#Ghoulvember ‘Sour Candy’ by Kealan Patrick Burke

About the book…

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 together 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.

‘Sour Candy’ is published in ebook and paperback format by Elderlemon Press and Smashmouth editions , available from all good bookshops. I am really getting into these independently published novellas, especially as my concentration levels are not the greatest at the moment. To spend a day not reading at all is the absolute pits, and these allow for the satisfaction of starting, and finishing, something on the same day, as well enjoying the novella format.

It takes real skill, in this reader’s humble opinion, to set up an entire story, hell, a whole universe, round it off with a satisfying denouement and yet leave the reader wanting more. The best short story writers create this kind of magic, and I believe that Kealan Patrick Burke is cut from the same cloth.

He pares back every non essential word and phrase, leaving the reader to flesh out the bones of the tale-in this instance it is the everyday trip to the corner shop for a snack hungry girlfriend, which leaves Phil in peril.

Sometimes evil, bad, inexplicable things just happen without a reason, and in this case, Phil and his antipathy towards a screaming child are the magnets which pull Adam, the ultimate cuckoo in the nest, towards him.

Suddenly, the man who was not ready for children finds himself with a son that everyone knows existed-except him. All the things he tries to do to extricate himself from the taffy of his son’s attention drags him in deeper and deeper still.

The symbolism of the sour candy- the diametric opposite to much requested treat-is startling.Phil rapidly finds that he cannot digest anything other than candy which begins to rot him from the inside out.His entire, previously carefree existence is now gone in a flash, it now evolves around this child who is oddly well behaved, polite and invested in all the activities Phil takes him on, except when he screams to get his own way…

As a parent of a child who did not sleep till the age of 5, and who would utter ear splitting screams that would focus everyone arounds attention on your obviously shoddy parenting, I completely related to the themes explored in ‘Sour Candy’. The way that your identity is subverted by having a child, the way that everyone has an opinion on your reproductive faculties except they do not listen to what you have to say, the way that the arrival of a child can firebomb your expectations and bring you to your knees-none of this is really talked about. They are seen as gifts that many would be glad to accept-but what if you are not?What happens when you have parenthood thrust upon you and dare to admit,it’s actually not that great? Might as well build your own pyre and light that match before others do it for you.

Dark, sharply bitter and disturbing, this novella just made me want to read more by Kealan.

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