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Democracy dies in Donald-grovelling

 

From wikipedia.org / © The Washington Post

 

“What would you say to Epstein survivors…?”

 

“You are so bad.  You are the worst reporter.  No wonder CNN has no ratings.  She’s a young woman.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile.   They should be ashamed of you.”

 

On February 4th, CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins was cut off in the middle of a question about the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, notorious paedophile, human trafficker and friend to the rich and famous, at a White House press conference.  Cutting her off was President Donald Trump, coincidentally someone who receives, according to the New York Times, 38,000 mentions in the Epstein files so far released by the US Department of Justice.  Evidently, in Trump’s mind, you need to smile when you ask questions about victims of paedophilia and human trafficking.

 

I find his objection ironic considering that for the last 21 years Trump’s been married to Melania Trump, a woman on whose visage – gimlet-eyed and as smooth, hard and unyielding as an iron bedpan – anything resembling a smile rarely flickers.  Obviously, though, if you were expected to share a marital bed with Trump, your face wouldn’t be projecting sunbeams and rainbows either.

 

Lately, Melania Trump has been in the news because of the release of a new documentary movie about her.  Entitled Melania, it focuses on her during the run-up to her husband’s second inauguration as president.  Jeff Bezos’s Amazon paid 40 million dollars for the rights to the documentary – 28 million of that reportedly going straight into Ms. Trump’s pocket – and another 35 million to advertise it.

 

Reviews of Melania have not been, shall we say, overly enthusiastic.  The last time I checked the review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, its ‘Tomato-meter’ had it at seven percent.  William Thomas at Empire magazine advised, “Do try not to choke on your popcorn.”  Sean Burns at North Shore Movies observed, “At least Leni Riefenstahl could frame a shot.”  Mark Kermode at Kermode and Mayo’s Take – The Brand New Podcast described it as “the most depressing experience I have ever had in the cinema.”  He added, “I mean, I’ve seen A Serbian Film (2010), I’ve seen Cannibal Holocaust (1980), I have never felt this depressed…  I thought it was absolutely repugnant.”

 

By the way, the director of Melania is Brett Ratner, who in 2017 was accused of sexual assault and harassment by six women, accusations he’s denied.  In photos recently released from the Epstein files, he appears sitting on a sofa beside the late, loathsome paedophile, both of them cuddling young women.  The women’s faces are blocked to protect their identities, so you can’t tell how young they are.

 

I should also say that Melania made seven million dollars on its opening weekend, a decent haul for a documentary.  Obviously, it appeals to a certain audience in the USA, i.e., cultish MAGA dingbats so worshipful of her husband they’d spend a fortune on eBay to acquire pieces of his used toilet paper, which they’d then frame and hang prominently in their living rooms.  However, it still looks like it’ll be a long time before Amazon recoups anything like the 75 million dollars it invested in the movie.

 

From wikipedia.org / © White House

 

In totally unconnected developments during Trump’s first year as 47th president, the Orange One signed an executive order relaxing environmental rules about space launches (benefiting Bezos’s private space venture Blue Origin); signed an order preventing US states from enforcing their own AI regulations (benefiting Bezos’s AI start-up Project Prometheus); and generally created a oligarch-friendly climate that’s allowed Bezos and fellow magnificoes Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to increase their collective wealth by approximately 250 billion dollars.

 

But I don’t know why Bezos would take a financial hit by getting involved in Melania, a vanity project that nobody apart from those hardcore MAGA nutters would pay money to see.  I really don’t know.

 

In other, totally unconnected news last week, the Washington Post, a once-respected newspaper whose motto is ‘Democracy dies in darkness’, and which broke the story about the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon’s presidency in 1974, has announced a ‘strategic reset’.  This reset involves showing a third of its current workforce the door.  It’s also “ending the current iteration of its popular sports desk… restructuring its local coverage, reducing its international reporting operation, cutting its books desk and suspending its flagship daily news podcast Post Reports.”  The loss of the Washington Post’s books desk means it’ll no longer publish its literary review supplement Book World.

 

The Washington Post has been on a downward spiral this past year, a spiral of its – or its proprietor’s – own making.  Previously, and unsurprisingly, it’d not been enamoured with Trump.  As 2024’s presidential race neared election day, however, and with Trump looking likely to regain the White House and launch his glorious new thousand-year Reich, the Washington Post’s editorial board was ordered not to publish an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris, Trump’s rival for the presidency.  As a result, more than 200,000 disgusted readers – eight percent of its 2.5 million-strong readership – cancelled their digital subscriptions to the newspaper.

 

After the announcement of the Washington Post‘s downsizing, its legendary Watergate  reporter Bob Woodward lamented, “I am crushed that so many of my beloved colleagues have lost their jobs and our readers have been given less news and sound analysis.  They deserve more.”  Meanwhile, Trump’s Communications Director Steve Cheung crowed on Twitter, “Just a reminder that printing fake news is not a profitable business model.”

 

Earlier, the Washington Post’s proprietor had defended his decision to have the newspaper sit on the fence before the 2024 election, which’d started the rot.  He wrote: “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election…  What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias.  A perception of non-independence.  Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”  Aye, right.  That’s the principled thing to do.  When there’s a choice between a candidate who’s a convicted criminal and convicted sexual abuser and a candidate who isn’t, you say nothing.  Heaven forbid anyone perceives you as being biased and non-independent.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Van Ha, US Space Force

 

And who’s the proprietor of the Washington Post?  Oh look, it’s Jeff Bezos.  Funny that he should take a hit by alienating his newspaper’s natural readership and sending it down the toilet, just as he took a hit by shelling out 75 million dollars for a dud like the Melania movie.  It’s almost like he has an ulterior motive.  Almost like he’s trying to… curry favour with someone.

 

But seriously.  A while ago, I posted about “an unholy alliance of authoritarians, kleptocrats, fascists, media tycoons, tech bros and oil barons”, working hard “at stripping freedoms from those of us living in societies that,  until now, have retained some freedoms; at transferring another huge chunk of wealth from our dwindling coffers to their swelling coffers; and at burning and poisoning the planet we live on in their quest for profits whilst aggressively pushing the line that any science questioning this policy is a ‘hoax’.”  You see that here.  Bezos grovelling to Trump by financing his missus’s dreadful movie and nuking the Washington Post.  As a reward, Trump throwing him a few legislative and financial scraps from the White House table so he can carry on making pots of money for himself.

 

And with Bezos and his ilk embracing automation and Artificial Intelligence to maximise profits by eliminating human employees, and salaries, the future looks grim.  Journalists will soon go the way of lamplighters, elevator operators, switchboard operators and video store clerks.  News copy will be written by AI technology, controlled by billionaires, who’ll make sure that copy panders to their interests and those of their political allies.  And if there’s bad news they can’t avoid reporting, it’ll be blamed on those people not plugged into their extreme-right-wing, white-Christian-nationalist gestalt: blacks, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, atheists, gays, trans-people, liberals, socialists, trade unionists.

 

Education will be similar.  Teachers will disappear too and kids will be taught by AI, with the likes of Elon Musk deciding what’s in the curriculum.  Indeed, Musk has done a deal with El Salvador’s government to “bring his artificial intelligence company’s chatbot, Grok, to more than 1 million students across the country… to ‘deploy’ the chatbot to more than 5,000 public schools in an ‘AI-powered education program’.”  Yes, that’s Grok, the lovable chatbot that praises Hitler and puts tweens in tiny bikinis for the gratification of paedophiles, coming to a school near you to teach your kids.

