Blood and Porridge – Ian Smith's blog on WordPress

January 19, 2025January 19, 2025

The man from another place has gone to another place

From wikipedia.org / © Georges Biard

For the past few days, I’ve felt like wearing a black armband while I sip my cups of coffee. That’s because David Lynch, visionary maker of movies, short films, TV shows, web series, music videos and commercials, and artist, musician and actor to boot, passed away on January 15^th.

In his cinematic output, Lynch was surely one of the most American of film directors. His work was suffused with Americana, both the cosy variety populated by porches, picket fences, lawns, sprinklers, diners, coffee, pie and kindly, neighbourly folk; and the flashier variety whereby bequiffed, leather-jacketed Elvis wannabes and peroxide blondes cruised along endless highways in big, finned sports cars. This being Lynch, though, submerged beneath the Americana and frequently bubbling to its surface were things altogether weirder, darker, more surreal and twisted. There was as much Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel and William S. Burroughs in his work as there was Edward Hopper, Frank Capra and Ray Bradbury. Meanwhile, though Lynch’s themes, motifs, imagery and stylistic touches felt unique – no wonder ‘Lynchian’ became a word – he wasn’t afraid to dress his visions in the clothes of familiar genres: horror, thriller, crime noir, science fiction and – something Lynch didn’t get enough credit for – comedy.

Anyway, here’s a guide to my favourite parts of the David Lynch film-and-TV universe.

Favourite Lynch cast

Lynch’s version of Dune (1984) was a box-office flop and received much abuse from critics. (Dung, I remember the New Musical Express calling it.) Unfortunately, Dune’s old-school producer Dino De Laurentiis wanted the doorstop-sized and labyrinthine Frank Herbert novel on which it was based crammed into a regulation two-hour movie. The condensed result didn’t make much sense.

© Dino De Laurentiis Corporation / Universal Pictures

But Lynch never worked with a better troupe of actors. It even outshone the cast that, four decades later, Denis Villeneuve assembled for his telling of the story in 2022 and 2024. The Lynch Dune features Kyle MacLachlan, Jurgen Prochnow, Francesca Annis, Kenneth McMillan, Paul Smith, Patrick Stewart, Richard Jordan, Freddie Jones, Sian Phillips, Virginia Madsen, Jack Nance, José Ferrer, Everitt McGill, Brad Dourif, Max von Sydow and Dean Stockwell. Oh, and Sting – more on him in a minute.

Favourite Lynch collaborator

That would be Jack Nance, who played Henry Spencer, lead character in Eraserhead (1977), the film that put Lynch on the map. With his impassive features, bouffant, tight suit and peculiar gait, Nance contributes as much to the film’s atmosphere as the elements that today we’d regard as typically Lynchian – the mutant baby, the lady in the radiator, the flickering lights, the industrial noise. Thereafter, he was in all Lynch’s film projects (apart from 1980’s The Elephant Man) up to 1997’s Lost Highway. He most famously played the amiable, fishing-and-chess-obsessed Pete Martell in Twin Peaks (1990-91), Lynch and Mark Frost’s oddball, sometimes barmy, occasionally confounding TV murder whodunnit, which coincidentally was a soap opera, comedy, horror story and science-fiction drama too.

© AFI Center for Advanced Studies / Libra Films

Nance’s life sounds pretty rough. His film work was intermittent and in the mid-1980s he worked as a hotel clerk to make ends meet. His second wife Kelly Jean Van Dyke (Dick Van Dyke’s niece) committed suicide. And he had severe alcohol problems. During the filming of Blue Velvet (1986), he was in such a state that Dennis Hopper – Dennis Hopper! – had to drive him to a rehabilitation centre. In 1996, Nance died of a subdural hematoma, resulting from a ‘blunt force trauma’. The previous day his face was bruised and he told friends that he’d been punched during a brawl he’d got into with some strangers in a doughnut shop. Lynch said in tribute: “There’s not another actor I can think of who could fill his shoes. I had roles in my head for future films that I was saving for Jack. I cannot think of anyone else who could do it.”

Favourite Lynch funny bit

The other day at work I was discussing Lynch’s passing with a colleague. I started enthusing about the sequence where Nicolas Cage and Willem Dafoe try to rob a feed store in Wild at Heart (1991) and how funny it was: “Willem Dafoe trips and falls on his shotgun and it goes off and you see the top of his head flying up in the air… Meanwhile, there’s a wounded clerk who’s had his hand blown off at the wrist… His colleague comforts him by saying modern surgery can reattach his hand… And then you see a dog running away outside with the hand in its mouth…”

At this point I realised my colleague wasn’t laughing with me, but was looking decidedly queasy. He didn’t seem happy to be reminded of that sequence. Which shows humour is subjective. Still, I think the attempted robbery in Wild at Heart is Lynch’s funniest moment.

© PolyGram / Propaganda Films / Samuel Goldwyn Company

Favourite Lynch musical bit

Lynch was a musician, so music played a big role in his films – right from Eraserhead, when the lady in the radiator sings In Heaven. In his final major work, Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), the long-awaited third season of his celebrated TV show, music wasn’t so much an element as a fixture. Each episode ended with a scene in the Roadhouse, the bar / concert venue in the town of Twin Peaks, where a musical act would be performing. Given Twin Peaks’ small size and remote location, the Roadhouse attracted some unfeasibly big names: Julee Cruise, the Cactus Blossoms, Rebekah Del Rio with Moby on guitar, and one Edward Louis Severson – Eddie Vedder to you and me.

But in my opinion, the act that rounds off Episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return is best of all. It’s the fearsome electro-metal juggernaut Nine Inch Nails, whom the Roadhouse MC introduces as the Nine Inch Nails, no less.

© Dino De Laurentiis Corporation / Universal Pictures

Favourite Lynch musician in an acting role

Lynch was also fond of putting singers and musicians in his casts. Many remember Sting playing Feyd-Rautha Harknonnen, evil nephew of the equally-evil Baron Harkonnen, in Dune. I’m not a fan of Sting’s acting but visually, with his spiky blonde hair, lean frame and daft codpiece, he was striking. Indeed, when I saw Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part 2 and Austen Butler strolled into view as Feyd-Rautha, my first thought was: “Oh look, there’s what’s-his-name in the Sting role!”

© Twin Peaks Productions / New Line Cinema / CiBy 2000

However, my favourite Lynchian musical-cameo comes in the middle of Twin Peaks’ cinematic prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992). This is when David Bowie pops up as Phillip Jeffries, an FBI agent who’s been mysteriously missing for two years. One morning, he suddenly steps out of a lift at FBI headquarters. He proceeds to babble gibberish at FBI agents and Twin Peaks regulars Dale Cooper, Albert Rosenthal and Gordon Cole (Kyle MacLachlan, Miguel Ferrer and Lynch himself): “Who do you think this is, there…? I found something. And then there they were!” Then he narrates a trippy dream montage involving dwarves, killers, masks, disembodied mouths and long-nosed spectres. And then he vanishes into thin air. “He’s gone!” squawks McLachlan. “He was never here!” retorts Ferrer.

Bowie died early in 2016, before Twin Peaks: The Return began filming, which seemed to rule Philip Jeffries out of the third series’ storyline. However, Lynch did include Jeffries. Only now the disappearing agent is a giant teapot voiced by an actor called Nathan Frizell doing a Bowie impersonation.

David Bowie turned into a teapot. Only David Lynch could do that.

© Lynch-Frost Productions / Showtime Networks

Favourite Lynch sad bit

Because of the nightmarish aspects of his work – it’s not the majority of their content, but it’s the stuff that lingers in viewers’ minds – Lynch isn’t readily associated with pathos. Yet there are moments in his films that I find incredibly sad. In The Elephant Man, for instance, it’s when the titular character John Merrick (John Hurt) escapes from the freak show owned by the evil Bytes (Freddie Jones), with the help of the show’s other inmates. A dwarf, played by Star Wars’ Kenny Baker, remarks ruefully: “Luck, my friend, luck. Who needs it more than we?” Or in Twin Peaks: The Return when Deputy Hawk (Michael Horse) says a final goodbye to the ailing Margaret Lanterman, aka the Log Lady. This is made more poignant by knowing that Log-Lady actress Catherine Coulson died early in the third season’s production.

