BLANKY by Kealan Patrick Burke

Kealan Patrick Burke has rocked it again with his latest novella and lands an effective balance of sadness and terror in this story about a man who loses his infant daughter to crib death and struggles to move on. But things take a darker turn when his daughter's blanky reappears, the blanky that was buried with her.

Burke takes one of the most horrific things that can happen to a parent and punches it up even more with the idea that there might be something much darker behind it all. And like most of the writers I love, his writing is deceptively simple, where you believe for a while that you're reading a simple horror tale because it has all the regular trappings, but then Burke sneaks up and punches you in the nose with genuine emotion and you realize that you're reading something else entirely. It also works in the reverse as well, where you think you're comfortably reading simply a well-written melancholy novella about the loss of a child, but then Burke turns your head and shows you something that creeps the crap out of you.

Can't wait to read even more of his work.

GRADE: B+