- B R A M S T O K E R A W A R D - W I N N I N G A U T H O R -
Kealan Patrick Burke
NEW NOVEL: THE WIDOWS OF WINDING GALE
Coming in October 2025 from Earthling Publications.
For the people on the rugged Irish island of Winding Gale, life has always been hard. now in the wake of the second World War, the island is dying, the young taken away by death or the appeal of better lives elsewhere, leaving behind only a handful of adults.
But on the night the men of the island disappear while fishing in uncharted waters, the women are forced into a conflict with something both new and unfathomably old.
A strange greenish mist rolls in, cutting off the island from the mainland. Spiral symbols appear in the sand, fashioned from dead fish and stones. Seductive voices lure people from their homes to walk into the sea. Ancient ships materialize in the fog. And specters of the past will rise to take their vengeance in blood.
Because this is Samhain, a time when the veil between the living and the dead is thinnest, and there is something rising from the deep that will thrust the women of Winding Gale into a war against an unspeakable evil.
From Kealan Patrick Burke, the Stoker Award-winning author of Kin and Sour Candy, The Windows of Winding Gale is a nightmarish homage to the seminal work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hope Hodgson, Arthur Machen, and John Carpenter.
With cover art and interior illustrations by Glenn Chadbourne and an introduction by Nathan Ballingrud.
You can download a PDF file of CHAPTER ONE here.
“A lonely island, a fog rolling in, missing fishermen, and a hideous evil emerges from the sea…The Widows of Winding Gale is pitch-perfect, spine-tingling horror. Burke gives a master class in isolation and dread, so chilling that the author should take a bow at the end.” — Christopher Golden, New York Times bestselling author of The Night Birds and All Hallows
"Atmospheric, intelligent, and wise, Winding Gale mines the classic haunting story and invents something new. It's a joy to read." — Sarah Langan, bestselling author of Good Neighbors and A Better World
"The Widows of Winding Gale is a terrifying aquatic hellscape, an insane mashup of monsters and folklore and the occult, with a black, briny beating heart bursting with vengeance and death. A cold, wet, tentacled nightmare that will haunt you." — Philip Fracassi, author of Boys in the Valley and The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre
“The Widows of Winding Gale is one of the best horror stories I've read in a long time. It is many kinds of horror story at once: a ghost story, a sea monster story, a town under siege story, a story about grief and thwarted dreams, a story about profound isolation. You're in for a treat.” — from the introduction by Nathan Ballingrud, author of Cathedral of the Damned
NOW AVAILABLE: COTTONMOUTH (The Prequel to KIN)
A thrilling prequel to Kealan Patrick Burke's southern gothic horror novel KIN, COTTONMOUTH is set in the aftermath of the Great Depression in Tennessee, a time of religious fervor and charlatanism, of thieves, murderers, and moonshiners.
Here you'll meet Horseshoe Collins, a traveler on a vengeful search for the father who abandoned him; Billy Wray, a snake-handling Pentecostal preacher bringing the promise of salvation to rural communities paralyzed by fear of the Devil; and Jonah Merrill, a child grieving the loss of his beloved father and tormented by his mother's wrath.
With the threat of a second World War looming on the horizon, destiny will bring these three people together and set innocent young Jonah on the path to his eventual fate and a new name: Papa-In-Gray, the patriarch of the dreaded Merrill family whose horrific exploits were first introduced to the world in KIN.