Currency of Souls

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.

About the Author

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 Sour Candyand The House on Abigail Lane, both 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 three 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. Kealan is represented by Merrilee Heifetz at Writers House and Kassie Evashevski at Anonymous Content.He lives in an unhaunted house in Ohio with a Scooby Doo lookalike rescue named Red.

Reviews

News