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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.
Reviewed by Lit Amri for Readers' Favorite
“Four months to the day he first encountered the boy at Walmart, the last of Phil Pendleton’s teeth fell out.” Phil Pendleton comes across a screaming child with his strangely worn-down mother in the candy aisle. The bizarre pair causes a ruckus that forces the store manager to try dealing with them. During this chaos, the child offers Phil a sour candy which he accepts before leaving the store. On his way home, the same haggard woman from the store rear-ends his car. From that moment on, Phil’s day that had started so perfectly quickly turns to hell.
Sour Candy by Kealan Patrick Burke is a demonic twist on parenting duties that one man unfortunately has to accept. The child, Adam, forced himself into Phil’s life and changes everything. Everyone strangely agrees that the child is his. Proof of Adam’s existence as his son suddenly appears out of nowhere, and Phil could no longer deny them or seek help from the police. He has to play along, while figuring out what the child really wants. I greatly sympathized with the protagonist and feared for his sanity.
On the whole, Burke’s Sour Candy is a brilliant psychological horror novella that delves deeper into the human psyche. The page turning quality of this twisted horror story had me forgetting other things and simply wanting to read on – I finished this book in just one sitting. It’s a quick read but exceptionally well-written and the story will linger in readers’ mind for quite some time. Thanks to Burke, I’ll stay away from any screaming kid in a store.
