#Spooktober ‘Dead Leaves’ by Kealan Patrick Burke

About the book…

Two brothers find themselves drawn to the only house in the neighborhood not decorated for Halloween…

A man returns to his hometown to bury his overbearing mother, and finds more than memories awaiting him in the shadows of his childhood home…

A young girl walks a lonely country road, recalling a rhyme that brings with it memories of death…

A teenager hoping for romance gets more than he bargained for when the object of his desire introduces him to the object of hers…

An aging millionaire awakes buried in a cheap coffin with only a lamp and a bell for company…

The son of a woman accused of being a witch accepts the villagers’ peace offering at her funeral, but all is not quite as it seems…A woman with a violent past realizes that this year’s Halloween party may be coming for her…

And a lonely trick-or-treater awakes in a house rumored to be a place of death.

From Bram Stoker Award-winning author Kealan Patrick Burke comes the second in his series of seasonal collections. Featuring seven reprints, a brand new story “The Toll”, an introduction, and rounded out by the author’s recommended reading and viewing lists, ‘Dead Leaves’ makes for the perfect autumnal read.

Beware ,gentle reader, for although Kealan Patrick Burke introduces his October/Halloween themed collection as emblematic of the sanitised ,safe way to enjoy seasonal horror, there is little to be found in the way of redemption or sanity in the pages that follow.

Embracing multiple concepts from the traditional ghost story,wickedly reverse engineered, to tales of serial killers,haunted houses and revenant, each tale resonates with autumnal vibes.

They may be dead leaves, falling from a once living source,but they find homes in our minds and,like most of his stories, tend to linger.

It’s a seasonal read for sure,but I think that any time of the year-for me it would be mid-summer, a time I loathe more than any other and tend to crawl under a rock until September starts-it can immediately place you in the foggy, getting chillier leaf strewn streets of autumn.

It brings to mind the tales we would tell each other, you can hear Kealan’s voice lulling you into that seasonal arena where we set aside the mundane, embrace our wicked sides and get ready for the best night of the year, Halloween.

Perfect for indulging in, these stories come complete with an extensive and well thought out list of recommended reads .

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