The Ballad Of Billy Lopez

Name: The Ballad Of Billy Lopez
Price: 22.0000 USD
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 978-988-8833-95-5

Stewart McKay

English , 2024/11 Proverse Hong Kong

Tags: Fiction, Novel, Set in HK

220 x 145 mm , 208pp ISBN / ISSN : 978-988-8833-95-5

US$22.00

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Set in a small southern US town in the late 1980s, THE BALLAD OF BILLY LOPEZ is the story of Brad, a disaffected seventeen-year-old from a difficult home, whose Pa drinks too much and whose Ma tries her best, really she does. Brad sees the world for what it is, and performs tricks on anonymous men for money behind Yates’s wholesale. He recently got into one fight too many and had to start seeing a doctor. The Doc has asked him to start keeping a diary. Brad isn’t sold.

In class one day Brad is forced to work with straight-A dweeb, Billy Lopez, whose leg Brad just happened to break in a soccer game the month before (the latest in a long list of things that keep going wrong but are never Brad’s fault). The pair reluctantly strike up a partnership, before discovering more in common than they would ever have expected.

As Billy and Brad’s friendship develops, they find in one another things they lack in themselves. They spend the summer together: camping, drinking, talking, exploring... They grow closer, grow physical with one another – acts that Brad describes in his unique, matter-of-fact narrative style. Billy grounds Brad, and helps him to see that he is more than his upbringing, and that his dysfunctional family isn’t irredeemable. In turn, Brad teaches Billy how to let loose sometimes, to be a teenager; while realising that Billy’s cookie-cutter family life, with all its cable TV and en-suite bathrooms, isn’t quite what it seems.

What starts out as an awkward alliance between two very different boys develops into an impulsive, eye-opening, and ultimately devastating romance.

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“A deeply moving, and engaging counterpoint to Catcher in the Rye, The Outsiders, and even Huckleberry Finn, The Ballad of Billy Lopez is a spirited psychological X-ray of ‘two amazingly insignificant people’. While at turns ironic, comic and tragic, this bildungsroman ultimately refuses conven-tional classification of both form and, especially, character. I am reminded of my reaction to George Eliot’s work. Though stylistically as far from each other as it is possible to be, both Eliot and Stewart insightfully explore the complexity of internal being as it relates to and reacts against powerful social forces without. Both argue convincingly for ethical and categorical relativity. Yet Stewart McKay’s novel eschews the pedantic as it poignantly reveals and delves into the most singular of love stories.”

–George Watt, winner of the Proverse Prize 2020 (The Finley Confession)

“A breathtaking debut by an extraordinary new talent, Stewart McKay’s novella took me on a startling road trip into the psyche of Brad Hart, a boy coming to terms with his sexuality, and with his place in the world. Ranging in mood from the blackest comedy to the deepest pathos, it is as visceral as a slaughterhouse, a literary tour de force.”

–Sadie Kaye, Broadcast Journalist and Filmmaker

“The Ballad of Billy Lopez is an exciting and delightful read from beginning to end ̶ a web of controversial issues, like commercial sex and homosexuality, intertwined with the problems of master signifiers, like love, writing, sex, imagination, and the subtle presence of the “professional supposed to know” (“Doc”) who, in this case, isn’t in possession of any real knowledge. Reading the novella is like reading a contemporary Dostoevskian Notes from Underground, written to be read as a free flow of (un)interrupted thoughts and impressions of a teen’s mind, clumsily packed, like the unconscious, into a dialectal, syntactic, semantic, and intentionally chaotic mess, where language always says the truth even when it intends to cover it. McKay demonstrates an enviable ability to stage a seemingly uncontrollable material while the reader knows only too well that the writer has utmost control over every little detail of it from the beginning to the end.”

–Dr Ahmed Elbeshlawy (Savage Charm (Proverse, 2019))

"This tender, funny, bittersweet coming-of-age book pulls no punches, and keeps you rooting for the main characters all the way to the last page."

–Jan Lee, Editor-in-Chief, The Apostrophe

"Stewart McKay has created a highly relatable community in 1980s small-town America, with the forbidden romance of Brad and Billy at its core. A coming-of-age story told through the voice of a disaffected teenager, it explores love, sex, friendship, family, pain, healing, and much more besides. A moving, memorable, and often poetic ballad of adolescent experience."

–Sam Powney, Editor and Poet (Special Characters, 2024)

STEWART MCKAY graduated from the University of Stirling in 2007, with a honours degree in English Literature and History. Having previously lived in Thailand, he moved to Hong Kong in 2012, working as an ESL teacher, tutor, and examiner. An active member of the Hong Kong Writers Circle, he has contributed to several of their anthologies, and edited two of them HK24 (2017) and Lost in Transition (2023). His flash fiction and short stories have appeared, and have been shortlisted for prizes, in online publications, such as Grindstone Literary, Raconteur, Fiction Factory and Free Flash Fiction.

Stewart uses his fiction to explore the minutiae of what makes us human, for better or for worse. While literature can and should explore the essence of the human condition, he believes that it should always remember to entertain the reader as it does so, and he hopes that a seam of humour, often dark, runs through all his work. His writing covers topics ranging from sexuality, to aging, to various speculative visions of how our future might pan out, to full-on post-apocalyptic nightmares.