Category: Writing

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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.

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Christmas comes early for Steve Cashel

 

© Heavenly Flower Publishing

 

Belfast’s Heavenly Flower Publishing has just made available a new anthology called White Witch’s Hat & Other Yuletide Ghost Stories, whose Amazon write-up describes it as “a collection of spooky seasonal stories by 21 authors just in time for the short days and long nights as the winter solstice draws ever nearer.”  The write-up also contains a proviso.  “Reader beware: this book will give you nightmares.  If you’re looking for chilling short stories that are more Krampus than Christmas, full of supernatural scares and denizens of dark nights, Yule not be disappointed.”  One of those spooky Christmas stories comes from my own pen and is entitled Southbound Traveller.

 

Although I usually write creepy fiction under the pseudonym Jim Mountfield, Southbound Traveller bears a different nom de plume, Steve Cashel.  This is the one I commonly use for ‘non-scary, non-fantastical Scottish stuff’.

 

A long time ago, back in those naïve days when I didn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t become the literary equivalent of Alasdair Gray, William McIlvanney or James Kelman, I sent many Steve Cashel stories off to various Scottish mainstream-literature magazines.  But I only got two of them placed: one in a publication called Gutter, the other in a publication called Groundswell.  I will forever remember Groundswell, a modest journal based around Edinburgh University, because they replied to my submission with both a rejection letter and an acceptance letter – I didn’t know if they’d published my story or not until I found a copy of Groundswell in a shop and checked its contents.

 

Then I started to have more success with my horror and fantasy stories, written as Jim Mountfield and Rab Foster, and the Cashel pseudonym was shelved.  From 2023, however, I tried rewriting and submitting again a few of my old Steve Cashell stories and this time they got into print.  Thus, Mr Cashel had an unexpected resurrection.

 

Something weird and inexplicable happens in Southbound Traveller but, for the most part, it’s an un-supernatural Christmas story.  It tries to paint as realistic a picture of Christmas Day as possible – at least, as I remember Christmas Day in Scotland in the early 1990s, with lots of TV, such as the Queen’s speech, the big afternoon film and the Christmas editions of the popular soaps, and also with too much booze being quaffed and family members getting on each other’s nerves.  It felt more like a Steve Cashel story than a Jim Mountfield one, so I attributed it to the former.

 

I should add that Southbound Traveller owes something to Hans Christian Anderson’s 1845 fairy story, The Little Match Girl.

 

Edited by Leilanie Stewart and Joseph Robert, and available as both a paperback and a kindle edition, White Witch’s Hat & Other Yuletide Ghost Stories can be purchased at Amazon US here and Amazon UK here.

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Jim Mountfield hedges his bets

 

© Spiral Tower Press

 

I’m pleased to say that at the end of last month – appropriately in time for Halloween – I had a new short story published in Issue 5 of Witch House Magazine.  Witch House is devoted to “the pulp fiction tradition of a modern gothic literature called ‘cosmic horror.’  Writers in this tradition include (but are not limited to) the following: Edgar Allan Poe, M.R. James, Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, and many more.  ‘Cosmic horror’ emphasizes helpless protagonists, unexplainable monstrous menaces, and fictional occult themes such as forbidden lore and evil conspiracy.”  My story is entitled The Bustle in the Hedgerow and, because it’s macabre in tone, it’s attributed to Jim Mountfield, the penname I use for such fiction.

 

Yes, the title was inspired by a lyric (“If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now”) in Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven (1971), a song that a very long time ago I thought was great but now, having heard it a million times, I’m heartily sick of.  Other songs that fall into this unfortunate category include the Beatles’ Hey Jude (1968), Derek and the Dominos’ Layla (1970) and the Eagles’ Hotel California (1977).  But that’s the only Zeppelin-esque influence on the story.  The Bustle in the Hedgerow owes its existence to three different ideas I had at three different times, which I duly recorded in my ideas notebook.  All published writers and aspiring writers of an elderly disposition, like me, carry a notebook into which they scribble the ideas that occur to them.  Though I suppose these days younger writers may record their ideas using a notes app on their smartphones.

