© Swords & Sorcery Magazine
The Scarecrow of Terryk Head is the name of a short story I’ve just had published using the pseudonym Rab Foster. I always attribute any fantasy fiction I write to Rab Foster and, accordingly, this story is about an elderly witch who tries to enjoy a peaceful retirement in a remote farming valley, only to have her solitude disturbed by the local farmers, who beg her to use her magical powers to combat a fearsome and malignant totem that’s suddenly appeared at the top of the valley – the titular scarecrow at the titular Terryk Head. The story appears in Issue 151 of the online Swords & Sorcery Magazine.
It wasn’t so long ago that I commented on this blog that I felt scarecrows had been overdone in fantasy fiction. Well, I still believe that, but I thought the idea behind The Scarecrow of Terryk Head was good enough to justify the presence of a tattie-bogle (as we call the things in Scotland). I have to admit the story was influenced, slightly, by scarecrows that appeared in the Thomas Ligotti tale The Shadow at the Bottom of the World, which was published in his 1991 collection Grimscribe: His Lives and Works; and in a story featured in the 2010 collection The Mirror of Paradise by the Sri Lankan writer Asgar Hussein. Unfortunately, I can’t remember what Hussein’s scarecrow story was called, and I haven’t been able to find its title online. But I enjoyed it a lot.
Other influences on The Scarecrow of Terryk Head include, curiously enough, Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970) and, yes, the Bronte sisters. And, writing it, I had fun paying homage to a scene from the 1961 film Murder, She Said. This was a cinematic adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple novel 4.50 from Paddington (1957) and starred two of my all-time favourite performers, Margaret Rutherford and James Robertson Justice. What, you may wonder, does a fantasy story about witches and scarecrows have to do with an old black-and-white Miss Marple movie? Well, read the darned thing and find out.
For the next month, The Scarecrow of Terryk Head can be accessed here; while the main-page of the 151st edition of Swords & Sorcery Magazine, which contains two other stories and an essay, can be reached here.