But my number-one Lynch sad moment is probably the ending of The Straight Story (1999), when Alvin (Richard Farnworth) finally makes it to the shack of his dying brother, Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton). They’re two old codgers, one using walking sticks and the other a Zimmer frame, and clearly aren’t used to expressing their feelings. But Lynch, with some basic dialogue (“Did you ride that thing all the way out here to see me?” “I did, Lyle.”), some silence and some anxious, exhausted looks and expressions from his actors, conveys a huge amount of emotion.

© Asymmetrical Productions / Film4 / Buena Vista Productions

Favourite Lynch scary bit

Obviously, there are lots of scary bits in Lynch’s oeuvre. I imagine he’d have been miffed if you described his works as ‘horror’ films, but he more than earned his entry in any ‘Encyclopaedia of Horror’.

Particularly freaky to me were several things in Twin Peaks and its 2017 sequel. The image of Killer Bob (Frank Silva) crawling over a sofa in the original series was terrifying. Twin Peaks: The Return featured in its first episode a strange experiment involving a big glass box and a mass of surveillance equipment that eventually conjures up a phantom entity. Unfortunately for the guy monitoring the experiment – who’s inopportunely chosen this moment to have it off with his girlfriend – the entity is equipped with kitchen-blender fingers and It proceeds to reduce their heads to bloody confetti. Also horrific is a sequence in a later episode wherein Deputy Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) tries to calm a hysterical woman at the wheel of a stalled car and a convulsing, vomiting zombie-like creature slowly rises out of the seat beside her. This is never explained or referred to again – a perfect, scary Lynchian moment in other words.

And I remember sinking into my cinema seat, not wanting to look at the screen too much, during Lost Highway (1996), when Lynch’s camera starts prowling deep – deep – into the black recesses of the house belonging to Fred (Bill Pullman), the film’s initial hero. That sequence had a real primordial chill to it.

But for my money, the scariest Lynch moment is the ‘Winkie’s Diner’ sequence in Mulholland Drive (2001). A man sitting in the diner (Patrick Fischler) recounts two dreams he’s had, both of which take place there. In each dream he’s been possessed by an inexplicable fear – and a man with a hideous face living behind the diner, whom he can see ‘through the wall’, seems to be responsible. When a companion suggests he exorcises the memory of the dreams by checking behind the real diner, he reluctantly complies. So they venture along the side alleyway, and… What follows is one of the very few jump-scares in cinematic history that actually made me jump.

© Lynch-Frost Productions / Spelling Entertainment

Favourite Lynch speech

Miguel Ferrer’s Albert Rosenthal, the arrogant FBI pathologist who assists Kyle MacLachlan’s Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, gets my vote here. During the first season, Albert is very vocal about his low opinion of the town of Twin Peaks, which results in him getting punched out by Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean). During the second season, when Truman’s ready to punch him out again following a particularly cutting jibe – “You might practise walking without dragging your knuckles on the floor” – Albert responds to the threat of violence with an impassioned speech explaining that he’s happy to be a knob-end if it helps him in the greater scheme of things, i.e. in the struggle against evil. Oh, and he’s a committed pacifist too.

“While I will admit to a certain cynicism, the fact is that I’m a naysayer and hatchet-man in the fight against violence. I pride myself in taking a punch and I’ll gladly take another because I choose to live my life in the company of Gandhi and King. My concerns are global. I reject absolutely revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love. I love you, Sheriff Truman.”

No wonder Cooper tells the dumfounded Truman afterwards, “Albert’s path is a strange and difficult one.”

© De Laurentiis Entertainment Group

Favourite Lynch villain

There are a good many contenders for this too: Killer Bob in Twin Peaks, Willem Dafoe’s Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart, and Kenneth McMillan’s Baron Harkonnen in Dune, who’s basically a levitating, leering sack of pus. But at the end of the day, my ‘Favourite Lynch Villain’ award has to go to Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth in Blue Velvet.

The scene where the black-clad, slick-haired Frank assaults Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) whilst acting out a deranged sexual fantasy, screaming things like “Baby wants to f**k! Baby wants to f**k blue velvet!” and slurping gas out of a canister is astonishing. It’s made even more harrowing by the fact that the hapless Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) is hiding nearby in a closet and has to witness it all. This is the moment when the preppy, clean-cut Jeffrey discovers life is a lot more complicated, in a bad way, than he thought. No wonder he laments: “Why are there people like Frank? Why is there so much trouble in this world?”

So, thank you David Lynch. Your oeuvre was sometimes comfortingly genial, sometimes perplexingly weird, sometimes shockingly dark – but it was always fascinating. I raise a damn fine cup of coffee in your honour.

© Lynch-Frost Productions / Showtime Networks

January 1, 2025January 10, 2025

My 2024 writing round-up

© The Sirens Call Publications

“Well, 2024 was an excellent year!” No future historians will say, ever. Come to think of it, because of events in 2024, there might not be any future historians. Not any future, full-stop.

However, on a personal level, 2024 saw some improvements in my situation. Firstly, in March, my partner and I, and our cat, moved apartments in our current city (and country) of abode, Singapore. We’d been in an expensive condo, inhabited mostly by rich Western and Chinese expatriates, in a modern part of the city-state. We moved into a cheaper and more modest condo in an older and more traditional district where our neighbours are nearly all Singaporean. It’s so much nicer. For one thing there are no spoilt, bratty kids running riot outside our front door because the unfortunate Filippino / Indonesian / Burmese girls hired by their expat parents as ‘maids’ or ‘helpers’ and made to look after them are afraid or unwilling to discipline them. Also, our new neighbourhood is handier for getting to our work and has several notable Hawkers’ Centres and eateries offering a range of good but modestly-priced foods. Singapore is generally expensive and its Hawkers’ Centres are one of its saving graces.

Secondly, I had a successful year with regard to my writing. Indeed, in terms of short stories published, 2024 even topped 2023, when 15 of my stories made it into my print. This has been my best writing year to date.

So, here’s a round-up of my stories published in 2024. Details are provided about who published them, what pseudonym they were published under and, when possible, how they can be accessed today.

As Jim Mountfield:

Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I stick on my horror fiction, was first published in 2024 at the end of January when the story Underneath the Arches was included in the quarterly fiction-and-poetry magazine The Sirens Call. Heavily inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, Underneath the Arches was written by me at a young age – and I think it shows in the florid writing style. However, I was grateful to The Sirens Call for giving the story (which’d languished on my computer hard-drive for decades) a home at last. Alas, The Sirens Call ceased publication late in the year and I can no longer provide a link for downloading its past issues.
In April, Issue 11 of The Stygian Lepus featured my ‘cosmic-horror’ story The Followers, which was set in the English city I lived in from 2002 to 2005, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Specifically, it was set in two parts of it, Grainger Market and Chinatown on Stowell Street. Issue 11 can be read here if you become a member of The Stygian Lepus’s Back Catalogue; or purchased here.

© The Stygian Lepus

April was also when my Northern-Ireland-set short story The Crawler, which involved a devious policeman and a collection of sinister dolls, appeared in 2024’s second issue of The Sirens Call.
And in July the next – and unfortunately, the last ever – issue of The Sirens Call contained my sci-fi / horror story The Colony. This was set in East Anglia after manmade climate change has hoicked up temperatures and sea levels. Its premise was that scientists had created, through genetic engineering, millions of giant jellyfish-like organisms and tethered them offshore in order to hold back storm surges and reduce coastal erosion. Obviously, nothing could go wrong with this scheme. Nothing at all…
The Hole in the Wall was a ‘folk-horror’ story about a member of an organisation modelled on Britain’s Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) who’s researching a couple of pubs. First, he visits a horrible dump of a pub; then he stumbles across a pub that’s so classy it seems too good to be true. And yes, the second one is too good to be true because it has a mysterious, malevolent something lurking in its walls. The Hole in the Wall appeared in Volume 18, Issue 12 – the October 2024 edition – of Schlock! Webzine, which can be purchased here.
Also in October, my story The Activation was the opening number in the anthology Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024, the annual volume of scary fiction published by Cloaked Press. As the collection’s title suggests, its theme this year was body horror, described by Wikipedia as “a subgenre of horror fiction that intentionally showcases grotesque or psychologically disturbing violations of the human body or of another creature…” including “aberrant sex, mutations, mutilation, zombification, gratuitous violence, disease, or unnatural movements of the body.” The Activation contained about five of those things, so I think it fitted the bill. It was also a prequel to my story The Nuclei, which appeared in the 2020 collection Xenobiology – Stranger Creatures. Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024 can be purchased on Kindle here and as a paperback here.