 

The story’s main character was based on the historian, writer and poet Walter Elliot, who’s written extensively about the Scottish Borders, especially the lovely Ettrick and Yarrow part of it.  My family own a small farm near the Borders town of Peebles.  One day Walter showed up on our doorstep, asking if he could take a look around one of our fields in the cause of historical and archaeological research.  My dad happily told him to go ahead and, as a thank you, Walter presented him with free copies of couple of his books.  “A historian doing research in a remote farm field,” I thought.  “That’d make a good premise for a story.”  I wrote the idea down.

 

I should say that Walter Elliot is still on the go.  His work was acknowledged and lauded in the Scottish Parliament in 2021.  So please, don’t anyone tell him I’ve turned him into a character in a horror story.

 

© Deerpark Press

 

The second idea came when my dad got a grant from the European Union – oh, how long ago that seems now – to improve the natural environment of the farm and planted half-a-mile of hedgerow along the side of its biggest field.  One of the reasons why the hedge got approval was because it’d act as a ‘wildlife corridor’, allowing wild animals to move from habitat to habitat without having to cross roads or cultivated land.  Because the hedge started at a site where the local burn widened into a pool, and it ended at a shelterbelt of trees adjacent to our farmstead, I had a typically horror-writer-ish thought: “Hey, if something nasty lived in that pool, it could now use the hedge, the wildlife corridor, as a way of getting access to our house!”   And another idea was scribbled down.

 

Thirdly, I’d made notes about, and always wanted to write a story connected with, the Hexham Heads.  These were two little stone heads, alleged by some to be Celtic in origin, discovered in the northeast English town of Hexham in 1971.  They reputedly caused unwelcome and frightening paranormal activity in the homes of whoever had custody of them.  Infamously, Nationwide (1969-83) – a normally easy-going, family-friendly TV current-affairs programme that the BBC aired every weekday evening around six o’clock – featured a report on the story in 1976.  For some reason, the makers of the report saw fit to throw in images of severed human heads on tree-branches, screams and an unexpected jump-cut of Oliver Reed from 1961’s Curse of the Werewolf amid the creepy interviews, traumatising every young kid who happened to be watching.  It certainly scared the shit out of me.  (Long believed lost, footage of that legendary 1976 report has now been discovered and restored.  See here and here.)

 

From wikipedia.org / © Archaeology Data Service / Dr Anne Ross

 

I don’t normally dispense advice to other writers.  For me, personally, this has always felt a bit pompous.  But based on my experiences here, I’d recommend them to (1) make notes of their ideas before they forget them, and (2) avoid regarding each idea as having a linear correlation with a story.  Rather than thinking ‘one idea equals one story’, they should keep studying all their ideas, however random, and keep looking for ways that two, three or more ideas could be combined in a single work.  This cross-fertilisation allowed me to come up with The Bustle in the Hedgerow.

 

Containing eleven pieces of fiction and five poems, Issue 5 of Witch House Magazine can be downloaded here.

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Rab Foster resurfaces

 

© Cloaked Press Inc

 

The publishing house Cloaked Press, LLC has recently announced that its new anthology Fall into Fantasy 2025 can be purchased on Kindle.  Among the 15 stories contained in Fall into Fantasy 2025 is one entitled From Out the Boundless Deep, which I wrote under the name Rab Foster, the pseudonym I use for my fantasy fiction.

 

From Out the Boundless Deep has as its main character a woman called Kayra, who previously appeared in a story called The Trap Master, published way back in 2018 in the American webzine Aphelion.  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, she’s summoned to a beach in a remote bay to deal with something that has unexpectedly surfaced there.  I suppose the story is partly inspired by J.G. Ballard’s haunting tale of magical realism The Drowned Giant (1964).  Though, like a lot of my Rab Foster stories, it owes a lot to the films of the legendary stop-motion-animation wizard Ray Harryhausen too.

 

To access the Kindle edition of Fall into Fantasy 2025, visit here.

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Jim Mountfield gets slotted in

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

Jim Mountfield is the pseudonym I attach to fiction I write that’s dark and macabre in nature, and I’m delighted to report that a new Mountfield short story has just appeared in Volume 19 Issue 6, the July 2025 edition, of Schlock! Webzine.  It’s entitled Slot Boy and it takes place in Scotland, against an appropriately Scottish backdrop of parochial wee towns, middle-aged neds, cranky auld wifies, mobility scooters, and terrible football.

