Strange text messages portend a strange kind of apocalypse…Two brothers find themselves drawn to the only house in the neighborhood not decorated for Halloween…A man returns to his hometown to bury his overbearing mother, and finds more than memories awaiting him in the shadows of his childhood home…A young girl walks a lonely country road, recalling a rhyme that brings with it memories of death…A teenager hoping for romance gets more than he bargained for when the object of his desire introduces him to the object of hers…An aging millionaire awakes buried in a cheap coffin with only a lamp and a bell for company…The son of a woman accused of being a witch accepts the villagers’ peace offering at her funeral, but all is not quite as it seems…A woman with a violent past realizes that this year’s Halloween party may be coming for her…and a lonely trick-or-treater awakes in a house rumored to be a place of death. From Bram Stoker Award-winning author Kealan Patrick Burke comes the second in his series of seasonal collections. Featuring a brand new story “The Toll”, a new introduction, and rounded out by the author’s recommended Halloween reading and watching lists, DEAD LEAVES makes for the perfect autumnal read.
Horror Book Reviews Blog: Dead Leaves
I was itching to get back into reading a horror anthology for the Halloween season as I was a big fan of such books in my pre-teen years with books such as Tales from the Midnight Hour, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and later with Stephen King’s Skeleton Crew and Night Shift. I would curl up on the couch under the light of a table lamp when everyone would be fast asleep and scare the crap out of myself. And so, I decided to purchase Dead Leaves: 9 Tales from the Witching Season as the title seemed to be right up my alley. Dead Leaves is the second book by author Kealan Patrick Burke that I have read, the first being his novella, Blanky.
The stories in Dead Leaves were, for the most part not very scary but, of course, that is subjective. My favorites of the lot were ‘Someone To Carve the Pumpkins‘, and ‘The Toll.’ This is not to say that the other stories were not good, nor that I did not enjoy the book as Burke’s writing was impeccable and I hung on to his every word. Despite my not being scared by the book, there was an eeriness to Burke’s writing that was disturbing which is also apparent in Blanky. His writing is extraordinary, and I would be remiss not to point that out.
While I was hoping to read a few tales of horror that revolve around Halloween, Dead Leaves is a book that is not solely reserved for the Halloween season but, rather, can be read during any time of the year and will make you wish that it was the Fall. Again, while I found that Dead Leaves lacked scares, Burke’s writing more than makes up for that.