© Cloaked Press

In November, a Jim Mountfield story appeared in the collection Monster: Underdog Anthology 2024 from Leg Iron Books. A monster of a book indeed, this featured 39 spooky stories, including my Halloween-set effort Bag of Tricks. The story was inspired by a memory I had of riding on Bangkok’s Skytrain one October 31^st when some Thai kids entered the carriage wearing fancy dress, presumably on their way to a Halloween party; but most of Bag of Tricks actually takes place in Scotland. Monster: Underdog Anthology 2024 can be bought on Kindle here and as a paperback here.
The Tears of the Pontianak, which appeared in the Samhain 2024 edition of the magazine The Hungur Chronicles, published in November too, was a first for me. This was my first published story where the setting is my current home, Singapore. As you can tell from the title, it’s mainly about a Pontianak, a blood-drinking demon of Malaysian, Singaporean and Indonesian folklore. But the idea for the story actually came to me one afternoon when I was exploring Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum and encountered some beautiful pieces of local, antique furniture. The Hungur Chronicles’ Samhain 2024 issue can be purchased directly from Hiraeth Publishing here or from Barnes & Noble here.
Coming from a farming background, quite a few of my stories are set on farms. However, I only had one ‘farm-horror’ story published in 2024. This was in Issue 19 – the December 2024 edition – of The Stygian Lepus and its title was Rack and Ruin. It owed something to the legendary American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, although the Lovecraftian elements were mixed with the mud, muck and rain of a hill farm in autumnal southern Scotland. Again, Issue 19 can be read here if you’re a member of The Stygian Lepus’s Back Catalogue; or simply bought here.
The influence of H.P. Lovecraft could also be seen in The House of Glass, the final Jim Mountfield story I had published in 2024. As its title implies, most of the action takes place inside a house made almost entirely of glass. The house stands in the mountains of Sri Lanka, the country where I lived in real life from 2014 to 2022. The House of Glass appears in the anthology Swan Song: The Final Anthology, which, sadly, is the last volume to come from Trevor Denyer’s Midnight Street Press – from now on, Midnight Street Press will exist only to sell what’s on its back catalogue, not to produce anything new. It can be purchased from Amazon UK here and from Amazon US here.

© Swords and Sorcery Magazine

As Rab Foster:

Rab Foster, the pseudonym I use when writing fantasy fiction – usually the unruly sub-genre of fantasy called ‘sword and sorcery’ – hit the ground running in 2024. On January 1^st, the second and final part of my story The Boots of the Cat appeared in Volume 18 Issue 3 of Schlock! Webzine. This was about a group of mercenaries who, while sequestered in an unwelcoming city, find themselves in a strange scenario inspired by a famous fairy tale. And no, despite the title, that fairy tale isn’t Puss in Boots. The issue can be purchased here.
Because of a publishing delay, the December 2023 edition of the fiction magazine Savage Realms Monthly didn’t appear until January 2024. It contained my story Pit of the Orybadak, which combined fantasy elements – slimy flesh-eating monsters slithering around in a giant bog – with the pertinent real-life theme of how soldiers are treated (or mistreated) when they become prisoners of war. This issue of Savage Realms Monthly can be bought here.
The Fleet of Lamvula, a heady story inspired by my love of ‘lost graveyards of ships’ stories, and the movies of Ray Harryhausen, and the trippiest song ever recorded, Black Sabbath’s Planet Caravan, appeared in late January in Issue 144 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine. The story can now be read in Swords and Sorcery Magazine’s archive, here.
In July, my Rab Foster story The Drakvur Challenge made it into the pages of Issue 3 of Crimson Quill Quarterly. This was a milestone for me, being (by my calculations) the 100^th short story I’ve had published. The Drakvur Challenge was inspired by a visit I made to Tirta Gangga Royal Water Garden in Bali, Indonesia – a place I found fascinating because of its beautiful ponds, fish, fountains and networks of stepping stones… while, stowed away in a compound at the back, it also had some surprisingly monstrous-looking statues. However, like much of my fantasy fiction, The Drakvur Challenge owed a big debt to the cinematic marvel that was Ray Harryhausen too. Issue 3 of Crimson Quill Quarterly can be obtained as a paperback here and on Kindle here.

© Crimson Quill Quarterly

August saw the appearance of my story The Scarecrow of Terryk Head in Issue 151 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine. In it, one of my recurring fantasy-fiction characters, Gudroon the Witch, had to deal with not only the evil scarecrow of the title but with three doltish farmers – and with three even-more-doltish farmers’ sons. Again, The Scarecrow of Terryk Head is now available to read in the magazine’s archive, here.
In November, Rab Foster strayed into the controversial sub-genre of fantasy known as ‘grimdark’ and served up a tale of violence and gore, nihilism and despair, entitled The Mechanisms of Raphar. (What, I wonder, inspired this? What event in the real world in November 2024 could have induced nihilism and despair in me?) Owing something to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum (1842) and also something to the ’10 Courts of Hell’ display at Singapore’s most remarkable museum, Haw Par Villa, The Mechanisms of Raphar appeared in Volume 18, Issue 13 of Schlock! Webzine. The contents of this issue were available to read for free at the publication’s website during November but haven’t yet turned up for sale in book form. When the issue is available for purchase, a link for it will appear at the bottom of Schlock! Webzine’s archive page, here.

© Schlock! Webzine

As Steve Cashel:

Steve Cashel, the penname I put on non-horrific, non-fantastical and often crime-tinged stories set in Scotland, had one piece published in 2024. In fact, it appeared only yesterday, on December 31^st, the final day of the year. It’s called Malkied and appears on the short-fiction page of the website for the crime-and-mystery publisher Close to the Bone. It’s accessible here.

And finally…

This is cheating. Self-publishing doesn’t count. But on September 18^th, 2024 – the tenth anniversary of Scotland’s referendum on independence – I took the opportunity to post on this blog a short story entitled Mither, which I’d written in 2014 soon after I’d heard the referendum’s result. A mixture of Scottish politics and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), it was too weird to ever get properly published. (Still, even if I say so myself, I think Norman Bates and his mom are a good metaphor for Scotland and the divisions between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ voters that supposedly materialised at the time.) Anyway, if you’re interested, you can read it here.

So, I had 17 short stories published in 2024, which makes it my most successful year as a writer ever. I suspect I will be hard-pressed to equal or better that record in 2025, however. That’s because of the recent disappearances of certain magazines (like The Sirens Call) and publishers (like Midnight Street Press) who have published my stuff regularly in the past.

Meanwhile, 2025 looks like it’s going to be garbage, largely due to Donald Trump regaining the American presidency, which will embolden fascists, climate-change deniers, anti-vaxxers and conspiracy-fantasist nutjobs around the world. I suspect even somewhere as famously stable as Singapore will be affected, negatively, by the USA turning into a mafia state / an oligarchy / the political equivalent of a meth lab. And there’ll be extra, unwelcome input from Elon Musk… Oh well. My strategy for surviving 2025 with my sanity intact will be to keep my head down and keep writing.

© The Sirens Call Publications

December 31, 2024December 31, 2024

Steve Cashel gets malkied

© Close to the Bone Publishing

Malkied – a Scottish word meaning ‘murdered’ – is the title of a short story of mine that has just appeared today, New Year’s Eve 2024, on the website of the crime and mystery fiction publisher Close to the Bone. It’s attributed to Steve Cashel, the pseudonym I use when I write Scottish stories, often with a crime-related bend.

I suspect Close to the Bone scheduled Malkied for publication today because it’s set in Edinburgh, and Edinburgh is famous for its Hogmanay Street Party held every December 31^st to welcome in the New Year. However, by a sad irony, this evening’s Edinburgh Street Party has just been cancelled on safety grounds. The weather forecasters have warned that the city tonight is going to be dangerously stormy. A few Edinburgh Hogmanay events are still going ahead, though. These include the New Year’s Eve concert at the George Street Assembly Rooms featuring the excellent indie-rock band Idlewild, whom I’ve seen play live on no fewer than four occasions; and, also at the Assembly Rooms, the New Year ceilidh – among the ceilidh bands providing music for it is the brilliantly-named Jimi Shandrix Experience.

Malkied is inspired by a real-life incident that involved my brother… And that’s all I’m saying, because I don’t want to give anything away about its plot. It can be accessed here.

And meanwhile, a Happy New Year to you all.

