Kealan Patrick Burke

The intoxication from a pint of vodka, the electric buzz from snorting cocaine, the warm embrace from shooting heroin--drinking and drugging provides the height of human experience. It's the promise of heaven on earth, but the hell that follows is a constant hunger, a cold emptiness. The craving to get high is a yearning as intense of any blood-thirsty monster. The best way to tell the truths of addiction is through a story, and dark truths such as these need a piece of horror to do them justice. The stories inside feature the insidious nature of addiction told with compassion yet searing honesty. Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of accidental deaths, and some of the most incredible names in horror fiction have tackled this modern day epidemic. A WICKED THIRST, by Kealan Patrick Burke THE ONE IN THE MIDDLE, by Jessica McHugh GARDEN OF FIENDS, by Mark Matthews FIRST, JUST BITE A FINGER, by Johann Thorsson LAST CALL, by John FD Taff TORMENT OF THE FALLEN, by Glen Krisch EVERYWHERE YOU'VE BLED AND EVERYWHERE YOU WILL, by Max Booth III RETURNS, by Jack Ketchum

"If you are hiding from yourself, don't expect anyone else to see you." Everyone has a secret. Everyone is someone else when the world isn't looking. Sometimes that person is good, sometimes that person is not. In SECRET FACES, Bram Stoker Award-winning author Kealan Patrick Burke's latest terrifying collection of short stories, you'll meet thirteen people who discover the horror of what happens when those secret faces are removed and the true darkness that dwells within us all is unleashed."one of the most clever and original talents in contemporary horror" - Booklist

This second annual anthology from LampLight Magazine collects the four great issues from September 2013 to June 2014 Includes the complete novella, The Devoted, featuring Jonathan Crowley, by James A Moore. Fiction and interviews from our featured writers: Norman Prentiss, Kealan Patrick Burke, Mary SanGiovanni and Holly Newstein. J. F. Gonzalez continues his history of the genre in his Shadows in the Attic series. LampLight Classics brings you some great classic stories. Fiction by: Michael Knost, Christopher Bleakley, Emma Whitehall, David Tallerman, M. R. Jordan, Lauren Forry, Dave Thomas, Arinn Dembo, Bracken MacLeod, doung jai, Tim W Boiteau, Alethea Eason, Lucy A Snyder, Colleen Jurkiewicz, Curtis James McConnell, Victor Cypert, Catherine Grant

Our featured artist is Kealan Patrick Burke. He brings a brand new story called "Memory Lane." Jonathan Crowley continues his adventures, with Part Two of James A Moore's serial novella, The Devoted. J. F. Gonzalez brings us part 3 of his From the Stone Age to the Early Victorian Era, in 3000 Words, talking about Late Victorian ghost stories through the early pulps. We have fiction from Lauren Forry, Dave Thomas, Arinn Dembo and Bracken MacLeod. Featured Artist Kealan Patrick Burke Bram Stoker Award winning writer Kealan Patrick Burke brings a new story to LampLight. He talks with us about his early writing, acting, and his experience writing a web based novel. Serial Novella James A Moore The Devoted, Part Two: The Rabble. Crowley and his companion make their way to a small town and see what they can stir up. Shadows in the Attic J. F. Gonzalez From the Stone Age to the Early Victorian Era, in 3000 Words, Part Three. In this installment, J. F. Gonzalez takes you through the Victorian era into Edwardian, talking about ghosts and the first pulp magazines.

An omnibus collection of four novellas by Bram Stoker Award-winning author Kealan Patrick Burke (Kin, The Turtle Boy). Featured in this book are: THE TENT - The perfect getaway... The perfect place to hide... Hocking Hills, Ohio is an oasis for campers, hikers, nature enthusiasts, and for those who just want to get away and lose themselves in the wild. And as long as you follow your guide's advice and stay within the permitted areas, you can expect to survive the night. Because deep within the dark woods, something insidious awaits, something few have ever seen, something ancient, unknowable, and insatiable. If you go down to these woods today, you won't live to see the sunrise... YOU IN? - For years the Wickerwood Inn has stood abandoned, home to nothing but dust and the trapped echo of past celebrations...and tragedy. For a down on his luck ex-gambler, the inn's reputation is a thing of myth, and certainly not reason enough to turn down the first paying job to come his way in months. The inn will soon be renovated in preparation for a new lease on life. So tonight, from midnight till six, Peter Haskins will watch over the machinery. And he will soon discover that there is something else in the hotel with him, something that needs no new lease on life, for it has never died. And never will. SELDOM SEEN IN AUGUST - Wade Crawford is not a good guy. He's a bank robber and a ruthless killer, and now three people are dead and Wade is on the run. With the cops hot on his heels, he breaks into a seemingly ordinary house in a seemingly ordinary neighborhood to hide and wait on word from his partner. But this neighborhood is far from ordinary. Indeed it has a very specific purpose, and soon Wade will discover that life in prison would be preferable to the hellish torment Seldom Seen has in store for him. MIDLISTERS - Meet Jason Tennant, a writer of violent horror novels whose career is mired firmly in a maddening swamp of frustration somewhere north of nowhere and south of success. He is a midlister, those thankless souls who labor in the shadows of sometimes better, sometimes luckier writers, and it's starting to take its toll. Meet Kent Gray, wildly popular author of a string of so-called "sex-fi" novels. He's wealthy, handsome, and the object of Jason Tennant's professional jealousy. Welcome to Baltimore, Maryland, and the Aurora Science Fiction & Horror Convention, where these two men, midlister and bestseller, will meet for the first time, and the midlister motto "Better Read Than Dead" will be put to the ultimate test.