 

Despite its Scottish setting, Slot Boy – like many of my stories – owes a lot to the works of Stephen King.  Although the inspiration for this particular story comes from something I suspect King isn’t in a hurry to trumpet as one of his finest hours, the anthology movie Creepshow 2 (1987), which was a sequel to the rather better Creepshow (1982).  One of the three segments in Creepshow 2, The Raft, was based on a short story included in King’s 1985 collection Skeleton Crew, but the other two segments, Old Chief Wood’nhead and The Hitchhiker, were apparently stories he devised especially for the film.  He wrote an outline that was then polished into a script by legendary horror filmmaker director George A. Romero, though the final movie was directed by Michael Gornick.

 

Weirdly, it was Old Chief Wood’nhead that inspired Slot Boy.

 

The Raft and The Hitchhiker both have their moments, but Old Chief Wood’nhead is rightly regarded as the worst of Creepshow 2’s stories.  That’s despite it featuring the stalwart character actor George Kennedy (a man I always associated with crashing airplanes – he was in 1965’s Flight of the Phoenix and all four of the 1970s’ Airport movies) and Dorothy Lamour, star of the Bob Hope / Bing Crosby Road to… movies (1940-62).  Kennedy and Lamour play an elderly couple who own a shop with a hulking, timber cigar store Indian, the titular Old Chief Wood’nhead, standing outside it.  Predictably, bad things happen to them. Then, magically, seeking revenge, Old Chief Wood’nhead comes to… Well, you can guess the rest.

 

Native American culture is a rich source of stories and myths – see the works of Stephen Graham Jones – but Old Chief Wood’nhead operates at the level of a crass old Hollywood western, with a caricatured ‘injun’ shooting arrows, removing scalps and wielding a tomahawk.  Of course, the horror in the story, or in any horror story, is nothing compared to the real-life horrors that North America’s native American population had to endure during history.  Estimates suggest that population stood at about eight million in the whole continent in 1492; but in the USA, by 1890, it’d been reduced to a quarter of a million.  Though no doubt Trump will soon rewrite all that and have it taught in schools that life was peachy for Native Americans after European settlers arrived.

 

If Old Chief Wood’nhead was a bit asinine, why on earth did I think of it again after so many years, let alone get an idea for a story from it?  Well, for the first two years that I lived in Singapore, I regularly ate and drank in an establishment on Singapore’s Mountbatten Road that, bizarrely, had this standing on the edge of its premises:

 

 

I don’t think I ever saw a cigar store Indian during my time in Scotland, but shops there used to have other figurines standing outside their doors, usually for charity purposes.  One of those figurines features in Slot Boy and plays a role in the story similar to that played by Old Chief Wood’nhead in Creepshow 2.  I just hope the result is scarier – and funnier – than the movie segment.

 

During July 2025, you can read Slot Boy here, while the main page of Schlock! Webzine, Volume 19 Issue 6, can be accessed here.

 

© Laurel Entertainment / New World Pictures

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Rab Foster gets moored up

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

Rab Foster, my fantasy-writing alter-ego, is on a roll this week.  Just two days ago, The Cats and the Crimson, a story I wrote under that pseudonym, was published in Issue 159 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine.  Today, another Foster-attributed fantasy story appears in the new edition – Volume 19, Issue 4 – of the monthly online publication Schlock! Webzine.  It’s called The Shrine on the Moor and chronicles another adventure in the life of my sword-and-sorcery character Drayak Shathsprey.  By my calculations, this is the sixth tale featuring Shathsprey to have made it into print.

 

In fact, The Shrine on the Moor is a direct sequel to a story called The Pit of the Orybadak, which featured in the magazine Savage Realms Monthly in January 2024.  Pit of the Orybadak was about Shathsprey’s experiences during a bloody battle and its equally bloody aftermath.  The events of The Shrine on the Moor, when he escapes onto the moor of the title, and encounters the shrine of the title, take place a few days later.  Has he really escaped the battle?  Is there nobody around who still wants to kill him?  Of course not…

 

I’d like to think The Shrine on the Moor has a flavour of the 1968 John Boorman movie Hell in the Pacific.  But, being a sword-and-sorcery story, it has ghosts and primordial gods mixed into it as well.

 

For the month of May 2025, The Shrine on the Moor can be read here.  And you can access the contents page of Schlock! Webzine Volume 19, Issue 4, with links to a dozen tales of fantasy, horror and science fiction, here.