 

The stinking rich and stinking powerful won’t only hoard wealth – they’ll hoard information too, whilst making sure only small, approved increments of it leak down to the masses they regard as their serfs and inferiors.  Especially manipulated will be scientific information about the climate catastrophe posing an increasing threat to our civilisation’s survival on this planet.  So that their environmentally-ruinous cash-generating projects, like power-guzzling and water-guzzling AI data centres, escape censure, they’ll suppress this information or bury it under an avalanche of counter-arguing pseudoscientific gibberish, or not collect it in the first place.

 

But let’s end positively.  While it’s sickening to watch America’s business magnates, corporations, media organisations, law firms and universities bend over supinely and lick Trump’s gruesome arse, the way ordinary Americans have reacted to his policies gives glimmers of hope.

 

© MS NOW

 

I’m thinking especially of Minneapolis.  Since December, the city has been overrun and brutalised by up to 3000 of Trump’s masked, violent, badly-trained thugs from Immigration and Customs (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol.  Ostensibly, they came to crack down on fraud allegedly committed by Minneapolis’s Somali-American community.  In reality, as Wikipedia reports, they’ve assaulted, harassed and detained people  “on the basis of their alleged or suspected immigration status”, including “restaurant, airport and hotel workers, Target employees, children and families, Native Americans, students and commuters”, many of whom “have been US citizens, legal residents with work authorisation, or asylum seekers.”

 

This has disastrously impacted on the city’s businesses, schools and whole social fabric.  ICE was accused of violating at least 96 court orders during four weeks in January alone; and they’ve executed two citizens during peaceful protests, Renee Good on January 7th and Alex Pretti on January 24th.

 

Obviously, the operation was designed to intimidate Minneapolis – whose state governor is Tim Walz, Kamala’s running mate against Trump in 2024 – and intimidate liberal-leaning cities generally.  But local people are having none of it.  They’ve protested peacefully, organized strikes, alerted neigbours about approaching ICE patrols, monitored and filmed their activities, and provided support for people at risk from those activities by helping them get to their schools and places of worship unmolested, running errands for them and raising money for them.  They’ve stood by their fellow citizens in a display of decent, old-fashioned community values – values Trump would despise if his reptile brain could ever understand them in the first place.

 

One thing that particularly impressed and moved me was a viral clip showing a white-bearded old man protesting against ICE on a snowbound and teargas-fogged Minneapolis street on January 24th.  When a reporter and camera crew approached him, he raged, “I’m just angry.  I’m 70 years old and I’m f**king angry.”  Then, wearing neither mask nor goggles, he strode off through a billowing wall of teargas.

 

That furious but defiant old-timer, it transpired, was Greg Ketter, founder and proprietor of the Minneapolis independent bookstore DreamHaven Books and Comics.  The renowned sci-fi and fantasy writer Harlan Ellison once described DreamHaven as “a book-seeker’s cave of miracles”.

 

I find it inspiring to see a man who’s devoted a lifetime to books taking a stand against Trump, someone who brags about not reading as if it’s a badge of honour.  And by extension, against Trump’s billionaire toadies, currently trying to create an AI dystopia wherein novels and other human art-forms are replaced by soulless, AI-generated slop.  And against Trump’s toady at Amazon, Jeff Bezos, who’s just axed the Washington Post’s Book World, one of the very few literary supplements the American newspaper industry had left.

 

From wikipedia.org / © DreamHaven Books & Comics

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Rab Foster has another river to cross

 

© Crimson Quill Quarterly

 

My sword-and-sorcery story The Voice of the River is now available to read in Volume 9 of the magazine Crimson Quill Quarterly, which was published at the end of last month.  As with all my fantasy fiction, it’s attributed to the pseudonym Rab Foster.

 

Someone once observed – it might have been Stephen King in his forward to his 1978 collection Night Shift – that a writer’s mind is like the grating on a storm drain.  Just as water flows in through a real grating and the bigger debris it carries gets stuck there, so a writer’s mental grating gets clogged with ideas, impressions and images while his or her life-experiences seep through it – all things that can inspire or be incorporated into stories.  The gunk trapped in my grating, from which I fashioned The Voice of the River, contained some disparate things indeed.

 

When I was 11 or 12 years old, I watched a western on late-night TV called Barquero (1970).  I assumed at the time it was a spaghetti western, because Lee Van Cleef was in it, but since then I’ve discovered it was an American movie directed by the prolific Gordon Douglas, whose best-remembered film is probably the giant-ants-on-the-loose sci-fi / horror classic Them! (1954).  The cast also included Warren Oates, Forest Tucker and Kerwin Matthews, so I should have twigged onto Barquero’s American-ness sooner.  Anyway, as Van Cleef’s character was a river ferryman, who gets caught up in shenanigans with some bandits, and as I’d recently been reading Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories, I suddenly had an idea: Wow, what if Conan retired from being a barbarian and took up a supposedly easier job, running a barge that ferried people across a river?

 

The notion sank to the back of my head and remained dormant for several decades – until last year, in fact, when I read Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark (1968), which contains an episode set on a river ferry.  That reminded me of my long-ago idea about ‘Conan the Ferryman’ – though I realised an unruly, adventure-loving character like Conan would balk at such a job.  So I modified the premise to ‘a sword-and-sorcery story involving a river ferry’.

 

Other debris stuck in that mental grating, also from movies, gave me inspiration for the story’s characters.  I’ve long been interested in the late Northern Irish character actor John Hallam, who appeared as hard men and coppers in a string of 1970s British crime movies – Villain (1971), The Offence (1972), Hennessey (1975) – though he’s maybe best-known for playing Luro, Brian Blessed’s winged sidekick in Flash Gordon (1980).  I visualised The Voice of the River’s main character as being like the tall, gangly, craggy Hallam and took his name, Halym, from the actor’s surname.  Meanwhile, both the appearance and personality of another character in the story were inspired by Peter Cushing in the role of Gustav Weil, the fanatical anti-hero of one of my favourite Hammer horror movies, 1972’s Twins of Evil.

 

© BBC / London Films

 

Finally, The Voice of the River pays tribute, sort of, to a scene from a TV show that’s always haunted me.  It comes at the end of the final episode of I, Claudius (1976), the BBC’s acclaimed adaptation of Robert Graves’s novels I, Claudius (1934) and Claudius the God (1935), when Claudius (Derek Jacobi), on his deathbed, has a conversation with a supernatural entity – the oracle the Sybil (Freda Dowie), who’s come to usher him to the River Styx and the underworld.  I love how, though one is flesh-and-blood and the other is ethereal, they speak as equals and both have seen so much of the world that they’re weary of it.  (“It all sounds depressingly familiar,” Claudius sighs after the Sybil has told him what will happen to Rome after his death. “Yes,” she replies, “isn’t it?”)  I tried to replicate a little of that magic in this newly-published story.

 

So, The Voice of the River owes its genesis to a 1970 Lee Van Cleef western, Cormac McCarthy, a tough Northern Irish character actor, some Hammer horror villainy by Peter Cushing and I, Claudius.  Not bad for a simple sword-and-sorcery tale.

 

One thing about Crimson Quill Quarterly that impresses me is the time and effort its editors spend on the editing process – including consulting and reconsulting the writers of its stories about suggested improvements – to ensure that the fiction in its volumes is in its best possible form when they go on sale.  Containing seven stirring tales of fantasy, magic and derring-do, its ninth edition can be purchased here.

