Drew Gummerson (2025) Saltburn

Drew Gummerson would be high on the list of books that need to be banned and burned in the good old US of A by the followers of the moron’s moron cult and stealer of elections he, apparently, never stole.

Short stories that become longer stories. Fey wee folk that become fucking big folk that catch up with their shopping with their dead sister who gets stroppy about what you’re buying. (It happens.) A young boy, Ginny, with a massive wanger that turns into a girl at midnight, with shades of Cinderella. Ginny nips off to Paris and marries an ‘impossibly handsome’ deep-sea diver, Jean Louis le Baptiste, who has ‘a tattoo of a sea urchin on his left arm’. He sweeps the streets and likes to bring back mementoes. It’s not supernatural, more supernormal. We all do it. But not all of us get caught in the midden of our lives.

Everything returns to Saltburn. An actual place, near somewhere, with the mandatory nuclear power station with seals that have a propensity for picking up weans and eating them alive on the mudflats, a foetus museum where kids like to jump out at you, mermaids that work the stalls and human trafficking.

There’s some bad wee fuckers, of course. Drew Gummerson is laird of the backstory (as I know having read some of his writing on ABCtales) grounded in the mundane.

For sale a surfeit of stuff a Dead Sister might want to choose from:  ‘snow globes (48p a pop)

Tiny rubber animals (12p each or five for 50p)

Cherry lipstick (68p)

A grainy black-and-white postcard of the nuclear plant (2p)

A Mexican style hat (£1.50)

A magnetic spider—with magnet (18p)

A pair of pink flip-flops (74p)

A tin of potted Best Pig! (52p)

A magnifying glass with a knife built into the handle to scrape crustaceans off rocks (99p)

A super high bouncy ball, pink (6p)

A selection of cassettes—Michael Jackson’s Thriller, The Essential Patti Labelle, The Beach Boys’ Beach Sounds (£1.05).’

If you don’t know where you are from that list then you’ve not been reading or listening. Read on.

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