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Rab Foster herds some cats

 

© Swords & Sorcery Magazine

 

The Cats and the Crimson is the name of a fantasy story I’ve just had published in the April 2025 edition, Issue 159, of the online publication Swords and Sorcery Magazine.  As always with my fantasy fiction, the story is attributed to the pseudonym Rab Foster.

 

One part of its title refers to its heroine, Cranna the Crimson, the formidable red-haired swordswoman who takes no shit from anyone, least of all from male chauvinists.  She’s previously featured in my published stories Vision of the Reaper (which appeared in the collection Fall into Fantasy 2023) and The Drakvur Challenge (which last year appeared in the third issue of the magazine Crimson Quill Quarterly).  The other part of the title refers to the cats that Cranna encounters when she enters a mysterious desert town in search of treasure – firstly, cats of the cute, domestic variety, but later, ones of a more sinister nature.

 

I don’t want to give away anything more about the story.  Though I will say it contains a rebuke to sentiments expressed by American vice-president and Trump-lackey J.D. Vance, who notoriously complained about women who are “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made” and who “want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”  I’m sure Cranna would react to those words by socking the contemptible, eyeliner-wearing creep in the jaw.

 

For the next month, The Cats and the Crimson can be read here, while the April 2025 homepage of Swords and Sorcery Magazine, with three further stories and a book review, is accessible here.

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Jim Mountfield gets beached

 

© 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.

 

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My 2024 writing round-up

 

© The Sirens Call Publications

 

“Well, 2024 was an excellent year!”  No future historians will say, ever.  Come to think of it, because of events in 2024, there might not be any future historians.  Not any future, full-stop.

 

However, on a personal level, 2024 saw some improvements in my situation.  Firstly, in March, my partner and I, and our cat, moved apartments in our current city (and country) of abode, Singapore.  We’d been in an expensive condo, inhabited mostly by rich Western and Chinese expatriates, in a modern part of the city-state.  We moved into a cheaper and more modest condo in an older and more traditional district where our neighbours are nearly all Singaporean.  It’s so much nicer.  For one thing there are no spoilt, bratty kids running riot outside our front door because the unfortunate Filippino / Indonesian / Burmese girls hired by their expat parents as ‘maids’ or ‘helpers’ and made to look after them are afraid or unwilling to discipline them.  Also, our new neighbourhood is handier for getting to our work and has several notable Hawkers’ Centres and eateries offering a range of good but modestly-priced foods.  Singapore is generally expensive and its Hawkers’ Centres are one of its saving graces.

 

Secondly, I had a successful year with regard to my writing.  Indeed, in terms of short stories published, 2024 even topped 2023, when 15 of my stories made it into my print.  This has been my best writing year to date.

 

So, here’s a round-up of my stories published in 2024.  Details are provided about who published them, what pseudonym they were published under and, when possible, how they can be accessed today.

 

As Jim Mountfield:

  • Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I stick on my horror fiction, was first published in 2024 at the end of January when the story Underneath the Arches was included in the quarterly fiction-and-poetry magazine The Sirens Call.  Heavily inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, Underneath the Arches was written by me at a young age – and I think it shows in the florid writing style.  However, I was grateful to The Sirens Call for giving the story (which’d languished on my computer hard-drive for decades) a home at last.  Alas, The Sirens Call ceased publication late in the year and I can no longer provide a link for downloading its past issues.
  • In April, Issue 11 of The Stygian Lepus featured my ‘cosmic-horror’ story The Followers, which was set in the English city I lived in from 2002 to 2005, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.  Specifically, it was set in two parts of it, Grainger Market and Chinatown on Stowell Street.  Issue 11 can be read here if you become a member of The Stygian Lepus’s Back Catalogue; or purchased here.

 

© The Stygian Lepus

 

