Callum McSorley's Blog, page 18

The Tattoo by Rick Brooks on Aether & Ichor

Around summertime I joined up with fantasy website Aether & Ichor as a guest editor.

Now, one of the first pieces I worked on with them has been published, and you can check it out on the A&I website here.

The Tattoo by Rick Brooks is the story of slimy corporate fixer, womaniser, and all-round bastard Leo, whose brush with a strange young woman in a bar could be his chance for redemption.

Read on…

Aether & Ichor is a fantasy website based in Edinburgh. They published my short story Naoko in...

Shoreline of Infinity 10

Issue 10 of Shoreline of Infinity is now out, featuring some great sci-fi short stories, flash fictions, and a book review of Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 by yours truly.

Shoreline of Infinity is an Edinburgh-based sci-fi magazine. You can get the new issue, and back issues, here.

Below is a snippet of what I thought of Robinson’s climate-fiction tale of a drowned New York City.

Review: New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

New York, New York, it’s a helluva town! So goes the song, a...

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Hera sat beneath the reindeer skeleton. It was made of aluminium and flashing fairy lights; its innards were red and gold baubles. It towered three metres above, from bolted-down hoof to the tip of its great antlers, where the electric cable fed into the window of the department store. And in the space between its feet, under its hollow body, was a dry patch of pavement, free from the slush and brown grit of mid-December snowfall, free from tramping boots and swinging shopping bags. Here Hera...

War is Over

McKinney got the football for Christmas. It arrived on the 24th, last post till after New Year. John got chocolate and a card. He ate half the bar in one go, then gave the rest away, brick by brick. He kept the card under his tin hat.

They sang hymns that morning, Christmas Day. They heard the other side singing too. Couldn’t understand the words, but understood them to be hymns nonetheless. They had the same mournful quality. They lacked the righteous upper register of women and children in...

Folktale of New York

I was in New York last December on holiday. Following both guide book recommendations and obvious curiosity I visited McSorley’s Old Ale House on East 7th Street in Manhattan. There’s no relation here, just coincidence. Inside, it hasn’t changed much since John McSorley (my father’s name, another coincidence) opened it in 1854. The unvarnished wooden floorboards are covered in sawdust. Beer-barrels are repurposed as tables. They sell two drinks: light beer and dark beer, which come in half pi...

Miracle on Rubik Utca

Unfortunately, Pista was also a weedy kid. He was poor, wore ragged second-hand clothes, had sallow skin like a Romani, had no parents, and lived in the orphanage on Rubik Utca in the eighth district. Each of these alone was reason enough to make him a target. But, unfortunately, Pista was also a weedy kid. That made him the prime target. He was a head shorter than the majority of the other thirteen-year-old boys he went to school with, and skinny like a homeless dog, which, those other boys...

Something was Stirring: Seasonal Tales of Horror

Ho! Ho! Ho!

In the sprit of the season I’m releasing a free ebook of Christmas horror stories.

In a tradition that dates back to the Victorians – and mostly carried on today in films – people would gather around the fireplace on Christmas Eve and terrify each other with tales of ghosts and goblins and grisly murders.

This also occasioned plenty of eggnog, sherry, brandy, whisky and other Christmas treats. ‘More of gravy than the grave’ is true enough.

The book can be downloaded from Amazon or...

Creative Conversations with Christopher Brookmyre

[In September, Scots crime writer Christopher Brookmyre spoke to Louise Welsh at Glasgow Uni as part of their Creative Conversations series. This article was originally written following that talk on 19/09/17]

‘“A” is for Alibi, “B” is for Burglar… she must be dreading that day when she has to write a book about xylophones,’ says Christopher Brookmyre about Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone Alphabet series of crime novels. (Grafton’s currently on “Y” is for Yesterday, and sidestepped the tricky l...

Pulp 2 influences: Neil Gaiman

I took a long time coming round to read Neil Gaiman. A combination of being told an unflattering anecdote about him and seeing him on a 2000AD documentary explaining how he cried when Alan Moore told him how he would have completed his cancelled series The Ballad of Halo Jones put me off.

(Plus reading a puke-inspiring interview with Gaiman and his wife, singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer, and there’s a kind of Breaking Bad/Game of Thrones effect where you reject it because you’re sick of being...

Pulp 2 influences: Stephen King

This is an obvious one, I guess – the master of suspense, the aeroplane novel extraordinaire, Stephen King.

Often – as he would complain himself through his work, particularly in the character of Paul Sheldon in Misery – the ire of literary snobs, King is nonetheless an inventive and sharp writer, as John Gardner put it in The Art of Fiction: “Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind… The most elegant techniques in the world, filtered through a junk...