December 26, 2024

The wave

For the last decade I’ve lived in southern and southeastern Asia. During that time, the shadow cast by the tsunami that struck 14 countries on December 26^th, 2004, has never seemed far away. Triggered by an earthquake off the coast of Aceh in Sumatra, northern Indonesia, the tsunami claimed approximately 228,000 lives. The worst devastation occurred in Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka, all three countries recording the tsunami as the worst-ever natural disaster in their histories. Today, December 26^th, 2024, is the 20^th anniversary of the tragedy.

My partner and I lived in Sri Lanka from 2014 to 2022. We weren’t there long before we began to notice memorials to, see lingering traces of and hear people talk about the tsunami, which slammed into the island’s eastern and southern coasts, claimed over 30,000 lives and displaced over 1,500,000 people from their homes.

For instance, in 2020, we stayed briefly in the southern town of Tangalle, where we hired a local tuk-tuk driver, going by the nickname of Dash, to take us to the tourist attractions in the neighbourhood. Dash told us his house had been destroyed by the tsunami and now, 16 years later, he was still trying to build a replacement house further inland. Its ground floor was complete but something had delayed the construction of the first floor.

Also, my work required me to stay a few times in the same hotel in the northeastern town of Trincomalee. There, I got to know the barman, who was a southerner. His tsunami story was that he got trapped by rising waters whilst on a bus east of Galle, southern Sri Lanka’s biggest town. Despite the water, the bus passengers decided it’d be safer to stay on board the vehicle. He disagreed with them, climbed out through a window, started swimming and made it to safety. From what he heard later, he believed the other passengers had died. The disaster disabled the local mobile-phone network and he recalled afterwards having to beg coins off someone, then having to stand in a long, long queue at an old payphone so he could contact his family to let them know he’d survived.

However, what really brought the horror of the tsunami home to us happened while we were having a weekend break in the seaside town of Hikkaduwa in southeastern Sri Lanka. We heard about the village of Peraliya, a few miles up the coast. The statistics of the tsunami’s carnage were so tragically overwhelming that they hid a more particular fact – that because of it, at Peraliya, Sri Lanka also experienced the world’s worst rail disaster.

I’ll let Wikipedia relate the details: “The 2004 Sri Lanka tsunami rail disaster is the largest single rail disaster in world history by death toll… Train #50 was a regular train operating between the cities of Colombo and Matara… On Sunday, 26 December 2004, during the Buddhist full moon holiday and the Christmas holiday weekend, it left Colombo’s Fort Station shortly after 6.50 AM with over 1,500 paid passengers and an unknown number of unpaid passengers with travel passes (called Seasons) and government travel passes…

“At 9.30 AM, in the village of Peraliya, near Telwatta, the beach saw the first of the gigantic waves thrown up by the earthquake. The train came to a halt as water surged around it. Hundreds of locals, believing the train to be secure on the rails, climbed on top of the cars to avoid being swept away. Others stood behind the train, hoping it would shield them from the force of the water…

“Ten minutes later, a huge wave picked the train up and smashed it against the trees and houses which lined the track, crushing those seeking shelter behind it. The eight carriages were so packed with people that the doors could not be opened while they filled with water, drowning almost everyone inside as the water washed over the wreckage several more times. The passengers on top of the train were thrown clear of the uprooted carriages, and most drowned or were crushed by debris…

“…the Sri Lankan authorities had no idea where the train was for several hours, until it was spotted by an army helicopter around 4.00 PM. The local emergency services were destroyed, and it was a long time before help arrived… Some families descended on the area determined to find their relatives themselves. According to the Sri Lankan authorities, only about 150 people on the train survived. The estimated death toll was at least 1,700 people, and probably over 2,000, although only approximately 900 bodies were recovered, as many were swept out to sea or taken away by relatives. The town of Peraliya was also destroyed, losing hundreds of citizens and all but ten buildings to the waves. More than 200 of the bodies retrieved were not identified or claimed, and were buried three days later in a Buddhist ceremony near the torn railway line.”

Today, when you enter Peraliya along the coastal road from the south, you’ll see a monument to the victims called Tsunami Honganji Viharaya on the right-hand, inland side. It consists of an 18.5-metre-high Buddha statue rising from an islet in a rectangular pond, built on the spot where the tragedy occurred. Although the statue was erected with donations from Japan, it’s actually a reproduction of one of the Bhamian statues in Afghanistan that were dynamited and destroyed by those ignorant bigots in the Taliban in 2001.

When we visited the monument, there was – and perhaps still is – a small building by the entrance with the words TEMPLE OFFICE painted on its side. Inside, we found a gallery of photographs taken in the tsunami’s immediate aftermath. Some of them recorded such carnage they were difficult to look at. Among the less graphic photographs, one showed the local rail-tracks after they’d been twisted into steel squiggles by the strength of the water.

A little further, on the road’s left-hand, seaward side, there’s a non-religious memorial to the victims, consisting of a plaque, a column and a scene carved onto a wall of grey and rust-orange stone representing the destruction immediately after train and village had been hit. It shows piles of bodies, masonry and smashed palm trees, sections of wrenched-up and misshapen rail track, and upended train carriages, some with corpses hanging from their windows. It’s startlingly candid – indeed, it probably shocks some Westerners, accustomed to such memorials in their own cultures avoiding explicit details and being discretely abstract, so as not to upset traumatised survivors and grieving relatives.

The 2004 tragedy at Peraliya has two poignant footnotes. The locomotive that’d been pulling the carriages, and two of the carriages themselves, were eventually retrieved from the disaster scene, rebuilt and repaired and now, every year on December 26^th, they return to Peraliya to take part in a religious ceremony held in remembrance of those who lost their lives. Secondly, one of the small number of survivors was a train guard called W. Karunatilaka. His sense of duty was such that following the disaster he continued to work on the Colombo-to-Galle train service. He was still serving on that coastal route in the mid-2010s.

A much more personal record of what the tsunami did in Sri Lanka that day is provided by Sonali Deraniyagala’s memoir Wave (2013). This records how she lost her husband, two sons and parents when the tsunami swept into Yala National Park on the south coast and how she dealt with – often couldn’t deal with – the emotional and psychological devastation that followed. Indeed, the ‘wave’ of the book’s title may refer to the massive grief she felt during the ensuing years as much as to the tsunami itself. I found the book a tough read indeed. However, it’s worth noting William Dalrymple’s appraisal of Wave when he reviewed it for the Guardian. It was “…possibly the most moving book I have ever read about grief, but it is also a very, very fine book about love. For grief is the black hole that is left in our lives when we lose someone irreplaceable…”

I only realised a few days ago that the 20^th anniversary of the tsunami was coming up. By a coincidence, my partner and I spent a pre-Christmas holiday in Khao Lak, the part of Thailand that suffered most in 2004. The area’s death toll was officially 4000, though unofficial estimates put the figure higher. We learned that a tsunami museum had opened in 2022 in the nearby village of Ban Nam Khem and decided to visit it.

Ban Nam Khem Tsunami Museum manages to be informative about 2004’s events, and convey their dreadful emotional impact, without wallowing in the death and horror. For instance, there’s a display of photographs from the disaster’s aftermath, showing scenes of mangled, waterlogged chaos – boats, vehicles, trees, parts of wrecked buildings dumped on top of each other – but the more upsetting images have been pixellated out. One terrifying photo shows the tsunami about to strike a bay, the sea swollen but still weirdly blue, clear and serene-looking, whereas the palm trees on shore are silhouetted against a crashing white wall of foam. On the premises outside the museum-building, the sense of the tsunami’s gargantuan power is reinforced by the presence of two salvaged trawlers. One was smashed a kilometre inland and deposited in the village’s centre, the other ended up with its prow stuck in the roof of a house.

The museum also has an auditorium where visitors can view a film about a Western tsunami survivor, now an adult, but a kid when he holidayed there with his family in 2004, returning to Ban Nam Khem to search for the fisherman who saved him from the post-tsunami floods. It’s obviously highly fictionalised, but at least it tries to show how something positive can develop out of the very worst of situations. The film also serves an educational purpose, warning local children not to be complacent and to take the area’s regular, tsunami-emergency drills seriously.

For me, the museum’s biggest impact comes from its displays of objects salvaged after the tsunami. Again, there are a few big things giving a sense of the huge, brutal force unleashed that day, such as the shattered prow of a boat or a pulverised car that looks like it’s been in a hydraulic compactor. But the small, everyday artefacts have the greatest poignancy: domestic ones (toys, handbags, purses, crockery, chairs, parasols, footballs, shoes), nautical (snorkelling flippers, broken fishing floats, pieces of netting, crab and lobster traps) and cultural (a spirit house, a Buddha’s head, urns, a Christmas tree). The fact that, 20 years on, some items – a portable CD-playing stereo, a manual typewriter, a box radio, a box camera, an adding machine from a shop – have an antiquated look gives the displays the feel of a time capsule. Yet this time capsule is from the moments before disaster struck and countless lives were ended or turned upside-down.