 

© United Artists

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Ralph’s extraordinary world

 

© Columbia Pictures

 

The recently released 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is the latest in the series of British zombie movies that began with 28 Days Later (2002).  It’s also a direct sequel to last year’s 28 Years Later.  Though I had a few reservations about 28 Years Later, which was scripted by Alex Garland and directed by Danny Boyle, creators of the original 2002 film, it generally impressed me.  I felt wary about the forthcoming Bone Temple, though, because one of my 28 Years Later reservations was how it ended and set up its sequel.

 

I wrote at the time: “Its last minutes have upset a few people with their unexpected reference to a dark episode in recent British history, but I don’t mind that.  I think it’s a pretty audacious move by Garland’s script.  Rather, I don’t appreciate the goofy, cartoony manner in which those last minutes are filmed, which jar against the sombre tone of everything that’s happened previously.  This makes me nervous about what the sequel will be like (and it isn’t directed by Boyle, but by Nia DaCosta).”

 

Happily, having just seen 28 Year Later: The Bone Temple, I realise I had nothing to worry about.  It isn’t goofy or cartoony at all.  Actually, Nia DaCosta shoots her movie in a more measured, controlled style than Boyle shot his – he filmed with numerous iPhone cameras, edited frenziedly, and intercut the action with clips from old war documentaries and Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944).  Parts of DaCosta’s film are so still and character-focused you feel you’re watching a stage-play.  And overall, it’s a near-perfect blend of horror, violence, humour, pathos and, yes, optimism.  I’d even rate it as the best of the 28 Days / Weeks / Years Later movies – praise indeed, since I think the previous three films are all quality.  (I know the 2007 installment, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later, gets some grief. But, apart from one idiotic lapse in plot logic, I like it.)

 

A warning.  From here on, there’ll be spoilers for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.

 

So, what was that ‘dark episode in recent British history’ referenced at the end of 28 Years Later?  Well, it concluded with its juvenile hero Spike (Alfie Wiliams) being rescued from the infected – the series’ name for the humans who’ve succumbed to the ‘rage virus’ and transformed into slavering, red-eyed, hyperactive zombies – by eight youths wearing tracksuits, bling and long, blonde wigs.  Their leader, played by Jack O’Connell, introduces himself as ‘Sir Jimmy’.  Indeed, they’re all called ‘Jimmy’: Jimmy Shite, Jimmy Fox, Jimmy Snake, etc.  Wandering around this post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested hellscape is a gang fixated on Jimmy Savile.

 

At this point, British viewers of 28 Years Later went, “Eek!”  Everyone else in the world probably went, “Huh?”

 

Savile, in case you didn’t know, was a British disc jockey, children’s TV presenter and charity fundraiser – in his lifetime he raised around 40 million pounds – who died in 2011.  With his long, greasy locks of blonde hair, penchant for tracksuits, cigars and bling, and irritating, homemade patois (“Now then, now then, as it happens, goodness gracious, how’s about that then, guys ‘n’ gals?”), he cut a grotesque figure, but was regarded as a saint because of his charity work.  One year after his death, though, he turned into a modern-day folk-demon when it became apparent he’d been a sexual predator who’d abused children, young women and others on an industrial scale – often patients in hospitals he’d raised funds for.  In fact, there’d been rumours about his evil proclivities while he was alive, but he never faced justice thanks to his saintly image and connections with the political and media establishments.

 

© Columbia Pictures

 

28 Years Later began with a prologue, seemingly unlinked to the rest of the film, wherein during the rage virus’s original outbreak in 2002 a group of children are stuck in a room watching a Teletubbies (1997-2001) video while their parents try, unsuccessfully, to barricade the house against an army of the infected.  Only one small boy escapes and he flees into a nearby church.  There, he sees his father, the local cleric, get attacked, transform and then seemingly lead the other infected off in a macabre, marauding dance.  The boy, it transpires, becomes Sir Jimmy, O’Connell’s character.  Grown up, his brain is an unhinged cocktail of zombie trauma, garbled religious dogma (from his father) and obsolete British pop culture (from the TV) – in the films’ alternative timeline, civilization ended in 2002, so Savile’s crimes were never revealed.  Thus, Sir Jimmy enthuses about Teletubbies and has trained one of his gang, Jimmima (Emma Laird), to do a Teletubbies dance-routine.  Also, echoing Savile, he frequently talks about ‘charity’ – though he uses the word as a euphemism for ‘torture’.

 

For Sir Jimmy’s gang are Clockwork Orange-type psychopaths.  He’s convinced them he’s the son of the devil and they’re on a holy, or unholy, mission to slaughter the infected and uninfected alike in what’s left of Britain.  Spike, fallen into their clutches and forced to join their ranks, spends 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple trying to stay alive and figure out how to escape from them.

 

The movie has a second plot-strand, concerning Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), whom we also met in the previous film.  He’s a hermit who, in the middle of the countryside, has created a spectacular ‘bone temple’ – a structure built from the skeletal remains of the victims of the 28-year-long contagion that also honours those victims.  Kelson is certainly eccentric, but he’s decent and humane too and he’s managed to find a way of peacefully co-existing with the dangerous, brutal world around him.

 

Emblematic of that danger and brutality is Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) – the name Kelson has given an ‘alpha’ member of the infected who stalks the environs of the temple.  Alphas are specimens bigger, stronger and even more dangerous than the ordinary infected.  Kelson uses morphine-tipped darts fired from a blowpipe to subdue Samson as he approaches, but he’s noticed that Samson has been coming back to the temple more often.  It’s as if he enjoys the doses of morphine he’s getting.  This inspires Kelson to experiment on the alpha.  How much, he wonders, of what’s wrong with the infected is a virus and how much is psychosis?  If the psychosis can be calmed – possibly lifted? – by drugs, what remains of the victim’s mind and memories?  Though Spike’s dad (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) claimed in the previous film that the infected don’t have souls, Kelson, as his relationship with Samson develops, realises something of a soul does linger in the infected’s simultaneously terrifying and pitiful husks.

 

So, Spike is trapped among the Jimmies, Fiennes is improbably bonding with Samson and, ominously, we know these two storylines are going to crash together sooner or later with painful results for everyone.  One thing I like about The Bone Temple, again scripted by Alex Garland, is that for all the simplicity of its plotting, it’s less predictable than you’d expect.  I’d assumed the Jimmies would intrude violently on Kelson with a ‘home invasion’ of his bone temple, but what happens is more complex.  I’d also seen people assume online before the film’s release that the Jimmies would kill Kelson and an enraged Samson would go on the rampage, or the Jimmies would kill Samson and an enraged Kelson would go on the rampage – but neither happens here. The real outcome is unexpectedly hopeful, funny, sad and satisfying.  And the long-awaited scene when Sir Jimmy and Kelson finally come face to face is splendid in both its drama and its restraint.  Generally, while O’Connell’s performance is great, Fiennes’ performance is one for the ages.

 

The previous film posited that although Britain had been ravaged by the rage virus, mainland Europe hadn’t and it’d continued to develop as it actually did in the 21st century.  This scenario of an isolated and seriously in-the-shit Britain was an obvious metaphor for Brexit.  The Bone Temple is less on the nose with state-of-the-nation metaphors, but you can still see some.

 

The kids making up Sir Jimmy’s gang – and they are kids, as evidenced by scenes where a couple of them suffer fatal injuries and reveal their true, frightened selves during their death throes, one of them even lamenting about a long-ago pet kitten – symbolize the victims of a half-century of ruthless government policies that decreed there had to be winners and losers and split the country into haves and have-nots. They’re the losers, the have-nots, the left-behind youngsters condemned to membership of a feral underclass.  Tellingly, the opening scene shows the Jimmies gathered in a decayed public swimming pool in some abandoned post-industrial city: the sort of public amenity, in the sort of place that desperately needed public amenities, that got the chop during David Cameron’s premiership and ‘austerity’ project in the early 2010s.

