Callum McSorley's Blog, page 18

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...

Pulp 2 influences: Charles Dickens

One of the most famous and lauded storytellers of all time, Charles Dickens may seem an unlikely character to pop up in a blog about authors who influenced my book of pulp stories, but the way Dickens’s stories contained scenes of poverty and violence which shocked and outraged the public of the time and were serialised in magazines (replete with cliff-hangers) had a direct impact on the later pulp magazines and penny dreadfuls and shilling shockers.

He also had an admirable social conscience...

Pulp 2 influences: Philip K Dick

If you’ve not read him then you’ve at least seen a film adapted from one of his stories. From classics of cinema like Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) to big budget summer blockbusters like Minority Report and schlocky B-movies like Screamers (Second Variety), there’s shelf-loads of sci fi films based on the work of Philip K Dick.

Seriously, the list goes on: A Scanner Darkly, Total Recall (We Can Remember It for You Wholesale), The Man in the High Castle, The Adjustment Bu...

Pulp 2 influences: No Mean City

I first read No Mean City while at university, on a course called The Glasgow Novel. It sat alongside the likes of Alasdair Grey’s Lanark and James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late.

Published in 1935, it shocked the public of the time with its depictions of violence and poverty in Glasgow’s notorious slum, The Gorbals, during the 1920s. (The Gorbals was probably only marginally improved by the publication date, the east end of Glasgow nearly 100 years later still being an area where many li...