It’s a reminder that, though our brains are hardwired not to think such about things, our safety and security depend upon the whims of nature. And if we’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, we can be suddenly engulfed in tragedy and chaos on a colossal scale – as happened to hundreds of thousands of unfortunate people in this region of the world two decades ago today.

December 25, 2024December 25, 2024

Christmas in Khao Lak

It’s been years since I last spent Christmas in a place where, around December 25^th, it’s actually cold. For most of the past decade, I’ve experienced the festive season in a country close to the equator, such as Sri Lanka or Singapore, where the temperature outside has been over 30 degrees.

For that reason, on Christmas Day, I customarily post a few photos whereby Christmas trees and decorations, bearing wintry images of snow, ice and reindeer, appear against a backdrop of tropical beaches and palm trees. And I write a few lines where I marvel, “Isn’t this weird?”

Well, my partner and I have just spent two weeks in southern Thailand, in the town of Khao Lak, and here yet again is a picture of something Christmassy juxtaposed with something far removed from the snowy north of the world. This time the photo is of a Khao Lak restaurant that had a Christmas tree standing beside two Thai spirit houses – San Phra Phum, as they’re known locally. These are the miniature buildings you see outside nearly every Thai home and business, held aloft on wooden pillars like bird-tables, often fragranced by smouldering incense sticks and garlanded with flowers. Their purpose is to provide accommodation for the spirits residing on the premises and to keep those spirits contented, so that they don’t move into the human building and cause ghostly high-jinks there.

Inside the spirit house, you get things such as a representation of the angel-like Hindu deity Phra Chai Mongkol, who bears a sword and a bag of money, presumably to ensure protection and good fortune for the house’s ethereal inhabitants; human figures to keep the spirits company; dolls’-house-style pieces of furniture for the spirits’ comfort; and possibly models of horses and elephants, to help them get around. I’ve even seen spirit houses cluttered with model cars and toy figures, presumably to give the spirits something to play with; and ones bedecked with strings of coloured lights, presumably to allow the spirits illumination after nightfall.

While in Khao Lak, I looked for spirit houses that had miniature Christmas trees and decorations put inside them so that the spirits could experience the festive season too. But I didn’t see any. Just as well. I don’t think the spirits would appreciate the gesture. Imposing Christmas on them would be a step too far in terms of Westernisation.

Meanwhile, the hotel we were staying at put on a lavish Christmas display in its front yard. I particularly liked the display’s Christmas tree, which had been assembled out of beer bottles. Alcohol is the only thing that makes the festive season bearable for many people, so a Christmas tree celebrating beer seems very fitting.

On the other hand, I have to say the display’s Santa Claus was the most hideous and evil-looking representation of the old fellow I’ve ever seen. Not only was he wildly cross-eyed, but his face – what could be seen of it above the beard – was a patch of putrid, decomposing brown mush. I really hope this thing didn’t climb down anyone’s chimney last night.

Anyway – a Merry Christmas to you all.

December 23, 2024

Bali bits and pieces

My partner and I have just been in Thailand. But before I put anything on my blog about that, I suppose I’d better post this last instalment about our experiences in Bali…

Taman Ayun Temple

This was our first stop on a tour we did with a spritely, 60-something Balinese guide who spoke English with an Australian accent – the result of years ferrying Australian tourists around the island’s attractions. Also, his raspy tones made him sound like an Australian Keith Richards. Appropriately, he complained about how life had been in Indonesia during the brutal military regime of General Suharto, who among his many sins had banned Western rock music. Our guide recalled the joy of being able to listen to the likes of Led Zeppelin and AC/DC after Suharto’s departure in 1998.

Unlike the Balinese mountain and coastal temples we visited, Taman Ayun Temple was sedate in its topography. Its buildings, compounds, stone-tiled paths, lawns, gardens, trees and green-painted, Victorian-style lampposts were arranged over a flat strip of ground contained within a long, narrow, U-shaped waterway. But I liked it because we arrived early, before other tourists, and had the premises to ourselves. I especially liked wandering the sides of the complex and looking across the water – tall, thin, poplar trees spearing it with their reflections. And at the temple’s far end were paths leading into some woodland with immensely fibrous and creepered banyan trees. That part was the closest I got to exploring Bali’s nature during our holiday.

Typically for Balinese temples, there were tapering, tiered pagodas shaped like stacks of ceramic bushings you’d find in an electrical substation. And at the end of the circuit we made around Taman Ayun, we encountered a display-area that was half-gallery, half-museum. In addition to many traditional and modern paintings, it had on show a trio of shaggy Balinese demon costumes. These included one of Rangda, whom Wikipedia describes as “the demon queen of the Leyaks in Bali… Terrifying to behold, the child-eating Rangda leads an army of evil witches against… the forces of good.”

Coffee Plantation

We’d known a coffee plantation was included on our tour itinerary. Unfortunately beforehand, we hadn’t given it much thought – or done any research.

We were shown around the plantation and ended up in a treehouse-café that resembled Tarzan’s jungle home in one of the old movies featuring Johnny Weissmuller. It looked particularly Tarzan-esque because of a catwalk that snaked from it, through the treetops, to a platform where you could take photos of the adjacent mountains, round, blue and caressed by tufts of passing cloud. In the café we were presented with 17 little tasting glasses containing 17 differently flavoured and coloured coffees, teas and other plantation-produced drinks.

What soured our experience there was the sudden appearance of a luwak, a type of civet used extensively in the production of ‘luwak coffee’. The process, to quote a somewhat ungrammatical information sign at the plantation, goes like this: “Luwak eats coffee beans that are still intact… Through the luwak digestive system, undergoes natural chemical treatment, fermenting in the stomach and come out with excrement… The taste very unique! Fermentation in the luwak stomach make low caffeine. It has rich flavour like almond chocolate taste and very smooth.” In other words, luwak coffee is made from beans eaten, digested and shat out by luwaks, which supposedly have less caffeine but a richer, smoother, more chocolatey taste.

A plantation staff-member brought a luwak around the café’s tables so the visitors could look at it. The poor beast seemed befuddled. Worse, when it was brought to us, the luwak panicked, sprang out of the staff-member’s hands onto my left arm, clambered across my shoulders and descended my right arm before being captured again. Upset by this, my partner consulted her smartphone. She discovered that luwaks should be fed on a varied diet of fruit, seeds and insects, not the monotonous, nutritiously-deficient diet of coffee beans they get at the plantations. They’re also confined to small cages and, as shy, nocturnal animals, being displayed to tourists during the daytime traumatises them.

I know – in all cultures, animals used in the production of food are usually treated cruelly. I’m well aware of that, being from a farming background. But the poor old luwaks could at least be spared the indignity of being dragged from their cages, during daytime, for tourists to gawk at. If we’re in Bali again, we’ll make sure coffee plantations aren’t on the itineraries of any tours we do.

Ulun Danu Beratan Temple

This temple complex was beautifully sited on the shore of Lake Beratan in central Bali. The view you got from it across the water was, basically, a rhapsody in blue: the shimmering, rippling, glassy blue of the lake, the solider green-blue of the Bedugul Mountains rising above the lake’s far rim, the crystal-clear blue of the sky. Also, horticulturalists would love the place even if they didn’t walk as far as the temple-buildings. The approach was gorgeously landscaped with lawns, flowerbeds, flowery borders and neatly groomed trees.

After our experiences a few days earlier at the tourist-infested Lempuyang Temple, it was a relief to be in a Balinese temple that was busy mainly with local people. Crowds of them, both adults and children, had assembled wearing white sarongs and red senteng (shawls bound around the waist) and white or red udeng (traditional Balinese male headdress). Not all the locals had gathered for religious purposes – for, at the lakeshore, a squad of boys were using fishing rods, their lines out in the water among the water-lilies and between the moored wooden boats. However, there were still a few foreigners around. One hideous spectacle that stuck in my mind took place at a stage where folk were invited to don historical Balinese costumes and pose for photographs – a Western lady, no doubt an influencer, had tricked herself out as a Balinese princess and was posing for picture after picture with a nauseating, full-of-herself smile on her visage.