 

Significantly, they’re exploited, manipulated and fashioned into a squad of killers by someone modelling himself on Jimmy Savile.  The real Savile was a respected member of the establishment at the time when British politics turned callous and abandoned the principle that all citizens, including the weak, poor and vulnerable, should be looked after.  Each Christmas-time in the 1980s, for instance, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would invite him to spend Boxing Day with her at Chequers.  He was also a confidante of Prince (now King) Charles.

 

© Columbia Pictures

 

If Sir Jimmy and his minions represent everything rotten about Britain recently, Kelson represents the opposite.  For one thing, he was formerly a doctor in the country’s National Health Service, an institution founded on the principle that the weak, poor and vulnerable should be looked after (and not have to pay a fortune for their treatment).  When he treats the arrow wounds that a doped-up Samson has incurred during his travels, he quips, “So you owe me…  Only kidding.  I’m NHS, free of charge.”  Another British cultural reference that may go over the heads of American audiences.

 

Kelson also reminds us that as well as being an imperial superpower, Britain was once a more benevolent, cultural one. (It helps that he’s played by Ralph Fiennes, a fixture in two massive, British-originating cultural franchises, Harry Potter and James Bond.)  Despite the apocalypse, Kelson has managed to hang onto his old vinyl collection and he plays stuff from it at appropriate moments – Duran Duran’s Ordinary World (1992) when Samson needs some pacification; Radiohead’s Everything in its Right Place (2000) when he’s wistfully contemplating the night-sky; and fabulously, when he has to deal with the Jimmies, Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast (1982) – “Let’s turn this up to 11,” he says, and he does.  Iron Maiden, Radiohead, Duran Duran…  In their different ways, at different times, these British bands were massively popular, musical juggernauts worldwide (and coincidentally, all three have been touring again lately).  That’s the sort of global soft power Britain should be proud of.

 

Indeed, Kelson seems an embodiment of the caring and creative British values that the country tried to project to the outside world during the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics – a ceremony whose artistic director was Danny Boyle.

 

Aside from the script, performances, themes and general execution, a reason why I liked The Bone Temple so much was because the relationship between Kelson and Samson echoed something in one of my all-time favourite horror movies, George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead (1985).  In the Romero film, a scientist called Dr Logan (Richard Liberty) attempts to ‘domesticate’ a zombie nicknamed ‘Bub’ (Sherman Howard).  Good though Chi Lewis-Parry is, Samson doesn’t quite have the pathos of Bub – it would be difficult, since at the start of The Bone Temple we see Samson doing business as usual, i.e., ripping off someone’s head and dragging their spine out of their neck-stump.  Kelson, though, is a far more endearing character than the obsessed and unbalanced Logan.  The scenes with him and an ever-more docile Samson are both amusing and touching and you feel increasingly worried about them both as the Jimmies close in.

 

If I have a criticism of The Bone Temple, it’s about how it depicts the other infected, the ones who aren’t Samson.  They feel like a device that gets turned on and off according to the needs of the plot.  Uninfected humans out in the open who need to be threatened?  The infected are ubiquitous.  Uninfected humans out in the open who need to have a chat by the campfire?  The infected are nowhere to be seen.  Also, near the end, I can’t understand why the infected don’t immediately swarm the bone temple when it’s lit up like a chandelier and blasting out Iron Maiden.

 

Otherwise, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a hugely impressive achievement by Nia DaCosta, Alex Garland and their cast and crew.  And while Ralph Fiennes won’t win an Oscar for his performance, much as he deserves to – zombie movies don’t win Oscars – Iron Maiden should at least get him onstage during the rest of their world tour.

 

© Columbia Pictures

Posted on

Favourite Scots words, W-Z

 

From wikipedia.org / Scottish National Portrait Gallery

 

It’s Burns Night this evening.  In other words, it’s been 267 years exactly since Agnes Burnes (né Broun) gave birth to little Robert Burns, who would grow up to be Scotland’s greatest poet.  I currently reside in Singapore and am not connected with the city-state’s St Andrew’s Society (whom I believe organise an annual Burns Supper in this part of the world), so I won’t be celebrating the bard’s birthday in the traditional fashion, i.e., quaffing whisky, listening to poetry recitals, quaffing more whisky, stuffing myself with haggis, neeps and tatties, and quaffing yet more whisky.  However, I’ll make sure tonight I drink a couple of bottles of Tiger Beer to the great man’s memory in my local bak-kut-teh eatery – and will post this latest instalment in my series about my favourite words in the Scots language, the medium in which Burns wrote his poetry.

 

Here, I’ll cover those Scots words beginning with the final four letters of the alphabet.  Actually, beginning with just ‘W’ and ‘Y’, since I don’t know of any ones beginning with ‘X’ and ‘Z’, unless you count Zetland, an old name for the Shetland Islands.

 

Wally (adj) – porcelain.  I believe I mentioned this before when I covered the term peely-wally, meaning pale and sickly-looking to the point where the person so described is the colour of porcelain.  A wally dug is a porcelain ornament in the form of a dog, while wallies is a Scots term for dentures – porcelain was first used to make false teeth in the late 18th century and was still a component in their manufacture two centuries later.  Finally, a fancy alleyway lined with porcelain tiles is referred to as a wallie close.

 

Wean (noun) – a young child.  Wean is a blend of the words wee and ane (one).  For example, Glaswegian poet Liz Lochhead’s 1985 Scots-language adaptation of Molière’s Tartuffe (1664) contains the couplet, “Can you bring the wean up well / When you’re scarce mair than a lassie yoursel’?”

 

Wee (adj) – small.  One of the commonest and most famous Scots words, wee isn’t just used across Scotland but in the north of England and Ireland too.  It’s frequently heard in my birthplace Northern Ireland, which contains its own variant of Scots, Ulster-Scots.  Indeed, so fond of the word are the inhabitants of Northern Ireland that in the TV show Derry Girls (2018-22), James – ‘The wee English fella’ – remarks on it.  “People here,” he cries exasperatedly, “use the word wee to describe things that aren’t even actually that small!”

 

From derry.fandom.com / © Hat Trick Productions / Channel 4

 

Back in Scotland, Scots terms that incorporate wee include Wee Free, referring to a member of the Free Church of Scotland, an uncompromising, purist and, well, wee splinter-church from mainstream Presbyterianism; the Wee Rangers, a nickname for Berwick Rangers, a considerably less well-known and wee-er football team than Glasgow Rangers – how everyone in Scotland who wasn’t a Glasgow Rangers supporter laughed when Berwick Rangers beat Glasgow Rangers 1-0 in the first round of the Scottish Cup in 1967; and wee dram , a ‘small’ whisky, though in my experience, anyone who’s offered me a wee dram has served me something not that wee.  Come to think of it, I’ve heard wee drams also referred to as wee refreshments, wee libations and wee sensations.  Meanwhile, the exclamation “What in the name o’ the Wee Man?” can be translated as “What in the name of the devil?”  And I’ve heard a few Scottish teachers in my time refer to their juvenile charges, uncharitably, as wee shites.

 

Weegie / Weedgie (noun) – an affectionate, and sometimes not so affectionate, term for an inhabitant of Glasgow.  I remember lending my copy of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) to a Canadian friend during the late 1990s.  When she returned it, she said, “I really enjoyed it, but tell me one thing…  What’s a Weegie?”  Maybe she was puzzled by the musings of the book’s hero / anti-hero, and staunch Edinburgh-er, Mark Renton, who at one point muses: ““Weegies huv this built-in belief that they’re hard done by, but they’re no.  It’s just self-pity.  Ah mean, Edinburgh’s jist as fuckin bad in places, but ye don’t hear us greetin aboot it aw the f**kin time.”

