We weren’t never bad kids, we just didn’t have nothing to hold on to, that’s all. – John Sissons
John Sissons is a working class kid growing up in London’s East End during the mid 1970’s. His family doesn’t have a lot, but they do have tremendous love for each other and an undying passion for football (that’s soccer for the American crowd).
Kenny Montgomery is the strange kid who lives across the street. Overweight, socially awkward, and uncommunicative to the point one could mistake him for mute, it seems to be Kenny’s lot in life to be the butt of jokes and target of bullies.
Turns out Kenny’s abuse doesn’t end when he gets home from school. As John learns firsthand one frightening afternoon when he stops in for tea, both Kenny and his mum are the victims of physical and psychological abuse at the hands of Kenny’s alcoholic father.
A good kid at heart, John takes Kenny under his wing and the two form an unlikely friendship, one that grows for several years until their lives are irrevocably changed by two outbursts of violence.
The first finds all the pain Kenny has suffered and repressed throughout his life erupting in spectacular fashion, while the second results when John, now a dropout, and some friends plan a holdup that goes decidedly sideways. The fallout from those events sends John and Kenny down separate paths in life for the better part of a decade. When they’re finally reunited they discover that the more things change, the more they stay the same. (more…)
When I decided to turn my short story ‘The Rise and Demise of Fat Kenny’ into a novel, the biggest consideration, literally, was how to turn fifteen hundred words into sixty thousand. I knew there was a novel in there somewhere. I just had to find the key, the way in. I read and I re-read. And the same paragraph kept jumping out. It wasn’t about Ronnie Swordfish and the blood-doping scam, or how Fat Kenny had made it into the big time overnight. It wasn’t even about how he walked into the river at the end and never came out. It was this:
The past year seems to have been a bonanza for short story collections, and editor Luca Veste proves that last is certainly not least with his collection Off the Record, which was released at the end of November. 
Edited by Nigel Bird and Chris Rhatigan, Pulp Ink is a blistering collection of 24 deliciously dark tales, each inspired by a song from the Pulp Fiction movie soundtrack. Murder and madness, sex and seduction, revenge and redemption, Pulp Ink has a little bit of everything going on. A few of my favorites:
