Category: Writing

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Jim Mountfield: less angelic, more demonic

 

© Cloaked Press

 

The independent publisher Cloaked Press has just brought out the latest instalment in its series of annual horror-story anthologies, Nightmare Fuel.  The 2026 anthology is called Angels & Demons and, as its title indicates, its contents are about supernatural entities either of the angelic or demonic varieties.  I’m pleased to say I have a story included in Nightmare Fuel 2026: Angels & Demons.  It’s entitled Asmodeus 86 and it’s attributed to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write macabre fiction.

 

My story is about a demon, not an angel – the ‘Asmodeus’ of the title is, according to his Wikipedia entry, ‘a king of demons in the legends of Solomon and the constructing of Solomon’s temple’ and ‘associated with lust’.  He’s mentioned in various holy texts in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as well as being referenced in the notorious 1486 treatise on witchcraft the Malleus Maleficarum (the Hammer of Witches in English) and supposedly involved in the famous possession of a convent of Ursuline nuns in Loudon in France in 1634.

 

Oddly, though, I first became aware of the name Asmodeus through something entirely different.  In Geoffrey Household’s 1939 thriller Rogue Male, the novel’s anonymous narrator and hero gives the name to a feral cat who befriends him while he’s literally holed up in the English countryside, hiding from the bad guys.  ‘Asmodeus’ is an appropriate moniker for the cat since he’s rather supernatural in appearance, being wholly black.  Also, the kinship the narrator feels with the cat whilst under extreme pressure – he spends ages concealed in a dark, filthy cubbyhole under a huge hedgerow in Dorset – becomes intense and spooky: “…there is, I believe, some slight thought transference between us…  back and forth between us go thoughts of fear and disconnected dreams of action.  I should call these dreams madness, did I not know they came from him and that his mind is, by our human standards, mad.”

 

So Asmodeus-the-demon is the exotic subject of my story in Nightmare Fuel 2026: Angels & Demons.  But Asmodeus 86’s setting is a mundane one.  It takes place in a state secondary school in the south of Scotland in the 1980s, just like the one I attended back then, Peebles High School.  The story concerns a group of school-pupils who resort to using black magic to achieve their ends and one hapless kid who unwittingly gets caught up in their shenanigans.  If you map the ages of the characters onto my high-school experiences, the events in the story would have happened in 1982, my final year, when I did my final exams there.

 

However, at that time in 1982, the news in Scotland, and the United Kingdom generally, was dominated by the war between Britain and Argentina over possession of the Falkland Islands.  So I shifted the setting forward to 1986, when the story’s characters would have less ‘background noise’ coming from the TV, newspapers and conversations around them.  (Not that big events weren’t happening in 1986.  The story namechecks a certain Mr. Gorbachev, a certain disaster at Chernobyl and… psychobilly music.)

 

Lastly, I titled the story Asmodeus 86 as a tribute to Artemis 81, the baffling, barmy and fascinating three-hour occult / mystery / fantasy / sci-fi TV play broadcast by the BBC in December 1981, written by David Rudkin, directed by Alastair Reid, and starring such thespians as Hywel Bennet, Dan O’Herlihy, Anthony Steel, Roland Curran, Ingrid Pitt, a very young Daniel Day-Lewis and, er, Sting as a gay angel.  Yes, I can safely say the days when the BBC would be so bold as to spend money on an audacious and willfully headache-inducing project like Artemis 81 are long past.

 

Containing 13 stories dedicated to the ‘divine and the damned, the celestial and the unholy’, the 285-page Nightmare Fuel 2026: Angels & Demons can be purchased on kindle here and as a paperback here.

 

From wikipedia.org / © BBC

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Rab Foster lights the way

 

© Swords & Sorcery Magazine

 

I’m pleased to report that Rab Foster, the nom de plume by which I write fantasy fiction, has just had a new story published in issue 177 of Swords & Sorcery Magazine.  Entitled The Illuminators, it features a recurring character of mine, the swordswoman Cranna the Crimson, who’s basically a big gobby redhead who takes no shit from anybody, least of all from male chauvinists.  In The Illuminators, Cranna is hired to escort a group of pilgrims across a city, at night, to a graveyard.  Ostensibly, the pilgrims’ purpose is to say prayers in memory of some fellow-believers who are buried in the graveyard – but inevitably, this being a sword-and-sorcery story, their real purpose proves to be a darker one.

 

The Illuminators owes a lot to a wonderful essay called On Thud and Blunder (1978) by the late science fiction and fantasy author Poul Anderson, which you can read here.  First, Anderson addresses the tendency of writers of sword-and-sorcery and heroic-fantasy fiction, up until the late 1970s at least, to base the imaginary settings of their stories on pre-industrial European societies that’d existed in history: ‘often as a mishmash of Roman Empire, Dark Ages, and high Middle Ages’, though ‘with a bit of Pharaonic Egypt, Asian nomadism, and so forth on the fringes.’

 

He then castigates many of those writers for not creating a setting ‘which, however thaumaturgical, makes sense,’ and describes how the realities of pre-industrial European life – political structures, labour, religion, literacy, travel by land and sea, disease, warfare, weaponry, horses, hand-to-hand combat – were very different from what’s usually depicted in fantasy writing.  To take just one example: “Nobody in his right mind would grab a sword two-handed, raise it over his head, and chop straight down, exposing his belly all that while.”

 

Something that struck me especially was Anderson’s observation about pre-industrial cities after dark: “People who have experienced blackouts will tell you that a nighted city without the modern invention of lights is black.  With walls shutting off most of the sky — especially along narrow medieval streets — it is far gloomier that any open field.  You’d grope your way, unless you had a torch or lantern (and then you’d better have an armed guard).”  That gave me the idea of having Cranna work for a business, in a medieval-style city, that provides escorts for travelers in the city’s streets after dark.  The escorts carry torches and are armed, thus providing both illumination and security.

 

I also took on board Anderson’s comments about the cleanliness, or lack of it, of pre-industrial streets.  “Furthermore, those lanes were open sewers; in many places, stepping stones went down the middle because of that.  Despite sanitary measures, metropolitan streets as late as about 1900 were often uncrossable simply because of horse droppings.  Graveyards stank too: one reason why incense was used in church services.”

 

In fact, the city that appears in The Illuminators is inspired by one I’m very familiar with, Edinburgh.  The Scottish capital earned itself the nickname of ‘Auld Reekie’, first of all because of the smoke it produced and then, as the meaning of ‘reek’ changed from ‘smoky’ to ‘stinky’, because of its malodorousness.  My imaginary city even has a lake below its slopes, which one character describes as a ‘cesspit’ because of all the sewage and filth that’s oozed down those slopes into it.  That corresponds to the Nor Loch, the body of badly-polluted water that used to exist at the bottom of the northern slopes of Edinburgh’s Auld Toon – the site of the Nor Loch is now occupied by Waverley Station and Princes Street Gardens.

 

For the month of November, you can read The Illuminators here, while the main page of Swords & Sorcery Magazine can be accessed here.

 

From wikipedia.org

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Steve Cashel is over the hill

 

© Still Here Magazine

 

My story The Drove Road has recently been published in Volume 2, Issue 1 of Still Here magazine.  Appropriately for its appearance a few weeks before Halloween, this edition of Still Here is both themed and subtitled Haunting Humanity and, accordingly, The Drove Road is a ghost story.  However, its supernatural elements are very mild, perhaps existing only in somebody’s imagination.  So, rather than attribute the story to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I attach to the scary fiction I write, I’ve attributed it instead to Steve Cashel, the moniker I usually put on non-scary stories that are set in Scotland.

 

And The Drove Road has a particularly Scottish setting.  It’s inspired by the hike from Peebles, my hometown in the Scottish Borders, up to the top of 750-metre hill of Dunrig.  It’s a route that follows the old Gypsy Glen Drove Road and takes you past slightly lower summits such as Kailzie Hill, Kirkhope Law, Birkscairn Hill and Stake Law.

 

Two other things also inspired The Drove Road.  One is Alasdair Gray’s novel 1982, Janine (1984) – specifically a scene that occurs during a remembrance the main character, Jock McLeish, has of his youth, when he joined an amateur theatre group who were putting on a play at the Edinburgh Fringe.  One day McLeish and his aspiring-thespian friends fill in time between performances by ascending Edinburgh’s most famous natural landmark, the ancient, extinct volcano Arthur’s Seat.

 

The other influence is something entirely different.  It’s the Japanese YouTube anthology Fake Documentary Q (2021-present), whose episodes tell stories of the paranormal and unexplained via a ‘found footage’ (sometimes just ‘found audio’) format that employs various types of digital and analogue media.  My story’s plot is inspired by one episode in particular, which is about some friends making a pilgrimage.  But The Drove Yard also mimics the anthology generally in its use of assorted media — photographs, flyers, letters, emails, audio files, WhatsApp chats, etc. – to fill in the reader about what’s been happening.

 

Volume 2, Issue 1 of Still Here: Haunting Humanity can be downloaded for free here.  As ever, it’s a bargain.  This issue boasts no fewer than 19 short stories, 16 poems, two essays and seven pieces of art.

 

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Rab Foster gets cosy

 

© Cloaked Press

 

Fall Into Fantasy 2026, this year’s instalment in the Fall into Fantasy series of short-story anthologies from the publisher Cloaked Press, went on sale a couple of days ago.  Its 15 stories include one entitled Jerthemia the Healer, which is attributed to Rab Foster, the penname I use when I write fiction in the fantasy genre.

 

Jerthemia the Healer is a rare thing from me.  It belongs to the sub-genre of fantasy known as ‘cosy fantasy’.  The Wikipedia entry on cosy fantasy describes it as being “characterized by its focus on comforting, low-stakes narratives set in fantasy worlds.  It emphasises themes of community, friendship, healing, and everyday life, often eschewing violence, war, and other serious conflicts which are typical of high fantasy…  Relationships, including family, found family, friendship, and healthy romance, are central…”  The entry goes to list some examples of cosy fantasy, such as Sarah Beth Durst’s The Spellshop (2024) – a novel “full of stolen spellbooks, unexpected friendships, sweet jams, and even sweeter love” – and Travis Baldree’s Legends & Lattes (2022), which is about a retired orc who joins forces with a succubus and opens a coffee shop.

 

Well, anybody who knows me would undoubtedly say that cosy fantasy sounds much too wholesome and un-cynical a sub-genre for someone with my unwholesome and cynical character to be working in.  And yes, usually, any time I’ve tried to write a cosy fantasy story, it hasn’t gone well – by the second or third page, one of the characters is puking up their intestines or getting their face ripped off or having horror-slugs crawl out of their eye sockets.  I guess I’m not mentally programmed to write that gentle, nice sort of fiction.

 

However, with Jerthemia the Healer, the central idea was strong enough for me to put the whole story on paper without turning it into a bloodbath.  And that idea is…  Well, I think I can give it away here because it’s already been given away in the blurb accompanying Fall into Fantasy 2026 on Amazon… The central character, Jerthemia Ros, is a fantasy-world vet who has to attend to sick or injured mythical animals.

 

An obvious inspiration for Jerthemia the Healer is literature’s most famous veterinarian surgeon, James Herriot, who wrote eight books between 1970 and 1992 based on his life as a vet in the Yorkshire Dales during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.  These inspired the very popular TV series All Creatures Great and Small, which ran from 1978 to 1980 and later from 1988 to 1990 and starred Christopher Timothy, Peter Davison and Robert Hardy.  I’ve only read one of Herriot’s books and it wasn’t quite my cup of tea, and I always found the TV show a bit twee,  But from all accounts Herriot was a decent and humble man who genuinely loved the animals he worked with, so all power to his memory.

 

By the way, ‘Jerthemia Ros’ is an anagram.  Have you worked it out yet?

 

One other inspiration for Jerthemia the Healer (and a huge influence on my fantasy writing generally) is the legendary stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen, whose films were populated with all manner of mythical creatures brought to life by his special-effects wizardry: dragons, rocs, cyclopes, hydras, harpies, gorgons, krakens, etc.  In my story, the appearance of one of the creatures is entirely modelled on a beastie that Harryhausen animated in his 1973 movie The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.