 

And I believe another Edinburgh – or Edinburgh-based – author, Iain Rankin, has written at least one crime novel wherein Inspector Rebus is sent to investigate a case 50 miles along the road from the Scottish capital in… Weegie-land.

 

Whaup (noun) – a curlew.

 

Wheech (verb) – to move very quickly or remove something from somewhere very quickly.  The word features in the Billy Connolly stand-up routine about the mechanism that purportedly exists in airplane lavatories, the jobby–wheecher: a sort of “ladle on a string and it’s tucked under the toilet seat, and as soon as you close the lid…  WHEECH!  Away it goes.”

 

© Castle Music UK

 

Whitterick (noun) – a weasel or stoat.  This word seems to exist in different forms.  In my well-thumbed copy of the Colllin Pocket Scots Dictionary, it’s whitterick.  But in Sleekit Mr Tod, James Robertson’s 2008 Scots translation of Roald Dahl’s children’s book Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970), Mr. and Mrs. Weasel are rechristened Mr. and Mrs. Whiteret.

 

Widdershins / withershins (adverb) – anti-clockwise or in the opposite direction from the sun’s movement across the sky.  This gives widdershins and the motion it denotes the connotation of being against the order of things, of being unnatural, of being unlucky and sinister.  As a result, it turns up regularly in folklore and tales of the supernatural.  In Robert Louis Stevenson’s short fable The Song of the Morrow (1896), when the King’s daughter and her nurse go to “that part of the beach were strange things had been done in the ancient ages, lo, there was the crone, and she was dancing widdershins.”  At the same time, ominously, “the clouds raced in the sky, and the gulls flew widdershins” too.

 

Wifie (noun) – not a ‘wife’ as you might think, but a woman in general.  However, as a conversation I’ve seen on Quora delicately puts it, it’s usually a term for ‘a woman of uncertain age, but probably past the first flush of youth’.

 

Winch (verb) – to kiss and cuddle or, as folk would say during the time of my misspent youth, to ‘get off with’ someone.

 

Windae (noun) – window.  Windae-hingin’ is leaning out of the window, a windae-stane is a windowsill and a windae-sneck is the catch on a window frame you use to open or close it.  Yer bum’s oot the windae is an abusive phrase, basically meaning, “You’re talking rubbish.”  And don’t ask about the politically incorrect term windae-licker.  This landed maverick Scottish politician George Galloway in hot water when he reacted to a Glasgow Rangers-supporting critic on Twitter with the retort: “You badly need medical help son.  Will decent Rangers fans please substitute this windae-licker…?”

 

© The Belfast Telegraph

 

Wynd (noun) – like its counterpart Scots words close and vennel, this refers to a narrow lane or alleyway.  Though most of the narrow side-streets and alleyways that cut off from the sides of Edinburgh’s historic Royal Mile are called closes, a couple of them have wynd in their name, for example, Bell’s Wynd and Old Tollbooth Wynd,

 

Yatter (verb) – according to the online Collins Dictionary, this word’s roots are Scottish and it means ‘to talk idly and foolishly about trivial things’.

 

Yestreen (noun) – yesterday evening or last night.  In Robert Burns’ poem Halloween (1785), the granny tells young Jenny, ““Ae hairst afore the Sherra-moor / I mind’t as weel’s yestreen / I was a gilpey then, I’m sure / I wasna past fifteen…”

 

Yoke (noun) – obviously, this is the crosspiece placed over the necks of a pair of horses or oxen when they’re made to pull a plough.  But in a couple of Sots dictionaries, I’ve seen this described as a term for a motor car.  I’ve never heard it used in this context in Scotland, though I did so plenty of times in Northern Ireland.  An old friend of my father’s once told me that, in his youth, my old man was famous, or infamous, for the cars he drove – they weren’t sleek, fancy or flashy, but the very opposite.  “Aye,” mused the friend, “he drove some right clapped-out oul yokes.”

 

Yous (pronoun) – unlike standard English, Scots differentiates between the second-person singular and plural personal pronouns.  Talk to one person, it’s ‘you’ (or ye).  Talk to more than one and it’s yous.

 

And with that…  I will wish yous all a merry Burns Night.

 

P.S.  This should be the end of my posts about the Scots language.  But, looking at previous entries, I’ve realised there are loads of other Scots words I’ve forgotten to mention.  So, in the future, there will undoubtedly be further entries in which I start again at ‘A’ and try to cover all the omissions.

 

From pixabay.com / © Makamuki0

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The girl and boys who cried wolf

 

 

I was not in the best of moods last Thursday evening when I arrived at the concert English alternative-rock band Wolf Alice played in Singapore as part of their current world tour.  A while earlier, I’d been on a bus when I messaged my wife, who was working an evening shift, to inform her I was now making my way ‘to see Wolf Alice at the Star Theatre.’  Then I thought: Hold on, something’s wrong.  The Star Theatre?  In the months ahead, some big musical acts are certainly scheduled to perform at the Star – Dream Theatre, The Darkness, Kraftwerk…  But was I absolutely sure Wolf Alice were playing there too?

 

So I consulted my Wolf Alice ticket – and discovered I’d screwed up.  Their show was actually at the Capitol Theatre, meaning I was on the wrong bus, travelling in the wrong direction.  I jumped out when the bus stopped at the next MRT station and got to the Capitol Theatre as fast as I could on Singapore’s MRT system, though the fact that en route I had to change from its Circle Line to its East West Line slowed me down.  And when I got to the Capitol, Wolf Alice had already played 20 minutes of their set.

 

Concert tickets are expensive in Singapore and you really don’t want to miss 20 minutes’ worth of live music…  Anyhow.  Maybe I’m suffering from the start of early-onset dementia.

 

A residue of my bad humour remained at the end.  After the band had finished their encore and left the stage, and the auditorium lights had come on, the theatre’s PA system started playing that perennially popular anthem by Queen, Bohemian Rhapsody (1975).  Okay, I’m not quite as sick of Bohemian Rhapsody as I am of, say, of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven (1971) or the Eagles’ Hotel California (1976), but having heard Rhapsody about 10,000 times now it does put my teeth on edge.  For some reason, many in the crowd started to sing along to it.  They gesticulated flamboyantly, in keeping with the song’s operatic sound, and also huddled together to pose for multiple selfies.  I just wanted to leave.  However, countless Freddy Mercury-impersonating, selfie-snapping exhibitionists were blocking my way to the exits.  I found myself snarling under my breath, “I don’t care if Beelzebub’s got a devil set aside for you.  Just get out the f**king road.”

 

 

But what of Wolf Alice themselves?  Tonight the band performed picturesquely in front of a simple but effective backdrop – a curtain of dangling, billowing and spangly strands that, depending on what colour of light shone upon it, sparkled like red rubies, green emeralds, purple amethysts and silvery… er, pieces of silver.

 

They’re currently promoting their fourth album to date, 2025’s The Clearing, and their Capitol Theatre setlist featured nine of its songs.  Critics have found The Clearing a quieter, mellower affair after the more raucous sound of its predecessors.  The New Musical Express described it as “the kind of album that could only be written after the dust has settled on your twenties and the post-30 clarity sets in.”  Well, it’s been a long time indeed since the dust settled on both my twenties and my thirties, but I have to say I prefer Wolf Alice’s brasher twenties stuff and would have liked slightly more of their older songs and slightly fewer of their newer ones.  Then again, I’m someone whose musical tastes gravitate towards the heavier end of the spectrum.

