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The Widows of Winding Gale book cover
The Widows of Winding Gale
2025
First Published
4.60
Average Rating
183
Number of Pages

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 Widows of Winding Gale is a nightmarish homage to the seminal work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hope Hodgson, Arthur Machen, and John Carpenter.

Avg Rating
4.60
Number of Ratings
30
5 STARS
63%
4 STARS
33%
3 STARS
3%
2 STARS
0%
1 STARS
0%
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Author

Kealan Patrick Burke
Kealan Patrick Burke
Author · 67 books

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. Represented by Merrilee Heifetz at Writers House Agency.

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