A little disconcertingly, along the shore from the temple buildings, the complex became more family-friendly, with the statues of traditional Balinese deities and mythological creatures giving way to Disney-esque ones of animals: fish, peacocks, parrots. There were also bird-headed paddleboats and even a little compound where youngsters could hang out with and cuddle large fluffy rabbits. Oh well. I suppose parents visiting the temple appreciated it having attractions to keep the kids occupied too.

Jatiluwih Rice Terraces

We stopped for lunch at an eatery that was in the middle of this UN World Heritage Site. It’s prized for the traditional rice fields that occupy the multiple terraces scaling its hillsides. When we stopped at a booth to buy our entry tickets for the area, I noticed a sign on the booth listing possible activities on the terraces and the prices that doers of those activities needed to pay. The list of activities ran up to the shooting of movies in the area, by foreign directors, which cost vast amounts of Indonesian rupiah. (The rupiah was currently worth 0.000088 Singaporean dollars, so a lot of zeroes were involved.) Shooting a movie there with a local director was slightly less expensive. As far as I know, the famous shots of Julia Roberts pedalling her bicycle through the rice-fields in Eat, Pray, Love (2010) – or, as I prefer to think of it, Watch, Gag, Puke – were not filmed here.

After we’d eaten, we ventured along a footpath leading in amid the expanses of rice. The rice-fields occupied a slightly-undulating plain of green and yellow, occasionally carved up by lines of trees, which stretched off towards distant, broad mountains. The path was bordered by a channel, full of water, and the edge of the adjacent rice-field collapsed over it, the plants dipping their golden heads in the water as if drinking it.

This tour took place on Tumpek Landep Day in Bali, which according to balispirit.com is “a ceremonial day at which offerings are made for objects that are made of metal,” which nowadays include “cars and motorbikes… Most Balinese people truly believe that these ceremonies and blessings will bring them luck and keep them safe in traffic.” Thus, as we drove around, we saw multiple vehicles – stationary and in motion – with charms and rosettes fixed on their bodywork, dangling long, dried strands of coconut-palm leaves.

However, these vehicular decorations didn’t sway the police in the city of Ubud, where we were staying. When Balinese / Australian Keith Richards returned us there at the tour’s end, we noticed some 4x4s that were naughtily parked in ‘no parking’ areas along the sides of the main street. To chastise them, the local cops were letting all the air out of their tyres.

Nyang Nyang Beach

We visited this beach three days later, after we’d relocated from Ubud to Uluwata. Its main attraction was the claim it was very cut-off and secluded. A taxi dropped us above the beach. From there we had to descend a long, very steep road that dropped down through a deep cleft cut out of the shoreline’s rock. The sun blazed from the strip of sky visible above. The road looked like it’d be an ordeal to walk up again, but our plan was to follow the beach to its far end, from which, supposedly, a flight of steps climbed back to civilisation. At the bottom of the road we found a parking lot and a ramshackle bar. From there, we stepped down onto the beach itself.

It was busier than we’d expected, both with bronzed teenaged and 20-something bodies lying on the sand sunbathing – or in a few instances, sitting straight-backed, meditating – and with a pod of surfers out on the water, each awaiting his or her turn to ride in on each big wave that passed by. A little way down the beach, we found another ramshackle bar – just a shed with a two solid walls and two open sides, a couple of fridges, an icebox, some clunky old wooden tables and chairs, and battered metal signs advertising rum, mojitos and something called ‘Friendship Coffee Vodka’. We stopped there for a rest. Nearby, a Balinese guy was operating a film camera, pointed in the direction of the surfers. They ‘d hired him to film their surfing antics, clips of which would later be uploaded to their social media accounts.

Then we walked further. The other holidaymakers disappeared behind us and we definitely felt the vibe of solitude and isolation that’d drawn us here. Disappointingly, though, Nyang Nyang Beach still had some gunk washed up on its sands: plastic bottles, bottle-tops, cartons, cups and cutlery, and flip-flops and shoe-soles.

At the beach’s far end we found a little old man with an icebox who was selling water, Coca Cola and beer. He showed us the flight of steps, which he proudly told us he went up and down several times a day. Actually, the ‘steps’ were a chaotic track of rocks, earth and rubble, an assault course rather than a staircase, which wound its way up through the vegetation covering the cliff-face. Hurriedly changing our plans, we thanked the old man and made our back along the beach to the bottom of the super-steep road. Luckily, another old guy there with a motorbike offered a ‘taxi’ service – for a fee of 25,000 rupiah, he’d shuttle you up to the top of the road on the back of his bike. My partner rode up with him first.

While waiting for the motorbike to return, I had a quick beer in the bar beside the parking lot. A slogan had been graffiti-ed on a timber column there: ‘F**K EVERYTHING AND BECOME A PIRATE’. Pirates, I thought sourly. That’s what all you wee influencer / Instagramming surf-boys out there are. Modern-day pirates.

Aye, right.

December 12, 2024December 23, 2024

Jim Mountfield joins the swan song

Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write horror stories, has just had another work published in an anthology. This comes soon after two other Mountfield short stories were included in the anthologies Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024 (in October) and Monster: Underdog Anthology 2024 (in November). The new story appears in Swan Song: The Final Anthology, just published by Trevor Denyer’s Midnight Street Press. Though I’m pleased about this, the experience is also bittersweet because Swan Song is the final book or magazine to come from Midnight Street Press and marks Trevor’s last work as a publisher, though I’m sure he’ll continue as a writer and poet.

Trevor started publishing in 1998 with Immediate Direction Publications, the original incarnation of Midnight Street Press, and the first thing he produced was the magazine Roadworks. In summer 2001, my story Hound Dog Blues turned up in Issue 12 of Roadworks. It was inspired by a 1995 court-case in my southern-Scottish hometown of Peebles involving a mate of mine, which ended up overturning the United Kingdom’s ‘Dangerous Dogs’ legislation of 1991, in Scotland at least. A judge couldn’t determine whether or not my mate’s dog, a mongrel called ‘Slitz’, qualified as being a dangerous breed, as some had claimed, and declared the legislation not fit for purpose. Anyway, the resulting Hound Dog Blues could best be described as ‘Irvine Welsh meets Stephen King’s Cujo (1981)’.

A year later, when Immediate Directions Publications also put out a fantasy magazine called Legend, I managed to place a story, Her Web, in it too. Her Web was a milestone for me because it was my first-ever fantasy story to get into print. In recent years, I’ve had quite a few fantasy stories published under the pseudonym Rab Foster, so the appearance in Legend set the ball rolling there.

I’m grateful to Trevor Denyer for publishing those two stories when he did because it gave me a break when my morale really needed it. The early 2000s was a period when, as a writer, I often felt I couldn’t get myself arrested, let alone published. I remember staring almost disbelievingly at his acceptance letters. (At that time, it was still a thing to post physical manuscripts to publishers, making sure you’d included the all-important stamped, self-addressed envelope in which an editor would send a reply saying ‘yay’ or ‘nay’.)

That was also back when my nom de plume wasn’t Jim Mountfield or Rab Foster, but Eoin Henderson. I’m superstitious, and when I was having little luck getting stuff published under that pseudonym, I changed to others. Since then, I’ve had reasonable runs of luck with Jim Mountfield and Rab Foster, so I expect to remain being them for a while longer.

Later, after Immediate Direction Publications had changed into Midnight Street Press, further stories of mine saw print in Trevor’s yearly magazine Hellfire Crossroads and in his anthologies Strange Days (2020) and Railroad Tales (2021). These include two stories that are among my favourites of what I’ve written. The Next Bus appeared in Issue 4 of Hellfire Crossroads in 2014 and was about a tourist who finds himself stuck at a remote bus-stop with a homicidal maniac wanting to make a life-or-death wager on when the titular next bus will arrive. I don’t drive and depend on public transport to get around, so the story expressed my frustration at spending much of my life waiting at bus stops, wondering when the bloody bus is going to come.

I also really liked The Groove, which appeared in the subsequent issue of Hellfire Crossroads, as it wasn’t only about horror but about another topic close to my heart, music. It had a lover and connoisseur of music getting his revenge from beyond the grave on his widow – her musical tastes begin and end with Mariah Carey, Phil Collins, Whitney Houston, Bryan Adams, Robbie Williams and Celine Dion, so you know she’s evil – when she schemes to enrich herself by rewriting his will, getting her hands on his massive record collection and selling it off on eBay. Not only that, but she befouls her husband’s memory by playing Robbie Williams’ Angels (1997) at his funeral.