 

I should add that the crowd, who seemed equally divided between locals and foreigners, greeted the old and new with equal enthusiasm.  Actually, I grimaced when, during a couple of the ballads, the crowd reacted by turning on the torches on their phones and slowly waving them above their heads.  Flashlight waves should be banned from concerts.  Banned from the planet, full-stop.

 

 

That said, I really liked the recent song Safe in the World, where guitarist Joff Oddie’s twangy country-rock hook hinted at Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama (1974).  The song is a lot better than another one that, less subtly, references Sweet Home Alabama, that super-annoying Kid Rock thing, All Summer Long, from 2007.

 

And when they did play their old, rocky stuff, the gig was great.  Particularly good was the manner in which they rounded off the main part of their set, prior to the encore, with the belters Giant Peach (2015) and Smile (2021).  These had the audience bouncing up and down so energetically that I felt tremors coursing through the Capitol Theatre’s floor.  Also praiseworthy was singer and front-woman Ellie Rowsell, who projects true star quality and attitude.  She’s a worthy addition to a long and distinguished line of rock-music front-women that includes Siouxsie Sioux, Chrissie Hynde, Kim Gordon and Shirley Mansun.

 

A couple of other things I like about Wolf Alice.  Firstly, they seem to be genuinely good guys – they’ve put their names and voices to campaigns to keep British live-music venues in business and to help up-and-coming bands to be able to tour, earn money and meet the generally high costs of working in the music industry in 2025.  Also, they’re named after a short-story by Angela Carter, Wolf–Alice, which appeared in her 1979 collection The Bloody Chamber.  And any rock band smart enough to take their name from a work by the sublime Ms. Carter has my respect.

 

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Jim Mountfield downloads the app again

 

© The Stygian Lepus

 

I’m happy to announce that I’ve just had my first fiction published in 2026 – though it’s the second half of a story whose first instalment appeared in print at the end of last year.

 

Appopolis Now, Part Two is available to read in Issue 31 of the Stygian Lepus – a magazine whose prose and poetry, says its editorial, take place in “regions where the boundaries of thought dissolve, where shadows are not merely the absence of light but living participants in the stories that unfold.”  If you think that makes the contents of the Stygian Lepus sound macabre in nature, you’re right.  For that reason, Appopolis Now, a tale about a near-future society that’s outwardly utopian but where citizenship comes at a grim cost to the individual’s sense of physical and mental self, is attributed to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write scary stories.

 

Over the next month, to access the 31st edition of the Stygian Lepus and its 11 stories and five poems, please go to this webpage here.  And as a kind bonus from the Stygian Lepus team, the same webpage also gives access to a self-contained edition of Appopolis Now that presents the story in its entirety.

 

© The Stygian Lepus

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Weird Penguin: Ancient Sorceries

 

© Penguin Books

 

In 2024 Penguin books inaugurated its Weird Fiction series, which to date has seen the republication of five venerable titles: Robert Chambers’ The King in Yellow (1895), William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland (1908), Gertrude Barrows Bennett’s Claimed! (1920), Algernon Blackwood’s Ancient Sorceries and a collection, Weird Fiction: An Anthology (2024).  Well, I assume Weird Fiction: An Anthology is a new collection, but it consists of some venerable short stories.

 

I’d already read those first two novels and most of the tales in the anthology, whose line-up includes such well-kent scribblers as Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, W.W. Jacobs, May Sinclair, M.R. James and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  But I hadn’t read the Bennett and Blackwood books.  Recently, their striking covers – illustrated in pastel colours, especially pink – caught my eye while I was in a Singaporean bookshop I frequent, Kinokuniya Books in Orchard Road’s Takashimaya Shopping Centre, and I wasted no time in buying them.

 

Here are my thoughts on the volume by Algernon Blackwood.  I’ll write about the Gertrude Barrows Bennet one later.

 

Ancient Sorceries contains five stories, the title one plus A Psychical Invasion, The Nemesis of Fire, Secret Worship and A Victim of Higher Space.  All feature Dr John Silence, described in the book’s blurb as “Physician Extraordinary… the greatest occult detective of the age.”  Yes, Silence is what in modern parlance we’d call a ‘paranormal investigator’ – but when the paranormal manifests itself in malevolent forms, he also battles against it.

 

Series of stories about occult detectives have been common in horror fiction… and I have to say I have a problem with them.  That problem is one of believability.  You can swallow the notion of the hero having one dramatic encounter with the supernatural in one story, maybe even of them having a second dramatic encounter with it in a second story.  But when that hero deals in story after story with supernatural jiggery-pokery, cropping up in different forms – ghosts, werewolves, poltergeists, whatever – it becomes almost impossible to take seriously.  That’s especially so when you consider how most human beings go through their lives with no contact at all with what might be defined as ‘occult’ or ‘paranormal’.  (During my many years on the planet, I’ve had one strange experience, lasting all of half-a-minute, which I couldn’t explain and which, if I was so inclined, I could attribute to the supernatural.)  This means a writer of such tales has to show a great deal of skill in making them seem plausible.

 

Also implausible is the idea that the occult detective, a mortal human being, can constantly take on dark forces of immense, unnatural power and triumph over them.  The success rate for the heroes of these stories suggests that the forces of darkness are, in reality, pretty weak sauce.

 

The afore-mentioned William Hope Hodgson wrote stories about an occult detective called Carnacki the Ghost Finder, first published as a collection in 1913.  He managed, I feel, to get away with it.  Hope Hodgson helped make his tales more believable by interspersing the ones where the threat was genuinely supernatural with ones where, Scooby Doo-style, it turned out to be a hoax.  Also, his usual narrative device – Carnacki told each story to a group of mates with whom he’d just had dinner – helped too, since it’s possible Carnacki could be exaggerating what happened or even just making it up.

 

On the other hand, I’ve read a few stories that the prolific pulp writer Seabury Quinn wrote about a French occult detective called Jules de Grandin and found them bloody awful.  (It doesn’t help that de Grandin’s patois – “Sang du diable…!  Behold what is there, my friend…  Parbleu, he was caduo – mad as a hatter, this one, or I am much mistaken!” – is closer to Inspector Clouseau than Hercule Poirot.)

 

Usually, the best I can hope for is to regard the stories as out-and-out fantasies – which is the case with Manley Wade Wellman’s stories of Silver John, set in the Appalachian Mountains.  Or as ‘silly but fun’ – the reaction I had to Alice and Claude Askew’s stories about Aylmer Vance (‘Ghost-seer’).  But in no way do I find them scary.

 

Blackwood, in his day a celebrated author, journalist, broadcaster and, generally, someone who ‘lived the life’ – his CV includes stints as a farmer, hotelier, barman, model, secretary, businessman and violin teacher and he was also a Theosophist and eager outdoorsman – has a big reputation as a writer of chilling stories.  The literary critic S.T. Joshi lauded his fiction as “more consistently meritorious than any weird writer’s except Dunsany’s”, and anything by him I’ve read before now I’ve found impressive.  I was thus looking forward to seeing how he would tackle this subgenre and its believability issue.

 

From wikipedia.org / © The Outlook

 

In fact, I’m afraid the trouble with a couple of the stories in Ancient Stories is that Blackwood is so keen to make them appear believable that he over-compensates.  They end up with more prose in them is necessary.  They would have been more digestible if they’d been a dozen pages shorter.

