Have You Read This? Kin by Kealan Patrick Burke

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre ends with the heroine Sally escaping by diving into the bed of a pickup truck. She's laughing maniacally, victoriously, as the truck drives away from the site of the massacre while Leatherface, the man responsible for most of the movie's bloodshed, can only swing his buzzing chainsaw in the air impotently, defeated. The movie ends on that note of triumph, but what if there was more to the story? Would the movie still have its impact if it followed Leatherface having to tell his family his prey escaped? Or followed Sally through her attempts to process what happened to her friends, the ones murdered by Leatherface's sadistic clan? Kealan Patrick Burke explores these questions, as well as the overall effect of trauma, in his ode to cannibal backwoods killers Kin.
Unlike Chainsaw, Kin begins with heroine Claire Lambert's harrowing escape from the diabolical Merrill family. She is naked, missing extremities, including her eye, and her body is running completely on instinct after escaping her captivity. Make no mistake that Burke does not shy away from the gory details, from describing the family's preparation of victims to the effects that horrors, like the ones the Merrills perpetrate on everyone, affect everyone in their orbit. Burke adds multiple stories, from the family that rescued Claire when they drove by, to a brother whose come home from a war only to start a new one when he discovers his brother, Claire's boyfriend, was one of those killed in the massacre. Now outside forces wanting retribution are bearing down on the Merrill clan, which is ruled with an iron fist and a Bible by Papa-In-Gray. Papa-in-Gray has trained his boys to hunt and to fight, to protect what is theirs and take what they want. It is truly unknown, as you read, who will walk away from the book's final showdown
One of the hardest balancing acts to maintain with books that don't shy away from violence is balancing it with some empathy. The advent of the movie genre "torture porn" shows the results of violence without empathy. Luckily, Burke knows how to make characters the reader can sympathize with. Even the mostly despicable members of the Merrill family show themselves to be more than cardboard monsters, particularly Luke, the son who is starting to question Papa-In-Gray's authority. If this were merely another book full of violent deaths and depictions of brutality that would make a med school student nauseous, I couldn't recommend this book, but Burke does know the craft of writing, making beautiful sentences, and showing us characters whose need for vengeance is as strong as their need to heal. While this book is not everyone's cup of bloody tea, Kin goes well beyond violence for violence's sake.