Genre: Horror
Length: 85 Pages
Publisher: Elderlemon Press
Release date: September 20, 2023
Synopsis:
What do you see when you look at a painting? The image, the brush strokes, the stippled canvas beneath? What if you looked beyond it? And what do you know about the person who created that picture that’s hanging on your wall? They say art requires a certain acceptable degree of madness. What secrets then lie beyond the pigment in the darkness between depiction and delusion?
Review copy provided in exchange for an honest review
Grim Portraits, the latest work from Kealan Patrick Burke, is a collection of shorts inspired by art, or maybe better, haunted by art or the artist. Kealan Patrick Burke sets up the audience with a great peak behind the curtain as it were in his introduction. I’ve discovered a lot can be gained by not skipping the introduction. Whether written by the author themselves or another, it sets the tone for what the reader is about to enjoy.
As soon as the book starts, the aim is to haunt, and haunt it does. The first story, Sometimes they see me gave the feeling that something is happening in the periphery, something felt and not seen. This story gave me a swift shock as it hits the climax. This was a crafty and cleaver tale. Kealan Patrick Burke doesn’t let up as we move to the next story.
The Binding while short packs a hell of a punch, and does so in just a few pages. The terror was palpable and nothing short of a gut punch. The following two stories, Portrait and The Acquisition, are very different tales from what came before. In the Portrait a young girl is given the inspiration she needs to become the artist her mother wanted her to be. I’m not sure it was what the young girl had expected.
The Acquisition tells the tale of a man wanting to know the meaning behind a painting. What he learns costs more than he bargained for. Again, Kealan Patrick Burke takes us to the edge of sanity with these dark art inspired short stories. The Barbed Lady Wants for Nothing holds no punches as Kealan Patrick Burke quickly blurs the lines of reality as the tables are flipped on two guys robbing a bookstore. This is a story straight out of the world of Black Mirror, and holy hell it was fantastic.
Link to purchase Grim Portraits
Kealan Patrick Burke, Biography-
Hailed by BOOKLIST as “one of the most clever and original talents in contemporary horror,” Kealan Patrick Burke was born and raised in Ireland and emigrated to the United States a few weeks before 9/11. Since then, he has written five novels, among them the popular southern gothic slasher KIN, and over two hundred short stories and novellas, including PEEKERS, SOUR CANDY and THE HOUSE ON ABIGAIL LANE, all of which have been optioned for film.
A five-time Bram Stoker Award-nominee, Burke won the award in 2005 for his coming-of-age novella THE TURTLE BOY, the first book in the acclaimed Timmy Quinn series.
As editor, he helmed the anthologies NIGHT VISIONS 12, TAVERNS OF THE DEAD, and QUIETLY NOW, a tribute anthology to one of Burke’s influences, the late Charles L. Grant.
Most recently, he adapted his work to comic book format for four volumes of John Carpenter’s TALES FOR A HALLOWEEN NIGHT series of anthologies and contributed a short story to Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden’s HELLBOY: AN ASSORTMENT OF HORRORS. He is currently at work on a new novel, MR. STITCH.
Kealan is represented by Merrilee Heifetz at Writers House.
He lives in an unhaunted house in Ohio with a Scooby Doo lookalike rescue pup named Red.
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