#BookReview ‘Jack and Jill’ by Kealan Patrick Burke

About the book…

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

‘Jack and Jill’ was published in 2017 in paperback and ebook formats by Creat Space and Elderlemon independent publishers(the latter is Kealan’s own publishing company) and I read it last night, continuing my newly found obsession with his works-buying them up as quickly as I can afford to!

As with ‘‘Blanky’ and ‘Sour Candy’, Kealan takes the horror of internalised grief, and situational trauma, to create a very real sense of dread, lingering evil and despair. Known as Jack and Jill, John and Gillian grew up in a house where the abuse their father perpetrated on them both was at best ignored, at worst colluded with, by their mother. Their escape was in rolling down the hill, as in the nursery rhyme, literally and figuratively trying to move themselves beyond their sphere of existence, trapped in a hell which no one seemingly knew about.

The use of the nursery rhyme title is really effective, the things that you learn by rote stay with you for life, leaving an indelible stain on your conscience so even when you read a title such as this, your mind automatically fills in the lines of the rhyme.

As Gill grows up and has a family of her own, her grip on reality starts to fracture from 2 directions- her daughter is approaching the same age that she was when abuse began and her brother has died, leaving her the sole survivor. This has resulted in her lossening grip on her mental health, nightmares which begin to seep into her daytime world and a truly terrifying figure which haunts her nightmares. Finding solace in alcohol, she descends further into her mind, distancing herself from her children, her husband and her job. As the two worlds begin to encroach and reality slips into her nightmare world, Gill has no choice but to confront the worst moments of her life, moments created by a monster wearing a human face…

This story is incredibly, needfully dark. It deals with the trauma of abused children, the closeness that it brings between abused siblings and the way that these formative experiences echo down the rest of a person’s life. There is subtlety and nuance in amongst the grief and the horror, the nightmares catch the breath in your throat as you think ‘Dear God has this woman not suffered enough?’, yet this is the burden she bears alone now that John(Jack) has died. However, it is not a tale steeped in melancholy-the love that Gill feels for her children, her relationship with her brother and her strength in being able to stand up and tell the police what was happening to them, resulting in her father’s imprionment, has a strange beauty which permeates the horror.

Again, the way that Kealan writes in such a short space-100 pages-is a thing to behold, he takes less than a third of what most writers would use in terms of page numbers and fills it with three times as much depth, meaning and story. He creates vividly realised siutuations, places and characters which stay with you, and endings which have you thinking into the wee small hours-and in this case, falling down a rabbit hole reading reviews and interviews-because, I will give you a headsup, do not expect a neat and tidy conclusion, There is very rarely one in real life, and here, there is so much room for the reader to make up their mind, I would recommend trying to work your conclusion out for yourself, reaching out to others who read this novella, and then reading reviews. It will not only help how you feel about the story which goes to the darkest of places, but also bring you into touch with Kealan’s growing number of readers.

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