© Stygian Lepus
Jim Mountfield, the penname I use when I write scary stories, has just had his first fiction published in 2025. This is a short story entitled Beach Bodies, which appears in Issue 22 of the Stygian Lepus, a magazine where “readers explore the depths of imagination, where fear and fascination entwine.”
As its title suggests, Beach Bodies was inspired by a visit I made to a beach: Nyang Nyang Beach in the Uluwata area of Bali, Indonesia. I’d walked a fair bit along the beach, away from its touristy part, to a stretch of it where there was hardly another human being in sight, when suddenly I came across a huge, long slab of rock embedded in the sand. It was flat but its surface was covered in ruts and runnels that, each time a wave crashed against the shore and breakers came hissing up the beach, filled with white foam and formed strange, drizzling patterns. There was something weird – something a bit, well, alien – about that rock formation. And that’s how my story got its basic idea.
Meanwhile, most of the Western tourists I saw on the beach seemed to be busy filming themselves with their smartphones, recording clips of their hopefully-glamorous, hopefully-exotic holiday-adventures that would then be uploaded to their social media accounts. I even noticed a Balinese guy on the shore, operating a film camera pointed at a group of surfers out amid the waves. He’d been hired to film their surfing exploits, the footage of which would no doubt be posted online. This influencer-style narcissism made me immensely grumpy… That grumpiness also features in the story.
For the next few weeks, Beach Bodies can be read online here, while the contents page of the Stygian Lepus, Issue 22, is accessible here. And go to this link if you’d like to sample the issue as an eBook.