 

The title story, Ancient Sorceries, is a case in point. Dr John Silence doesn’t feature much in this one.  He just interviews its main character, Arthur Vezin, about some strange experiences and passes comment at the end.  Vezin was travelling by train across northern France when, impulsively, he decided to get off at a remote station, stay in the locality for the night and resume his journey the next day.  (A quiet sort, Vezin had been put off his train journey by the unwelcome presence of many noisy tourists, mainly ‘unredeemed holiday English’.)  Vezin ended up staying in a little town that seemed normal on the surface but, of course, had weird things going on underneath.  A mysterious mental torpor began to affect him.  Rather than get the next day’s train, he remained in the town longer and longer and became increasingly listless:

 

“It was, I think on the fifth day – though in his detail his story sometimes varied – that he made a definite discovery, which increased his alarm and brought him up to a rather sharp climax…  At the best of times he was never very positive, always negative rather, compliant and acquiescent; yet, when necessity arose, he was capable of reasonably vigorous action and could take a strongish decision.  The discovery he now made that brought him up with such a sharp turn was that this power had positively dwindled to nothing.  He found it impossible to make up his mind…”

 

Alas, Blackwood’s description of Vezin’s gradual – very gradual – descent into this torpor goes on for too long.  He’s trying to make it sound realistic and credible, but as you read it over several pages, you feel a similar torpor taking possession of your senses.  Things admittedly liven up near the end, but the climax feels like it’s been a long time coming.

 

Also guilty of this is The Nemesis of Fire, whose action takes place on a remote English country estate, involves artefacts from ancient Egypt and features a fearsome fiery phenomenon that causes things, and people, to burst into flames.  This is narrated by one of Silence’s associates and immediately we’re reminded of a Sherlock Holmes story being told by Holmes’ loyal sidekick, Dr Watson.

 

This time, too much prose is spent describing, and adulating, Silence’s character.  For example: “His voice had that quiet mastery in it which leads men to face death with a sort of happiness and pride.  I would have followed him anywhere at that moment.  At the same time his words conveyed a sense of dread seriousness.  I caught the thrill of his confidence; but also, in this broad light of day, I felt the measure of alarm that lay behind.”  Yes, this helps us believe Silence is a remarkable man, capable of taking on and defeating supernatural horrors.  But again, it goes on too long.  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made it plain that Watson greatly admired Holmes, but did so economically and didn’t let it get in the way of the actual story.

 

That said, the other three tales in this volume are fine.  The Psychical Invasion is a sturdy haunted-house story that benefits from a novel idea.  Rather than bring a team of ghost-hunters with him into the house, Silence comes accompanied by a cat and dog – working on the belief that animals are more sensitive to the paranormal than humans.

 

Secret Worship is about a man returning to a monastic school in the mountains of southern Germany where he studied as a child – again, this is a ‘Silence-lite’ entry where the detective remains in the background most of the time – and is increasingly disturbed by the hospitality he gets from the brothers / teachers there.  I thought it was the strongest story of the lot, a masterpiece of mounting unease.

 

The last tale, A Victim of Higher Space, is agreeably wonky and I wonder if a young Ian McEwan read it prior to writing his short story Solid Geometry, which featured in his early collection First Love, Last Rites (1975).

 

One thing that’s slightly annoying about this book is its incompleteness.  For some reason it omits a sixth Silence story, The Camp of God.  This is included in an earlier collection, The Complete John Silence Stories (2011), which comes with an introduction by S.T. Joshi.  I can’t understand how a publishing company as mighty as Penguin allowed that sixth instalment to slip through the net.

 

© Dover Publications

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My 2025 writing round-up

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

All in all, 2025 was a horrible year: one in which an unholy alliance of authoritarians, kleptocrats, fascists, media tycoons, tech bros and oil barons worked hard at stripping freedoms from those of us living in societies that have, until now, retained some freedoms; at transferring another huge chunk of wealth from our dwindling coffers to their swelling coffers; and at burning and poisoning the planet we live on in their quest for profits whilst aggressively pushing the line that any science questioning this policy is a ‘hoax’.  But you’ve probably noticed that.  You don’t need me to tell you.

 

On a personal level, and regarding my writing career, 2025 for a time looked like it would be horrible too.  The previous year, 2024, had been my most successful one ever, with its twelve months seeing 17 of my short stories published.  However, in my writing round-up for 2024, I noted warily that “I will be hard-pressed to equal or better that record in 2025…  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.”  Yes, those closures impacted on me this year.  But for a period of four of five months in the middle of 2025, I really felt that, submissions-wise, I couldn’t get myself arrested.  I sent story after story to publication after publication and, relentlessly, rejection after rejection came back.

 

For a while, my efforts at fiction seemed about as popular as a Cybertruck in a Tesla showroom in a district of Washington DC heavily populated by ex-government employees.

 

But…  “If at first you don’t succeed, Mr Kidd…”  “…Try, try again, Mr Wint.”

 

In keeping with the philosophy of Mr Kidd and Mr Wint, the two camp assassins in Diamonds are Forever (1971) who indefatigably persevere in their efforts to dispose of Sean Connery, I tried and tried again.  And unexpectedly, I had a breakthrough near the end of the year.  Half-a-dozen of my stories got into print in November and December.  Also surprising – since I’ve never considered myself a particularly Christmassy person – was the fact that three of these stories appeared in anthologies or magazine issues dedicated to the festive season.

 

Anyway, here’s a summary of the fiction I’ve had published in 2025.  It includes details of where they were published, which pseudonym they were published under and how they can be accessed today.

 

As Jim Mountfield:

  • Jim Mountfield, the penname under which I write horror stories, had his first 2025 success with a story that appeared in Issue 22 of the Stygian Lepus magazine.  It was entitled Beach Bodies, was set in Bali, and was about an older man coming into conflict with an extreme manifestation of the foreign backpacker and influencer culture that overruns the island’s tourist spots.  Issue 22 of the Stygian Lepus can be purchased here.
  • In July, a Mountfield story called Slot Boy was featured in Volume 19, Issue 6 of Schlock! Webzine.  At the time I described Slot Boy, which was set in Scotland and not wholly serious in tone, as having a “Scottish backdrop of parochial wee towns, middle-aged neds, cranky auld wifies, mobility scooters, and terrible football.”  You can buy that particular issue of Schlock! Webzine here.

 

© Spiral Tower Press

 

  • My next two Mountfield stories were also set in Scotland. Halloween 2025 saw the release of Issue 5 of Witch House Magazine, whose contents included The Bustle in the Hedgerow.  This story drew on a number of inspirations: a historian who once visited my family’s farm while hunting for the remains of a Roman fort; a hedge my father once planted on the farm after receiving an environmental grant; and the supposedly true story of two ancient Celtic stone heads, known as the Hexham Heads, which caused terrifying paranormal activity to assail anyone who came into ownership of them.  The Hexham Heads traumatized a generation of kids in the UK in the 1970s when the BBC current-affairs show Nationwide broadcast a report about them.  Issue 5 of Witch House can be downloaded here.
  • Early in December, a Mountfield story called The Dark Crooked One appeared in a seasonal anthology from Black Hare Press, Eerie Christmas 4. This combined a legend about Scottish bogeyman who supposedly appears during the shortest days of the year, including December 25th, with the real-life tensions that can arise at Christmas – namely, when you stick a not-particularly-happy family together in a room all day, make them eat and drink too much, and pressurise them into acting like they’re having a good time when, in fact, they’re not.  Go here to buy a copy of Eerie Christmas 4.
  • And later in December, Jim Mountfield was responsible for the first part of a science-fictional horror story, entitled Appopolis Now and set in an imaginary Asian country in the near-future, that turned up in Issue 30 of the Stygian Lepus.  Appopolis Now is currently available to read here.  Its second and final part should appear in the 31st issue of the Stygian Lepus next month.