Enter a world in which a man can make birds fall from the sky and the future can be found in the pages of a comic book...a world in which a thief can pick the worst possible target and find himself stalked by his bounty...a dark place where the written word can be used, quite literally, to draw blood...and the Pied Piper can step out of fairytale to bring horror to a small town. Enter the world of RAVENOUS GHOSTS. Herein you'll find nineteen tales of mystery, madness, and monsters by Bram Stoker Award-winning author Kealan Patrick Burke. With an introduction by Jack Cady and a new afterword by the author.

STAGE WHISPERS is an omnibus collection of novellas featuring Timmy Quinn, who made his first appearance in the Bram Stoker Award-winning story THE TURTLE BOY in 2004. Over the course of thirty years, we follow a boy cursed with the ability to see ghosts and doomed to serve them, into adulthood, as he battles murderers and monstrous revenants in his struggle to find those responsible for violating the veil that separates the realm of the living from the land of the dead. From the sunlit banks of a pond in the American Midwest to a haunted, wind-ravaged island off the coast of Ireland, STAGE WHISPERS represents an epic voyage through the darkness both supernatural and all-too human. Included in STAGE WHISPERS, you'll find all four novellas in the series: THE TURTLE BOY, THE HIDES, VESSELS, and PEREGRINE'S TALE, the short story "Genesis", and a new introduction by the author.

The lonesome sound of a long forgotten train draws an old man to memories of a horrific past... A journalist makes the mistake of visiting a website where real-life executions are the order of the day... At the foot of an old tree, an insidious evil awaits two boys digging for treasure... A browbeaten salesman finds hope and a possible escape from the banality of his world when he returns home to find a fairytale beanstalk sprouting from his garden... A man resists the social pressure to quit smoking and puts himself at an unimaginable risk... A high school student accepts a dare to ask out a disfigured girl and enters a world of pain and violence... A comedian finds himself faced with a most peculiar and deadly audience... The pariah of a village accepts an offer of peace at his mother's funeral, but the olive branch may have hidden thorns... A bunch of barflies doomed to murder sinners get together for one last drink in a dying town... These are just some of the passengers, headed for a ride through the dark uncharted regions of the heart and mind...on The Number 121 to Pennsylvania. "In 14 dark fantasies collected here, Burke creates characters whose angst opens them up to uncanny incidents and ghostly encounters that seem an extension of their own spiritual malaise... Burke shows skill at imagining expressive supernatural experiences appropriate for his well-developed characters and their agitated emotions." - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY "Don't read it late at night." - BOOKLIST "Each tale grabs you within the first few sentences and never lets go, resulting in a collection guaranteed to take you on one of the scariest rides of your life." - RUE MORGUE

Welcome to Eddie's Tavern, the only functioning waterhole in a near-dead town. Among the people you'll meet tonight are: Tom, Milestone's haunted lawman, who walks in the shadow of death; Gracie, the barmaid, a wannabe actress, doomed to spend her hours tending bar in a purgatory of her father's making; Flo, the town seductress, who may or may not have murdered her husband; Cobb, a nudist awaiting an apology from the commune who cast him out; Wintry, the mute giant, whose story is told only in cryptic messages scribbled beneath newspaper headlines; Kyle, the kid, who keeps a loaded gun beneath the table; and Cadaver, who looks like a corpse, but smells real nice, and occupies his time counting stacks of pennies. And then there's Reverend Hill, who will be in at eleven, regular as clockwork, to tell them who's going to die, and who's going to drive. Welcome to Eddie's, where tonight, for the first time in three years, nothing will go according to plan...and Hell will come to Milestone.

Kate Mansfield and her blind brother Neil live in a manor on the edge of the Brent Prior moors, a dreary place populated by the dispirited and the disillusioned, where the young nurture desperate dreams of escape. And Kate is no different. But her plans to run away to the city are crushed one very ordinary morning by an inexplicable act of violence. In the wake of the tragedy, Kate's beloved father is stricken by a strange illness, and she and her brother fall under the care of the manor's caretaker and maid. Then, as if attuned to the melancholy that has stricken Mansfield House, a fog rolls in. Villagers begin to vanish. Lithe fleeting shadows are glimpsed in the mist, and a disfigured man arrives in Brent Prior. A man who has come back to settle an old score. A man who calls himself the Master of the Moors.

A new novel by the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of THE TURTLE BOY. On a scorching hot summer day in Elkwood, Alabama, Claire Lambert staggers naked, wounded, and half-blind away from the scene of an atrocity. She is the sole survivor of a nightmare that claimed her friends, and even as she prays for rescue, the killers -- a family of cannibalistic lunatics -- are closing in. A soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder returns from Iraq to the news that his brother is among the murdered in Elkwood. In snowbound Detroit, a waitress trapped in an abusive relationship gets an unexpected visit that will lead to bloodshed and send her back on the road to a past she has spent years trying to outrun. And Claire, the only survivor of the Elkwood Massacre, haunted by her dead friends, dreams of vengeance... a dream which will be realized as grief and rage turn good people into cold-blooded murderers and force alliances among strangers. It's time to return to Elkwood. In the spirit of such iconic horror classics as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Deliverance, Kin begins at the end and studies the possible aftermath for the survivors of such traumas upon their return to the real world -- the guilt, the grief, the thirst for revenge -- and sets them on an unthinkable journey... back into the heart of darkness.