 

© Morningside Productions / Columbia Pictures

 

The tenth volume in Cloaked Press’s Fall into Fantasy series, Fall into Fantasy 2026 can be purchased at Amazon here.

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Steve Cashel holds on a moment

 

© Still Here Magazine

 

Still Here Magazine has just published its fourth issue, which is subtitled Moments That Hold Us and contains 56 poems, 25 prose-items and 17 artworks inspired by the themes of precious experiences and memories.  I’m pleased to say that I have a 1000-word short story included in this issue.  It’s called Flawless and it appears under one of my pseudonyms, Steve Cashel.

 

Flawless is the tale of a naïve and somewhat pretentious young backpacker making his way through Sri Lanka in the early 2000s.  He has an experience that seems to him both a moment of perfect happiness and an epiphany.  But then he discovers he’ll have to make a sacrifice if his memory of it is to be preserved – to be kept ‘flawless’.  The story isn’t autobiographical but, remembering what I was like as a youth traipsing around Europe in the early 1980s, being adventurous but also taking myself far too seriously, it feels like it could be.

 

Steve Cashel is the penname I usually attach to non-fantastical stories set in Scotland.  Though Flawless is set in Sri Lanka, it contains a few references to Edinburgh and so feels like a Cashel story.

 

With photography and occasional paintings interspersed among the poetry and prose, and with each page literally abloom with pale but luxuriant shades of green, Still Here Magazine’s fourth edition is a visual as well as a textual treat.  It can be downloaded for free here.

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A Mayday from Jim Mountfield

 

© Schlock Webzine

 

Today is May 1st – May Day, halfway between the spring equinox and summer solstice and seen in ancient times as the beginning of summer.  It was – and, in some parts, still is – a day of celebration.  Bonfires would be lit and rituals conducted to ensure bountiful harvests and protect livestock being driven out to their summer pastures.  Flowers would be used to decorate the doors and windows of houses and byres.  Offerings would be made to the fairy folk.  Sacred wells would be visited, Beltane bannocks cooked, Jack-in-the-Greens and hobby horses paraded, May bushes assembled, Maypoles danced around and May Queens crowned.

 

And if you live on the Scottish island of Summerisle, I assume it’s still the day when you make sure any virginal and sanctimonious Free Presbyterian police officers have an appointment with the wicker man.

 

Today is also the day that my latest short story – appropriately a folk-horror one attributed to the penname Jim Mountfield – sees publication in Volume 20, Issue 1 of Schlock Webzine.  Entitled Encapsulated and set in rural England during the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s about a father trying to help his daughter combat the boredom of lockdown by assembling and burying a time capsule.  He suffers disturbing visions after the burial of the capsule results in something else, something strange and mysterious, being unearthed.

 

Though it’s May Day, and two paragraphs ago I invoked Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973), the greatest folk-horror movie of all time, Encapsulated is actually closer in spirit to another classic British folk-horror movie of the early 1970s, Piers Haggard’s Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970).  In fact, though I don’t make any explicit connections with Blood on Satan’s Claw, I’d like to think Encapsulated inhabits the same universe as it.

 

For the next month, Encapsulated can be read here.  Meanwhile, the main page of Schlock Webzine, Volume 20, Issue 1, can be accessed here.

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Steve Cashel has the last laugh

 

© Close to the Bone Publishing

 

Steve Cashel, the pseudonym I use when I write fiction set in Scotland and without any elements of the fantastic, has had a new story published in Close to the Bone Magazine.  The magazine describes itself as “publishing weekly hard-hitting crime fiction since 2012”.

 

My story, entitled Last Laugh, doesn’t contain any crime that necessitates the involvement of the police force, detectives and / or private investigators.  But it does concern behaviour that’s criminal in nature.  It tells the tale of a man who suddenly finds himself reflecting on a boy he bullied in his schooldays, the bullying becoming more and more extreme until it got entirely out of hand.  The story owes something to Good and Bad at Games, the 1983 British TV drama written by William Boyd and directed by Jack Gold, which was published with another of Boyd’s TV plays in a volume called School Ties in 1985.