Earlier this year, Trevor brought out a new magazine called Roads Less Travelled, but that didn’t do as well as expected and led to his decision to close Midnight Street Press as a publishing concern (though not as a retailer – its past publications can still be purchased from its website). Swan Song: The Final Anthology contains the stories he’d planned to publish in future issues of Roads Less Travelled, had the magazine been a success. These stories include a horror / science-fiction number by myself, as Jim Mountfield, entitled The House of Glass, which owes something to the work of H.P. Lovecraft. However, it’s set among the non-Lovecraftian landscapes of Sri Lanka, the country where I lived from 2014 to 2022.

Containing 20 stories of horror, dark fantasy, science fiction and slipstream, Swan Song is available at Amazon UK here and Amazon US here. And to browse Midnight Street Press’s voluminous back catalogue, visit its website here.

December 10, 2024

The literary Bond revisited: The Spy Who Loved Me

First published in 1962, The Spy Who Loved Me is the ninth of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and holds several records in the Bond literary canon. It clocks in at 198 pages, making it the shortest Bond book. It was also the last book to appear in a world that knew Bond as a literary and not a cinematic character, because its publication came just six months before the release of Dr No, the first Bond movie produced by Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman. And it was the worst-received of the books. The Daily Telegraph reacted to it with a despairing “Oh Dear Oh Dear Oh Dear!”, the Listener dismissed it as ‘unremittingly’ and ‘grindingly boring’ and the Observer demanded, “why can’t this cunning author write up a bit instead of down?”

Once the critics had stuck in their knives, Fleming himself disowned the book. He asked his publisher not to print a paperback edition of it, a request honoured until two years after his death. He also stipulated that any movie version of The Spy Who Loved Me could never use the book’s plot, only its title.

I’m sure that 15 years later when Cubby Broccoli got around to filming The Spy Who Loved Me, he was distraught about this. “You mean,” lamented the cigar-puffing mogul, “I can’t follow what happens in the book? I have to put other stuff in my movie instead? Like cars that travel underwater? Giant oil-tankers that swallow nuclear submarines? Roger Moore skiing over a clifftop and saving himself with a Union Jack parachute? No! NO!”

Well, I’ve finally read the original, much-maligned The Spy Who Loved Me. My initial reaction was Ian Fleming at least deserved credit for venturing off the beaten track. Fans of his previous eight books were surely surprised when they started reading it in 1962 and discovered they were hearing a first-person narrative voice rather than Fleming’s usual, authoritative, third-person one. “I was running away,” it begins. “I was running away from England, from my childhood, from the winter, from a sequence of untidy, unattractive love-affairs, from the few sticks of furniture and jumble of overworn clothes that my London life had collected around me; and I was running away from the drabness, fustiness, snobbery and claustrophobia of close horizons and from my inability, though I am quite an attractive rat, to make headway in the rat-race. In fact, I was running away from almost everything except the law.”

The first-person voice is that of Viv Michel, a young French-Canadian woman who’s been left in charge of a closed-for-the-winter motel called The Dreamy Pines Motor Court in the mountains of northern New York State. After a first chapter where Viv doesn’t cope well with a thunderstorm raging above the motel’s empty cabins, playground, swimming pool and golf range – she stupidly pulls an electrical switch at the same moment that a bolt of lightning lets rip, and the resultant electrical shock knocks her unconscious – she spends the next eighty pages explaining how she’s ended up in this situation.

She describes her early life in Canada; being sent to a finishing school in England where she “was made to suffer agonies” for her accent, for her table manners “which were considered uncouth”, for her “total lack of savoir-faire and, in general, for being a Canadian”; and finding work in London while suffering the afore-mentioned “sequence of untidy, unattractive love affairs”. After the last affair results in her having an abortion in Switzerland, she returns to North America, where she resolves to search for adventure and self-discovery and shake off the memories of the men who’ve used and abused her. So she purchases a Vespa 150cc Gran Sport and sets off on a road trip. It’s on the road that she comes across the Dreamy Pines Motor Court, where she gets offered employment; first as an end-of-season receptionist and then, when it closes for the winter, as a caretaker minding the premises until its owner, one Mr Sanguinetti, arrives to take possession of the keys.

Viv’s position at the Dreamy Pines feels slightly like that of Jack Torrance at the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) and things soon go as badly for her as they did for the ill-fated Jack. Two hoodlums with the nicknames Sluggsy and Horror show up at the motel in the middle of the night and take her prisoner. It transpires that Sanguinetti is a gangster and the pair are henchmen tasked with burning the place to the ground as part of an insurance scam. Viv, the only witness, looks likely to be torched along with the motel.

It’s here that we encounter the single detail of the book that makes it into the 1977 film ‘adaptation’ with Roger Moore. Looking at Horror’s face, she notices “a glint of grey silvery metal from his front teeth,” indicating that “they had been cheaply capped with steel.” Sound familiar?

By now we’re more than halfway into the book. Back in 1962 at this point, readers must have been panicking: where the hell is Bond? Well, he appears at The Dreamy Pines later that same night – Viv’s first impression of him is that he’s “good-looking in a dark, rather cruel way” with a scar that “showed whitely down his left cheek” – and he explains that his car has suffered a flat tyre on the road nearby and he’d like to get a room. He soon wises up to the situation and joins forces with Viv. The next seventy pages play more like a Mickey Spillane novel than a Fleming / Bond one, with considerable running, hiding and shooting before Sanguinetti’s scheme is thwarted and Sluggsy and Horror end up dead at the bottom of the local lake. Then Viv and Bond indulge in some love-making and then, as abruptly and enigmatically as he arrived, Bond slips off again. In the final pages, Viv muses: “He was just a man who had turned up at the right time and then gone on his way.”

Though The Spy Who Loved Me wins kudos for bravely departing from the usual Bond formula, there are moments when seemingly Fleming remembers it’s still a Bond novel and is forced to compromise, with awkward results. He wants Viv to be more believable than the average Bond girl, which is why we see her depicted as a working Londoner. But on the other hand, as a Bond girl, she can’t be too ordinary so she also gets a French-Canadian back-story to make her appear more exotic – the overall effect of which feels contrived. Also, while Fleming wants her to be feisty and independent, he needs her to have a vulnerable side too – to be a credible damsel-in-distress, for whom Bond rides to the rescue as a knight in shining armour. That may explain the opening chapter where she panics during the storm and, frankly, comes across as a dolt.

And to make up for Bond’s late entrance into the plot, Fleming feels obliged to bring his readers up to speed on what Bond’s been doing in the meantime; so we get the telling of a previous Bond adventure. In a twelve-page chapter entitled Bedtime Story, Bond explains to Viv in detail how he ended up on the road that night. He was driving south after an operation in Toronto wherein he and the Canadian Mounties prevented the assassination of a Russian defector by the KGB and SPECTRE. By this point, Bond and Viv know the extreme danger posed by Sluggsy and Horror, so you’d think they’d have other things to focus on besides telling stories.

One thing I found surprisingly impressive about The Spy Who Loved Me is Viv’s account of her love-life in London. It’s as far removed as possible from the fantasy romance / sex scenes associated with the Bond novels. Just out of school, she gets involved with a youth called Derek Mallaby, whose posh, confident veneer hides, temporarily, the fact that (a) he’s desperate for sex and (b) he’s clueless about how to have sex. What follows is a painful tale set in the England of “drabness, fustiness, snobbery and claustrophobia” that existed before the 1960s started swinging and the permissive era arrived. The only privacy Viv and Derek can find for making love is in a small balcony-box at a cinema, “a meagre-looking place, showing two westerns, a cartoon and so-called ‘News’ that consisted of what the Queen had been doing a month ago.” Their attempted lovemaking, on the floor with Derek on top “in a dreadful clumsy embrace”, is anything but sensual and ends abruptly when a furious cinema manager bursts in on them: “Filthy little brats…! I’ve a damned good mind to call the police. Indecent exposure. Disturbing the peace.”

Barely articulate about what they’re trying to do, relying on strained expressions like ‘doing it’ and ‘being a sport’, and not even knowing what a condom is called and having to describe it to a shop assistant as “one of those things for not having babies”, Viv and Derek are products of a repressed, joyless, monochrome Britain that the Bond novels, with their exotic glamour and glitzy hedonism, were supposed to give readers of the era an escape from. No wonder The Spy Who Loved Me pissed so many of those readers off.

