Jack & Jill

When they were kids, Gillian and John used to visit the local cemetery every Sunday after church. It was a curious place for children to frequent, but they had their reasons. The main attraction was the lofty hill that separated the cemetery from the elementary school, and the act of tumbling down it like Jack and Jill was a ritualistic escape from the abuse they were suffering at their father's hands. It was an escape that lasted only until John's tragic death. Now, Gillian is all grown up. Married with two children, she has managed over the years to force the trauma of her nightmarish childhood into the darkest recesses of her mind. But lately there are dreams, and in them Gillian sees impossibly vivid reenactments of the horrors she endured as a child. Nightly, she sees John die all over again, only not in the way she remembers. And something else is in those dreams, stalking her, a terrible figure with wire-hanger hands and a plastic bag wrapped around its rotten face. A monster whose reach starts to extend beyond the boundaries of sleep into the waking world, threatening everything Gillian holds dear. A monster she once called Daddy.

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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