Category: Writing

Posted on

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

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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

Posted on

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

Posted on

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

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Jim Mountfield downloads the app

 

© The Stygian Lepus

 

The first part of my science-fictional horror story Appopolis Now has recently been published in Edition 30 of the Stygian Lepus, a magazine where, to quote the current blurb on its website, “the shadows don’t fall – they think, watching you from the edges of perception.”  As with all my stories that are dark and fantastical in tone, the story is attributed to the penname Jim Mountfield.

 

Appopolis Now is set in the future and imagines a society that’s slightly more high-tech than the one we will live in at the moment.  It’s also a society that’s…  Well, perhaps not dystopian, but definitely Cronenbergian.  (Wow, I have just typed ‘Cronenbergian’ and the Spelling & Grammar checker hasn’t put a red line under it.  That must mean it’s a recognised English adjective now, like ‘Orwellian’, ‘Kafkaesque’ and ‘Ballardian’.)  If you’re familiar with the works of Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, that should give you some idea about what to expect.

 

Edition 30 of the Stygian Lepus contains 14 pieces of macabre, disturbing and unorthodox short fiction and, for the next month, can be accessed here.

Posted on

Paul McAllister is still here

 

© Still Here Magazine

 

Still Here magazine, an online publication that publishes poetry, short stories, essays and artwork focusing on “emotional realism, grounded storytelling, and honest writing that isn’t afraid to bleed a little”, has just published its second issue under the title Ghosts of Our Pasts.  I’m happy to report that Paul McAllister, the pseudonym I use for the occasional piece of fiction I write that’s grounded in reality and set in Ireland, has a short story included in this new issue, entitled That Time.

 

In keeping with the issue’s theme of the past persisting into the present – in the words of Still Here’s editor Alauna Lester, “even what follows us can still lead us forward” – That Time is inspired by a memory of something that happened to me as a kid in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.  At the time it seemed a trivial, and indeed comical, incident.  But with hindsight, and in the context of the madhouse that was 1970s Northern Ireland, it was rather terrifying too.  No wonder the memory has stuck with me.

 

Containing 33 poems, nine prose pieces and four works of art, and formatted in a manner that’s beautifully and hauntingly visual, Issue Two of Still Here can be downloaded here as a pdf, for free.  You rarely get something of such quality for nothing these days, so I urge you to sample it!

Posted on

Christmas comes early for Jim Mountfield too

 

© Black Hare Press

 

I’ve never thought of myself as a Christmassy person, but the festive season of 2025 has allowed me to get a couple of Christmas-set short stories into print.  So maybe I’m less of a Scrooge or a Grinch than I’d believed.

 

A month ago, my story Southbound Traveller appeared in the collection White Witch’s Hat & Other Yuletide Ghost Stories from Belfast’s Heavenly Flower Publishing.  The story was set in 1990s Scotland and tried mostly for a realistic tone.  Rather than ghosts, it featured an example of what’s best described as a ‘paranormal incident’ near its end.  For that reason, Southbound Traveller appeared under the penname Steve Cashel, which I use for my less fantastical Scottish fiction.

 

Now, my story The Dark Crooked One has just been published in the book Eerie Christmas 4 from Melbourne’s Black Hare Press, which its blurb describes as a “collection of yuletide tales where the holly is sharp, the snow hides secrets, and something ancient stirs beneath the carols.”  It contains “haunted traditions that refuse to die, gifts that demand a terrible price, winter spirits hungry for warmth, and wishes that should never have been whispered at all.”  The Dark Crooked One is much more of a full-throttle horror tale, featuring a seasonal bogeyman – and indeed, Stephen King’s 1973 short story The Bogeyman gets namechecked in it – so it’s attributed to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I use for my scary fiction.

 

Though most of the horror in The Dark Crooked One is supernatural in character, there’s a little real-life horror present too.  This is the stress and pain that comes when family-members, who don’t necessarily get along very well, are cooped up together in a couple of rooms during December 25th, one of the shortest and wintriest days of the year, and are forced to eat too much and drink too much whilst making it look like they’re enjoying themselves.  And have to listen to the King’s Speech (or the Queen’s Speech, as it was at the time the story is set).

 

Black Hare Press have done an excellent job in packaging Eerie Christmas 4.  Not only have they been thorough in editing and proofing the text, but they’ve added decorative embellishments to its pages – marginalia, chapter ornamentations and dinkuses – which are both festive and spooky.  This anthology is strongly recommended.

 

Containing 40 tales of Yuletide terror, Eerie Christmas 4 can be ordered in different formats from different vendors via this webpage here.