Hauling Like A Brooligan

Stephen Gallagher

Category: novels

  • KoB in the NYT

    The Kingdom of Bones gets the following nod in the New York Times Book Review: Gallagher conjures a perfect demon to symbolise the industrial era of the turn of the 20th Century in England and America in a book that “shows the occult mystery in its best light”, Marilyn Stasio said in the Book Review.…

  • Free Story Download – IN GETHSEMANE

    As promised, I’m offering my story In Gethsemane as a free PDF download to tie in with the paperback launch of The Kingdom of Bones in September. Set in the aftermath of the Great War, it follows the pairing of stage magician Will Goulston and spiritualist Frederick Kelly as they tour the lecture halls of…

  • The Kingdom of Bones

    Here’s an advance look at the paperback cover. Launch date is September 9th, 2008, and it’s available for preorder now, should you be so inclined. More info about it on the Random House website here. To tie in with publication I’ll be putting online a free novella, In Gethsemane, for a limited period. In Gethsemane…

  • Life in Transit

    The first people to find Transit found it by mistake. They got lost in the fog and, literally, stumbled inside. For centuries the only way in and out – the only known way – was on foot. As time went by the feet doing the finding included mule train hoofs, camel hoofs and, allegedly, elephants.…

  • The Thirty-Nine Steps

    I recently went back to John Buchan’s novel The Thirty Nine Steps, the template for all modern on-the-run thrillers from The Fugitive to 24 to the entire Jason Bourne trilogy. The re-reading confirmed my remembered impressions. The book has terrific narrative velocity. It also falls apart to an utterly unmemorable end, and the story doesn’t…

  • Eyes Without a Face

    On that trip to Paris a couple of weeks back I gave myself an excuse to browse the stock of the Bouquinistes, those riverside bookstalls along the Seine, for a copy of the source novel of one of my favourite films. All I knew of Les Yeux Sans Visage was that it was written by…

  • The BFS Awards

    I’ve just learned that both The Kingdom of Bones and Plots and Misadventures feature in the recommendations list for the British Fantasy Awards, voted by the membership of The British Fantasy Society and announced each year at Fantasycon. It’s not an actual nomination or even a shortlisting, so let’s not get carried away. But it’s…

  • Characters that Stick

    “Doc would listen to any kind of nonsense and change it for you into a kind of wisdom. His mind had no horizon and his sympathy had no warp.” When I was fifteen, I thought that writing couldn’t get any better than John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. I thought that no ensemble could ever be sketched…

  • Valley of Lights

    Once again, a question in the comments spawns a post… Stan, people are gonna start talking. The true answer to the question (about which of my novels I’d most like to see adapted) is The Spirit Box, for reasons I’ll go into another time, but for now here’s an extract from my afterword to the…

  • Book into Film (2)

    In the comments section, Stan asked: “On the topic of novel-to-film translations, what would be your favourites? I was very impressed with ‘LA Confidential’ and ‘The English Patient’ – they both seemed to condense large novels without really losing anything (although they did actually dispense with a lot of plot and characters). It’s a crime…