hours are spent looking for this, usually whilst your child screams the house down as you frantically look.

It tends to also be something really, really odd that they attach themselves to, and in this case, a noise brings Steve into the room where Robin used to sleep and there he finds the blanket, a blanket which should not be there. Because Robin was buried with Blanky….

As Steve looks for the small market stall which he and Lexi brought the blanket from, at the same time as trying to repair his marriage, the world which he thought had nothing left to take from him grabs even more greedy handfuls of his sanity.

In 74 pages, Kealan Patrcik Burke manages to scare you witless, leave you haunted and traumatised by the grief of fictional parents and a baby, which is no mean feat. He takes the known , and turns into into the unknown as he twists reality and the reader’s perceptions of what they are reading and then proceeds to bite down.Hard. ‘Blanky‘ is absolutely a gateway novella, and this is an author which I am now eagerly scrabbling to collect the works of, the delicious chill of being scared out of your mind and having a slow, creeping horror wrap its tendrils round your neck, is an irresistible pull.

About the author…

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 grunge 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 movie based on his short story “Peekers” is currently in development as a major motion picture.

Links-http://www.kealanpatrickburke.com/

Twitter @kealanpatrickburke