 

As Rab Foster:

  • Meanwhile, my fantasy-writing alter-ego Rab Foster had his first 2025 story published in April when one called The Cats and the Crimson was accepted for Issue 159 of the monthly webzine Swords and Sorcery Magazine. The first half of the title reflects the fact that the story contains cats – both domestic cats and some ghoulish, demonic variations on the feline species.  The second half of it indicates the presence in its cast of Cranna the Crimson, a fearless and rather incorrigible swordswoman who’s already been a character in two of my earlier published stories.  You can read the story in Swords and Sorcery Magazine’s archive, here.
  • The next month, a Foster story called The Shrine on the Moor appeared in Volume 19, Issue 4 of Schlock! Webzine. This featured another recurring character of mine, the mercenary Drayak Shathsprey, and was a sequel to a story called Pit of the Orybadak, which had been published in the magazine Savage Realms Monthly at the start of the previous year.  Volume 19, Issue 4 can be purchased here.

 

© Cloaked Press, LLC

 

  • September saw the publication of another instalment in the yearly Fall into Fantasy anthology series published by Cloaked Press.  Fall into Fantasy 2025’s line-up of stories included a Rab Foster one called From Out the Boundless Deep.  Its main character, Kayra, had previously featured in a story called The Trap Master, published in the webzine Aphelion in 2018.  As I wrote on this blog: “The premise of both stories is that Kayra inhabits a world where all the creatures of myth and legend – griffins, hydras, harpies, kelpies, minotaurs, etc. – are real and she makes a living by hunting and trapping them.”  In From Out the Boundless Deep, Karya gets summoned to a remote beach where something large and mysterious has just been washed up.  Fall into Fantasy 2025 is on sale here.
  • The year ended with Rab Foster getting another story placed in Swords and Sorcery Magazine, this time one entitled The Palanquin. It’s an attempt to tell a fantasy story set within the confines of a very limited space – the interior of the conveyance of the title.  It features yet another recurring character in the Foster universe, the swordswoman and mercenary Keeshan, who appears sometimes as a partner to Drayak Shathsprey and sometimes as a lone agent.  Shathsprey has a role in The Palanquin too, but it’s a minor one.  Currently, the story can be read here.

 

As Steve Cashel:

  • I usually write non-horror and non-fantasy fiction that’s set in Scotland under the pseudonym Steve Cashel. This year, atypically, he had a story turn up in another anthology of supernatural Christmas tales, White Witch’s Hat and Other Yuletide Ghost Stories from Heavenly Flower Publishing.  The reason for this was because the story in question, Southbound Traveller, was set in a Scottish household on Christmas Day in the early 1990s and for most of its length was realistic in tone.  Only near the end does something strange happen – and it’s more a ‘paranormal incident’ than a manifestation by a ghost or other supernatural entity.  (An inspiration for the story was actually Hans Christian Anderson’s 1845 fairy tale The Little Match Girl.)  It seemed more like a Steve Cashel story than a Jim Mountfield one, so Cashel got the credit.  To purchase a copy of White Witch’s Hat and Other Yuletide Ghost Stories, please click here.

 

© Heavenly Flower Publishing

 

As Paul McAllister

  • Finally, I managed to get two short stories published in December 2025 under the penname of Paul McAllister, which I use for non-scary, non-fantastical fiction set in Ireland.  This felt like scoring two goals in injury time at the end of a football match.  The first of the stories was called That Time and was based on a memory of a brief but harrowing incident that happened to me when I was about eight years old and living in Northern Ireland.  That Time was included in Issue 2 of the digital magazine Still Here, whose title and theme was Ghosts of our Pasts.  A pdf of Issue 2 can be downloaded here.
  • And the team behind Still Here also decided to put out a mini-issue to coincide with Christmas Day, entitled A Light in December.  I managed to get a Paul McAllister story selected for that as well.  Called The Recovery, it’s another one that takes place in Northern Ireland.  It involves a funeral, during the run-up to Christmas, and a case of mistaken identity.  Again, you can download a pdf of the mini-issue here.

 

In the end, despite my pessimistic predictions, I managed to get twelve short stories published during 2025.  Prior to the bumper year of 2024, a dozen published stories was my average total each year.  So, I didn’t fare so badly after all.  From this experience, I would give budding writers two pieces of advice: (1) never give up (which is the advice all writers give aspiring writers); and (2) have lots of Christmas stories ready in your arsenal for the next round of seasonal anthologies.  I’ve already started writing a couple for Christmas 2026.

 

Meanwhile… A Happy New Year to you all.

 

© Stygian Lepus

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Rab Foster takes a ride in the palanquin

 

© Swords & Sorcery Magazine

 

A good place for a writer to go to for ideas – writers of all types of fiction, I’d say, though especially historical fiction and also fantasy fiction, which I write under the penname of Rab Foster – is a museum.  Last year my partner and I were on holiday in the city of Yogyakarta in Java, Indonesia. There, we visited the Sonobudoyo Museum, which is devoted to Javanese history and culture.

 

Among its many exhibits, a couple of items in the transport section caught my attention and piqued my curiosity.  These were palanquins, the conveyances the wealthy once employed to get around, which consisted of a chair, inside a box, with poles attached to it. The poles rested on the shoulders of servants or porters and their legs provided the palanquin and its rich passenger with locomotion.

 

 

What, I thought, if I set a fantasy story almost entirely inside a palanquin?  How would that work?  So I went off and thought about it, and made notes, and planned, and wrote, and the result a year-and-a-half later was a 7500-word short story entitled The Palanquin.  I even managed to incorporate into it a striking detail I’d seen on one of the Sonobudoyo Museum’s biggest palanquins, a carved snake (or naga) that adorned its roof.

 

 

I’m happy to say that editor Curtis Ellet has chosen The Palanquin for inclusion in Issue 167 of his monthly webzine Swords & Sorcery Magazine and that issue is now available to read.  Being fantasy, the story is attributed to the aforementioned Rab Foster.  For the next month, you can access the magazine’s main page here and The Palanquin itself here.

 

And that’s it from me for 2025.  Have a Happy New Year when it comes.

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Christmas comes on time for Paul McAllister

 

© Still Here Magazine

 

A few weeks ago, Paul McAllister, the penname under which I write realistic fiction set in Ireland, had a short story published in the digital magazine Still Here.  (By ‘realistic’, I mean not horror or fantasy stories, which I write under two other pennames, Jim Mountfield and Rab Foster.)  It pleases me to report that that the Still Here team has also published a ‘mini-issue’ to coincide with Christmas, entitled A Light in December, and it contains a further Paul McAllister story.

 

This new one is called The Recovery.  It adheres to the theme of A Light in December, in that it takes place during the festive month.   However, the idea for the story himself comes from a conversation I once had with a distant relative in Northern Ireland – at Christmas – when he recounted something that’d happened to him: a misunderstanding between him and some old friends of his dad.  He tried to present the misunderstanding to me as being funny, but it was actually rather sad when I thought about it.

 

The term ‘mini-issue’ suggests a small, slim publication, but in fact A Light in December puts many full-scale magazines to shame.  It’s 98 pages long and into those pages editor Alauna Lester has packed 19 poems and five pieces of prose.  Design-wise, it’s gorgeous to look at and, best of all, it’s free to download.  Please obtain a copy of this lovely magazine at its home page, here, or its ‘issues’ page, here.