back

THE HIDES
by Kealan Patrick Burke
(Cemetery Dance Publications, 156 pp., hc, $40.00, ISBN# 1-58767-120-4, 2005)

The challenge in writing a series of continuing episodes from a character's life is making each one stand on its own, without requiring prior familiarity with the previous works. I was a ways into this one before realizing it was a follow-up to Burke's earlier Stoker Award-winning novella The Turtle Boy. I've yet to read that one, but it didn't matter one bit. Everything you really need is right here.

The Hides rejoins the life of Timmy Quinn six years after his debut tale. He's now 17 years old and still contending with a longstanding problem: Timmy sees dead people, and dead people see him right back. Worse, they've met foul ends and look to him to play a role in settling old scores with the living. When a family crisis sends Timmy and his father on a move from Ohio to Ireland, where they put down new roots with Timmy's grandmother Agatha in the harbor town of Dungarvan, both father and son are naïve enough to hope that he can leave the past behind him.

This kind of thing never really works out as planned, does it?

Dungarvan, where Burke was born and raised, may have been the wrong haven for the wrong kid, but it provides an abundance of elements for a tale of vengeance from beyond the grave that's traditional in approach but contemporary in feel. Burke's use of locale and its history is inspired -- this is a story that couldn't take place just anywhere -- especially a local leather factory where the elder Quinn lands a job that not a lot of people are after. During their first drop-by, Burke renders the place in such Boschian detail that you really have to wonder why there's no staff psychologist on full-time duty. As the past gradually forces itself on the present, it culminates in a manifestation of vindictive fury that's perfectly logical yet surprising and original.

If there's one lapse here, it's that Timmy's father generally doesn't seem as well defined as the rest of the characters. He fares better by the end, but most of the time he's a bit of a cipher compared to the others. Certainly, Timmy is an appealing character, as resourceful as he is vulnerable, and Agatha glows from the page. Even Aldous, Timmy's late grandfather who's only spoken about, emerges as more vivid. It may be that his father was better realized in The Turtle Boy, and in this instance prior familiarity would help paint a more distinctive picture.

And I suspect that it wouldn't hurt to have read The Hides before moving on to Burke's forthcoming Vessels, his next Tim Quinn offering. While The Hides stands complete, Burke is clearly working on a larger canvas, weaving his own mythology of the lands of the living and the dead, and the Curtain that separates the two.

Seeing as how the ending here is as sharp and cold as an ice pick, this is one curtain that keeps out the darkness rather than the light.