Blanky

Blanky. Such an innocuous name for something that had now cemented itself as the locus of my grief and horror and rage.

Kealan is such a master of this gut-wrenching, tragic sort of horror tale that I'd been putting Blanky off for a while despite how badly I wanted to read it. Kealan is one of my favorite authors and I'd heard many rave reviews about this novella, but as a mother of a young child, child loss has been my only trigger in recent years and I worried that picking this one up might be a mistake. As soon as I gratefully realized over the past few months that my mental health treatments have worked enough that I can stomach stories about child loss, I immediately knew it was time to read Blanky, and I'm so glad that I did.

Blanky follows a father who's recently lost his infant daughter Robin, and the sheer grief and desolation that Stephen and his estranged wife are going through is palpable. Neither of them are certain they can go on or if they should even try, and who could blame them? The grief quickly segues into terror as bizarre things start happening upon the reappearance of Robin's lost ‘Blanky', and from then on, it was an eerie, twisted little fever dream as the story unraveled. Some of the imagery in this novella was truly unsettling, and I'm certain I'll never look at an antique baby blanket the same way again.

✨ Content warnings for: infant death, choking, grief, death, imprisonment

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