Once Viv and Derek have properly ‘done it’ a few times, Derek proves to be a cad and dumps her. She then gets into a second relationship with a German man called Kurt, which culminates in her getting pregnant, having an abortion and being dumped a second time. Kurt “had inherited strong views about mixed blood… and when he married, it would be into the Teutonic strain.” Fleming’s well-known dislike of Germans is on full display here.

This part of the book is so interesting because it suggests Fleming, a writer not noted for his empathy with women, is trying for once to think outside his normal male-chauvinist box and identify with a female character having a hard time in a world populated with predatory, shitty men.

Alas, this is rendered null and void later when Bond, hardly un-predatory and un-shitty himself, turns up and Viv promptly goes doe-eyed and weak-kneed at the sight of him; implying that Viv’s problem wasn’t men, it was just the absence of a fully-fledged alpha male like Bond to satisfy / tame her.

And, late on, Fleming truly sabotages his cause when Viv comes out with this jaw-dropping assertion: “All women love semi-rape. They love to be taken.” These ten words have rightly earned Fleming and The Spy Who Loved Me much opprobrium and they undo whatever good work he did with his depiction of Viv earlier in the book. I’d like to say they show an attitude towards women that’s wildly and rightly out-of-date nowadays – but of course in these Trumpian times, the era of Andrew Tate and Conor McGregor, there’s probably loads of male influencer-wankers out there in the so-called ‘manosphere’ who’d agree with Fleming’s sentiment.

In the end, I have no reason to disagree with the many people who label The Spy Who Loves Me the weakest of the Bond novels. The contradiction at its heart, that it’s a Bond story and yet wants to be something other than a Bond story, makes it uneven and inconsistent. And it’s all over the place in its sexual politics and, at worst, those politics are unspeakable.

But it deserves a little respect for attempting to do something out-of-the-ordinary, and thanks to Fleming’s always-amenable prose it’s an easy-enough read. And, in parts, hints of a better book glimmer through. It’s The Spy Who Tried Something Different.

December 4, 2024

Jim Mountfield racks up another one

I grew up on a farm. In fact, I grew up on two farms, one in Northern Ireland and the other in Scotland. So when I write fiction, farms are a common setting for my stories. That includes scary stories, which I write under the pseudonym Jim Mountfield.

A big inspiration for my ‘farm-horror’ stories was a 2005 Irish film called Isolation, written and directed by Billy O’Brien. It’s about a lonely and financially-pressed farmer forced to take the filthy lucre of a bio-genetics company and let them experiment on his cattle. Being a horror film, this doesn’t result in faster-growing livestock as the company hopes but some nightmarishly malformed, slimy organisms whose alien tissue is soon infecting all living things on the farm, bovine and human. Though it’s not well-known, Infection has a great cast – including two of my favourite Irish actors, John Lynch and Ruth Negga, plus Essie Davis and Sean Harris.

What really impressed me, though, was its bleak agricultural setting, one where soulless concrete animal-sheds and black-tarped silage pits loomed next to decaying barns and lakes of slurry, everything dark and driech in the continuously pissing rain. This made me realise that, at least on a bad-weather day, much modern farming is so grim it’s a horror story even before any monsters show up.

Last year, I had three farm-horror stories published – Wool in (the now sadly-defunct) The Sirens Call, The Turnip Thieves in Schlock! Webzine and The Shelter Belt in Witch House. Feeling I’d rather overdone this sub-genre, I didn’t write any more for a while. Until now – for I’ve just had a new, farm-set story published, one featuring the requisite soulless concrete sheds and decaying barns, rain and muck. It’s called Rack and Ruin and appears in the newly-published Issue 19 of The Stygian Lepus.

The original idea for Rack and Ruin came from the roadkill I’d frequently see on the back-road beside my family’s farm in Scotland. One very wet day, walking along that back-road, I encountered some roadkill that’d been so mashed by the wheels of passing cars, and partly-dispersed by the pounding rain, that I had no idea what animal it’d been. I gave the gruesome thing a wide birth as I walked by it. I would have given it an even wider berth if this had happened after I saw Isolation, for it resembled one of the squishy, hellish things in the film.

Rack and Ruin was also influenced slightly by the classic H.P. Lovecraft story, The Colour Out of Space (1927), in which a meteorite crashes in the hills of Massachusetts and releases a strange blight on the surrounding land – the property of a farmer called Nahum Gardner, who subsequently sees his crops and livestock mutate and become uneatable and unsellable and his family members die, disappear, go mad or grow horribly deformed. This is accompanied by the appearance of an indescribable colour that exists outside the visible spectrum.

Lovecraft’s story is told through the eyes of a narrator, a surveyor, who gets the details of the story from one of the Gardners’ neighbours. Thus, there’s little from the perspective of the farming family actually at the centre of the horror. I thought I would try to address this in Rack and Ruin. Farming is tough enough in the real world, being tethered to a piece of ground, toiling at it night and day in all weathers, trying to make a living from it whilst at the mercy of the natural climate and the economic one. Imagine how much worse you’d feel if your precious land was threatened by something inexplicably cosmic in origin.

The Colour Out of Space has been filmed several times and at least one of them, a 2019 version directed and co-written by Richard Stanley, does tell the story from the viewpoint of the Gardners. However, as Nathan Gardner – Stanley’s renamed Nahum Gardner – is played by Nicolas Cage, he hardly behaves like any farmer I’ve ever met. The scene where Cage freaks out after discovering his beloved tomatoes have been spoiled by the pesky meteorite is funny, though.

For roughly the next month, my story Rack and Ruin can be read here. And for the contents page of The Stygian Lepus, Issue 19, and access to all its stories and articles, visit here.

December 3, 2024December 4, 2024

Jim Mountfield sheds some tears

Late last month saw the publication of the Samhain 2024 edition of the fiction, non-fiction and poetry magazine The Hungur Chronicles. I’m pleased to say it includes an 8000-word short story of mine called The Tears of the Pontianak. The story is a horror one so, as with all my horror fiction, it’s attributed to the pseudonym Jim Mountfield.

I had the original idea for the story one day while I was exploring Singapore’s impressive Asian Civilisations Museum. A couple of items of antique furniture – beautifully ornate and lacquered and each containing a dozen drawers – caught my eye and got me thinking. I imagined a chest of drawers like these being acquired by a rich man with a lot of guilty secrets in his past, secrets his conscience could only deal with by compartmentalising them and totally shutting them away from his existence now. Not only would the drawers be symbolic of how he’d compartmentalised his life, but they’d somehow have a supernatural power to revive his guilty secrets and force him to confront them.

The Hungur Chronicles is a rebooted version of Hungur, a magazine I wrote stories for back in 2010 and 2011. The reason I hadn’t written for Hungur / The Hungur Chronicles since then is because the publication features “short stories, poems, articles, and illustrations related in some way to vampires.” And until recently I’d found it difficult to come up with a fresh and interesting vampire story. Like zombies, vampires are a staple of horror stories that have been used a zillion times before. It seemed impossible to write about them in a way that wasn’t clichéd.

So, yes, The Tears of the Pontianak isn’t only about a strange chest of drawers. It’s about a vampire. However, the ‘vampire’ in question is something a little out-of-the-ordinary, at least for Western readers. It’s a Pontianak, a malevolent female creature that appears in the folklore of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. Though Pontianaks have different attributes in different places, I went with the Malaysian version of them, which, according to Wikipedia, “depicts them as “vampiric” blood-suckers that dissect through the internal organs of men.” But to link the Pontianak with the other elements in my story, like the haunted chest of drawers and the rich man with a guilty past, I had it feed on something other than blood. I also needed to set the story in Southeast Asia. Thus, The Tears of the Pontianak is a minor milestone for me because it’s my first published story that takes place in Singapore.

Finally, I’m fond of basing fictional characters on gnarly old cinematic character-actors whom I like. For example, ones inspired by James Robertson Justice and James Cosmo have turned up in stories of mine that’ve seen print during the past year. The Tears of the Pontianak contains a character modelled on Michael Smiley, the grizzled Northern Irish character actor whose CV includes roles in several weird, disturbing and violent Ben Wheatley films: Down Terrace (2009), Kill List (2011), A Field in England (2013) and Free Fire (2016). As I’m also grizzled and Northern Irish, and people tell me I’m weird enough to be a character in a Ben Wheatley film, I identify a lot with Smiley. And in The Tears of the Pontianak I pay tribute to him.

Containing four additional stories, some poetry and a non-fiction article, and with a striking cover by painter Sandy DeLuca, the Samhain 2024 edition of The Hungur Chronicles can be purchased here.