Jordan Colley

It doesn't matter what you believe. The dead don't need your belief, no more than the sun needs your permission to shine. But to say you don't feel it, each and every year at this time, the tightening of the air, like a rubber band pulled to near breaking, is to fool yourself for your own comfort. This is when the veil is thinnest, and if you listen, you can hear them at the threshold, whispering (ch.7).

What a delightful, fast-paced read to ring in the spooky season! With a nod to John Carpenter and The Fog specifically, I hoped I was in for some atmospheric dread and that's what I got.

Burke sets the book in 1941 on a small remote island off the coast of Ireland. The story focuses on a small group of women whose husbands have not returned from a fishing expedition. As night comes and the fog rolls in, the women must survive whatever has been awakened.

The horror expands visually:

...he saw dark shapes passing over and around those blue lights. The silhouettes told him that at least some of them were kin to the thing they'd hauled aboard, but he glimpsed other things too, bigger things. Men, women. Human-like arms, barbs, open mouths with spindly teeth. Things that were like squid and octopi and manta ray and conger eel, and things that were like nothing at all. And then something bigger than them all, something bigger than the island, encroached upon that submarine world and blackened out the lights (ch.9).

Then, without warning, the story erupts into violence:

“How's the arthritis, Mammy?” he asked and snapped all her fingers at once (ch.8).

The characters occasionally speak in short Gaelic phrases to give the novella some specificity of place:

“Cá bhfuil siad, Michael? Bhfuil fhios agat? (Where are they, Michael? Do you know?)” she asked the grave now, the fog rising like steam from the gentle mound before her, but her brother had no answers (ch.7)

The Widows of Winding Gale is a novella, so the events move quickly and there's fairly little downtime in the story. I was pleasantly surprised that while the book captured the atmosphere of The Fog, it wasn't simply a retread of that story. The ending shoehorned in an extra element that I thought detracted from the focus of the story, but overall this was the perfect palate-cleanser after Augustus to transition into more Halloween adjacent reads. The book even takes place on All Hallow's Eve!

Burke, Kealan Patrick. The Widows of Winding Gale. Kealan Patrick Burke, 2026, e-book.