When I heard, months ago, that The Widows of Winding Gale was coming October 2025 from Earthling Publications, I was beyond ecstatic. Kealan Patrick Burke (Sour Candy, Kin) is a writer who is deeply attuned to dread. It’s textures, silences … it’s slow and patient bloom. In The Widows of Winding Gale, he turns his talent toward an isolated Irish island already half-claimed by hardship, loss, and the attrition of time. The result is a richly maritime, folkloric nightmare that marries the rhythms of classic weird fiction with Burke’s signature emotional horror. Let’s talk about it.
The Widows of Winding Gale is equal parts ghost story, mythic legend, and elegy, wrapped in the salt-bleached grief of a community on the verge of vanishing. The novel opens in the shadow of World War II, a moment when absence is already a familiar presence in Winding Gale. Young people are gone either in death, victims to the brutality of life on a rugged island, or to better futures on the mainland. Burke narrates this grief with quiet precision, letting the reader feel the heaviness of an aging community, where every remaining life is threaded with unspoken memories. So, when the men of the island vanish on a fishing trip, the loss feels less like a rupture and more like a horrific continuation. A familiar story unfolding in a not familiar and uncanny way.
The Widows of Winding Gale transforms the idea of disappearance into not only the tragedy it is, but into myth. An unexplainable green mist rolls in, essentially sealing the women off from the world even further. Bizarre spiral symbols, eerie and ritualistic, begin appearing along the shoreline. Voices, both seductive and mournful, coax the living toward the sea. The ships emerging from the mist like ghosts rising, stones and dead fish arranged into sigils, the uncanny hum of something ancient beneath the waves. These elements of classic folk horror, in Burke’s hands, are wielded with such immediacy they feel fresh and new. His imagery echoes Coleridge, Hope Hodgson, and Machen without feeling derivative. Instead, The Widows of Winding Gale reads as a living conversation with these writers, a continuation of maritime weird rather than a simple homage.
At the very center of this strangeness are women. They are mothers, sisters, widows-in-waiting, and survivors. Burke’s portrait of them is the emotional heart of the book. Their grief is communal yet deeply individual. Their fear is tempered by a fierce and hard-earned resilience. When the threats become impossible to ignore, the women of Winding Gale become Burke’s battleground for exploring themes of inherited trauma, generational duty, and the oft-overlooked ferocity of those left behind.
What sets The Widows of Winding Gale apart from other island-locked horrors is how Burke renders femininity not as vulnerability but as endurance. These women are not passive victims of the male’s disappearance or supernatural intrusion. They are fully realized characters whose relationships shape the course of the story. Their quarrels, loyalties, secrets, and shared history create a living community worth fighting for. And when the dead begin to rise, literally and metaphorically, the story becomes about what it means to stand your ground in the face of forces older and colder than the sea itself.
Burke’s prose is taut and lyrical, slipping effortlessly between quiet melancholy and explosive terror. His command of atmosphere is masterful. Fog seems to seep into every page, the ocean feels like a living antagonist, and every shadow carries the potential for revelation or ruin. The pacing is deliberate, building toward a crescendo that balances intimate character moments with sweeping, mythic horror.
One of The Widows of Winding Gale‘s greatest strengths is its sense of place. Winding Gale feels ancient, not in age but because of the accumulation of stories, sorrows, and whispered beliefs that Burke weaves into every paragraph. The island is both cradle and coffin. Burke understands the psychological landscape of isolation. It breeds superstition, binds people together, and susceptible to both wonder and terror. The events that unfold feel not just believable, but inevitable. As though the island has been waiting for this fog, this night, this unraveling.
While The Widows of Winding Gale pays homage to maritime horror traditions like ghost ships, the drowned but not dead, sirens and the treacherous magic of Samhain, it also feels thoroughly modern. Burke explores the emotional toll of war, the erosion of rural communities, and the stark realities of women forced to rebuild in the aftermath of tragedy. The horror itself is personal and maybe a little bit ancient, evil rising from the deep, yet also quieter and subtler, the hauntings of loss and generational decay.
Ultimately The Widows of Winding Gale is a remarkable achievement. A modern folk-horror tale steeped in myth and saltwater, carried by the fierce emotional core of the women who anchor its story. It is one of Burke’s most haunting work to date, a testament to his ability to blend the intimate with the epic and the human with the unearthly. Eerie, elegiac, and unforgettable, the novel is a storm I am grateful to have braved. Thank you to Paul over at Earthling Publications for sending me an ARC.
You can find more from Kealan Patrick Burke at Abebooks, his website, or follow him on Instagram.
Images via Earthling Publications
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