A FREE Online Novella by Kealan Patrick Burke
Starting today, we’re serializing “Saturday Night at Eddie’s,” the standalone novella that opens Kealan Patrick Burke’s acclaimed new novel, Currency of Souls, due to ship in early February.
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.
Limited: 750 signed numbered hardcover copies: $40
Lettered: 15 signed copies housed in a custom traycase: $250
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 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 committed and if not solved, perhaps they’ll get resolved.”