Currency of Souls: A Novel

Welcome to Eddie's Tavern, the only functioning waterhole in a near-dead town, a town unlike any other, because Milestone is alive, attuned to the good and evil in the people who call it home. 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. From Publishers Weekly: "...a gripping horror novel whose motley cast of characters drink the evening away in a seedy bar, Eddie’s Tavern, in a dying town called Milestone. Each is stained by--and may even have caused--an ugly death that still haunts him or her… At the haunting conclusion, escape proves only a brief respite from damnation." From Booklist: "Burke's sharp-edged prose includes enough unforgettable characterizations and dollops of macabre wit to distinguish him as one of the most clever and original talents in contemporary horror." From the Agony Column: "Burke writes one memorable sentence after another, ratchets the action up at an alarming pace and by the time the going gets weird, you know that Burke is a pro… You get that collection of odd personalities, each with a great backstory. But you get those backstories in the context of a really, really eventful night at the ol’ Tavern. Lives will end, at least for a short while. Undeaths will begin. Murders will be committed and if not solved, perhaps they’ll get resolved." From the Rocky Mountain News: "Bram Stoker Award-winner Burke spins a weird, frightening tale of despair and redemption with a deft touch of irony."

From Publishers Weekly

Burke expands on the bar-tale theme of his 2005 anthology, Taverns of the Dead, in a gripping horror novel whose motley cast of characters drink the evening away in a seedy bar, Eddie's Tavern, in a dying town called Milestone. Each is stained by—and may even have caused—an ugly death that still haunts him or her. Reverend Hill acts as judge and jury, ordering the barflies to go punish others in order to make restitution for their past sins. But then someone torches the bar, revealing the true evil crouched at the core of this beer-soaked corner of hell. Sheriff Tom Turner, who just wants "things to be the way they were before my wife died... before we all ended up here as slaves to our sins," bargains to save the town, but the cost may be too much to bear. At the haunting conclusion, escape proves only a brief respite from damnation. (Feb.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Burke's anthologyTaverns of the Dead (2004) featured stories of supernatural shenanigans in beleaguered barrooms. Now he takes the conceit a step further in his own gruesome dissection of the tormented patrons of Eddie's Tavern. In the deteriorating back-road town of Milestone, Eddie's is the lone watering hole for an assortment of angst-ridden locals, ranging from mute, giant Wintry McCabe to Milestone's sheriff, Tom Turner. Each carries the burden of having directly or indirectly killed someone, and each endures a ritual Saturday-night assignment from the diabolical Reverend Hill to rid the world of another evildoer and thereby cancel out his or her sins. But when the good reverend is dispatched by a bullet, and Eddie's burns to the ground, the stakes in the game of redemption become higher than anyone could have imagined, and Milestone's haunted citizens soon learn their purgatory may be everlasting. Burke's sharp-edged prose includes enough unforgettable characterizations and dollops of macabre wit to distinguish him as one of the most clever and original talents in contemporary horror.^B Carl HaysCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From the Inside Flap

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.

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.

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