The novel opens on a scorching hot summer day in Elkwood, Alabama, as Claire Lambert staggers naked, wounded, and half-blind away from the scene of an atrocity. She is the sole survivor of a nightmare that claimed her friends; and even as she prays for rescue, the killers are closing in.

In the spirit of films like Deliverance and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Kin approaches its subject matter from a different angle, examining the aftermath of such horror. In Burke’s story of teens run afoul of religious zealots in the backwoods of Alabama, the focus is on what happens after the nightmare: the grief, the trauma, and ultimately, the thirst for vengeance. In Kin, the line that separates us from evil is fragile when revenge corrupts the innocent and turns good people into monsters.

Now, Kealan Patrick Burke returns to the world of Kin with a never before published prequel novella, Cottonmouth. Set in the aftermath of the Great Depression in Tennessee, it is a time of religious fervor and charlatanism, of thieves, murderers, and moonshiners.

Here you’ll meet Horseshoe Collins, a traveler on a vengeful search for the father who abandoned him; Billy Wray, a snake-handling Pentecostal preacher bringing the promise of salvation to rural communities paralyzed by fear of the devil; and Jonah Merrill, a child grieving the loss of his beloved father and tormented by his mother’s wrath.

With the threat of a second World War looming on the horizon, destiny will bring these three people together and set innocent young Jonah on the path to his eventual fate and a new name: Papa-In-Gray, the patriarch of the dreaded Merrill family whose horrific exploits were first introduced to the world in Kin.