 

Good and Bad at Games was based on Boyd’s experiences at the posh private school Gordonstoun, to which he was packed at the age of nine.  Gordonstoun is famous for having helped to educate Prince Philip, the late Duke of Edinburgh, and his sons King Charles III, Prince Edward and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the arsehole formerly known as ‘Prince’.

 

However, in Boyd’s introduction to School Ties, the author wrote that in his day the school was ”comparatively unknown and inexpensive, distinguished only by its remoteness (in the far north of Scotland), a reputation for its somewhat Spartan lifestyle (boys wore shorts throughout their school career) and the idiosyncrasies of the educational ethos of its founder, who thought a school could be run along principles laid down in Plato’s Republic.”  Boyd also described being a small boy there, at the mercy of bigger boys, as being ”like a medieval peasant during the Hundred Years War.  One never knew when another marauding army might march by, randomly distributing death and destruction.”

 

In a nod to Boyd, I made the imaginary posh school in Last Laugh a Scottish one, though in Edinburgh rather than the remote north.  It takes both day-pupils, who are mostly Scottish, and boarders, who are mostly English, which doesn’t exactly enhance its social cohesion.

 

For now, Last Laugh can be read here, while you can access the home page of Close to the Bone Magazine here.

 

© Channel 4

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Paul McAllister sends some sunlight through the cracks

 

© Still Here Magazine

 

If you’ve read my recent posts about the state of the world – a world hostage to the crazed and destructive whims of the current occupant of the White House – you’ll be surprised to hear that I’ve just had a short story published in a magazine-issue whose theme is ‘hope’.

 

Issue 3 of the digital literary magazine Still Here features 19 poems and 18 pieces of fiction, each of which – in the words of editor Alauna Lester – “is a reminder that there is always light, even when it filters in quietly through the cracks.”  For that reason, the issue is titled Sunlight through the Cracks.  My contribution is a story called Learning to Leave and, as it’s set in Northern Ireland and doesn’t contain any elements of fantasy or horror, it’s attributed to Paul McAllister, the penname I usually put on stories of that sort.

 

The story, and its title, were inspired by an academic paper, Learning to Leave: The Irony of Schooling in a Coastal Community, which was written by Michael John Corbett and published by the University of British Columbia in 2000.  I read it in 2008, when I was beginning to study for an MA in Education and Development at the University of East Anglia (UEA).  One of the MA’s tutors, Professor Bryan Maddox, sent a copy of the paper to his students.  At the time, I suppose my course-mates and I had a missionary-like zeal about the transformative powers of education – we believed the world would be a much better place if all its inhabitants got to go to school, full-stop.  Corbett’s paper, though, advised caution, noting how one Canadian coastal community had suffered, not benefitted, from the educational system its young people had gone through.

 

By making us to read the paper, Bryan was playing devil’s advocate.  He wanted us to stop and think about the medicine we were so keen to prescribe.  Education, at least not in a one-size-fits-all form, isn’t necessarily the solution to everyone’s problems.  (Bryan, incidentally, was a great teacher.  I spent much of that year at the UEA tearing my hair out in frustration at lecturers who believed it was acceptable to subject their students to multi-slide PowerPoint presentations, overloaded with text, with zero time to process anything.  Bryan, though, kept the number of slides he used to single figures and encouraged discussion and reflection, and you walked out of his lectures feeling you’d actually learned something.)

 

Learning to Leave: The Irony of Schooling in a Coastal Community struck a chord with me because its message corresponded to something I’d noticed a few months earlier.  I’d accompanied my dad on a trip to Northern Ireland and, for the first time in decades, visited the little village in rural Country Tyrone where I’d spent my childhood.  And, years afterwards, the memory of that visit, plus the message of Corbett’s paper, compelled me to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and write the story Learning to Leave.  However, because it appears in Sunlight through the Cracks, it isn’t wholly bleak.  Some hope appears late on in the narrative, from an unexpected source.

 

As usual, Alauna and her team have put much care and effort into producing Issue 3 of Still Here and it’s a visual as well as a literary treat.  You can download a copy of its third edition, Sunlight through the Cracks, here.

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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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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