‘Currency of Souls’ – Kealan Patrick Burke

Page Count: 178 Pages

You wouldn’t have thought it possible but living in a small flat (with loads of books) makes me uniquely qualified to say this ;o) The smaller the flat, and the more books you own, the easier it is for those books to ‘hide in plain sight. And I’m pretty sure that I don’t own that many books… Either way, my books like to hide right in front of me and while sometimes it can be bloody annoying trying to find a book that I was sure I owned, sometimes it makes for a nice surprise to come across a ‘forgotten’ book and think to myself, ‘I was going to read that…’

‘Currency of Souls’ has been lurking in various TBR piles since October 2024 (thanks for the reminder Amazon) and when I came across it, the other day, I thought to myself, ‘I was going to read that’. So, before I forgot (again), that’s exactly what I did.

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...and Hell will come to Milestone.

I’d read a few of Kealan Patrick Burke’s short stories/novellas but never anything novel-length until last night. Lets say just say that…

‘Currency of Souls’ likes to play its card very close, to the chest, and not give too much away. The state I’m in at the moment (job winding down, ‘chemo-brain’ etc), I’d have been grateful for a little more context but the questions this book asks are so immediate that I just kept reading until there were no pages left to read. I really wanted to know why everybody was just sat in Eddie’s Tavern.

And the brilliant thing is that Burke answers this question not by spelling it out but by showing his readers what happens if certain conditions aren’t met. What happens? Absolute hell on earth, that’s what happens. That and the realisation that sometimes, the answer to a mystery is actually right in front of you. A mystery that becomes a threat that that can only be resolved by the most screwed up person in Milestone. An answer that is delivered on the back of some of the most hauntingly atmospheric prose that I’ve read in a long time.

In this way, ‘Currency of Souls’ makes the small town of Milestone as much a character as the people who live there. And by doing so, the book underlines its original questions with a quiet but insistent look at how a small town can die on its feet and why certain people choose to remain while that is happening. For a book that’s under a couple of hundred pages long, there is a lot happening and all credit to Kealan Patrick Burke for making it all fit together and play out so smoothly.

I really should have picked up ‘Currency of Souls’ a lot sooner then; that’s on me but at least I got there in the end. If you’re after an unsettling slice of horror that really makes you not only think about what you’re reading, but feel it too… ‘Currency of Souls’ was right here the whole time, don’t leave it as long as I did before giving it a read.

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