  • April was also when my Northern-Ireland-set short story The Crawler, which involved a devious policeman and a collection of sinister dolls, appeared in 2024’s second issue of The Sirens Call.
  • And in July the next – and unfortunately, the last ever – issue of The Sirens Call contained my sci-fi / horror story The Colony.  This was set in East Anglia after manmade climate change has hoicked up temperatures and sea levels.  Its premise was that scientists had created, through genetic engineering, millions of giant jellyfish-like organisms and tethered them offshore in order to hold back storm surges and reduce coastal erosion.  Obviously, nothing could go wrong with this scheme.  Nothing at all…
  • The Hole in the Wall was a ‘folk-horror’ story about a member of an organisation modelled on Britain’s Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) who’s researching a couple of pubs.  First, he visits a horrible dump of a pub; then he stumbles across a pub that’s so classy it seems too good to be true.  And yes, the second one is too good to be true because it has a mysterious, malevolent something lurking in its walls.  The Hole in the Wall appeared in Volume 18, Issue 12 – the October 2024 edition – of Schlock! Webzine, which can be purchased here.
  • Also in October, my story The Activation was the opening number in the anthology Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024, the annual volume of scary fiction published by Cloaked Press.  As the collection’s title suggests, its theme this year was body horror, described by Wikipedia as “a subgenre of horror fiction that intentionally showcases grotesque or psychologically disturbing violations of the human body or of another creature…” including “aberrant sex, mutations, mutilation, zombification, gratuitous violence, disease, or unnatural movements of the body.”  The Activation contained about five of those things, so I think it fitted the bill.  It was also a prequel to my story The Nuclei, which appeared in the 2020 collection Xenobiology – Stranger Creatures.  Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024 can be purchased on Kindle here and as a paperback here.

 

© Cloaked Press

 

  • In November, a Jim Mountfield story appeared in the collection Monster: Underdog Anthology 2024 from Leg Iron Books.  A monster of a book indeed, this featured 39 spooky stories, including my Halloween-set effort Bag of Tricks.  The story was inspired by a memory I had of riding on Bangkok’s Skytrain one October 31st when some Thai kids entered the carriage wearing fancy dress, presumably on their way to a Halloween party; but most of Bag of Tricks actually takes place in Scotland.  Monster: Underdog Anthology 2024 can be bought on Kindle here and as a paperback here.
  • The Tears of the Pontianak, which appeared in the Samhain 2024 edition of the magazine The Hungur Chronicles, published in November too, was a first for me.  This was my first published story where the setting is my current home, Singapore.  As you can tell from the title, it’s mainly about a Pontianak, a blood-drinking demon of Malaysian, Singaporean and Indonesian folklore.  But the idea for the story actually came to me one afternoon when I was exploring Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum and encountered some beautiful pieces of local, antique furniture.  The Hungur Chronicles’ Samhain 2024 issue can be purchased directly from Hiraeth Publishing here or from Barnes & Noble here.
  • Coming from a farming background, quite a few of my stories are set on farms.  However, I only had one ‘farm-horror’ story published in 2024.  This was in Issue 19 – the December 2024 edition – of The Stygian Lepus and its title was Rack and Ruin.  It owed something to the legendary American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, although the Lovecraftian elements were mixed with the mud, muck and rain of a hill farm in autumnal southern Scotland.  Again, Issue 19 can be read here if you’re a member of The Stygian Lepus’s Back Catalogue; or simply bought here.
  • The influence of H.P. Lovecraft could also be seen in The House of Glass, the final Jim Mountfield story I had published in 2024.  As its title implies, most of the action takes place inside a house made almost entirely of glass.  The house stands in the mountains of Sri Lanka, the country where I lived in real life from 2014 to 2022.  The House of Glass appears in the anthology Swan Song: The Final Anthology, which, sadly, is the last volume to come from Trevor Denyer’s Midnight Street Press – from now on, Midnight Street Press will exist only to sell what’s on its back catalogue, not to produce anything new.  It can be purchased from Amazon UK here and from Amazon US here.

 

© Swords and Sorcery Magazine

 

As Rab Foster:

  • Rab Foster, the pseudonym I use when writing fantasy fiction – usually the unruly sub-genre of fantasy called ‘sword and sorcery’ – hit the ground running in 2024.  On January 1st, the second and final part of my story The Boots of the Cat appeared in Volume 18 Issue 3 of Schlock! Webzine.  This was about a group of mercenaries who, while sequestered in an unwelcoming city, find themselves in a strange scenario inspired by a famous fairy tale.  And no, despite the title, that fairy tale isn’t Puss in Boots.  The issue can be purchased here.
  • Because of a publishing delay, the December 2023 edition of the fiction magazine Savage Realms Monthly didn’t appear until January 2024.  It contained my story Pit of the Orybadak, which combined fantasy elements – slimy flesh-eating monsters slithering around in a giant bog – with the pertinent real-life theme of how soldiers are treated (or mistreated) when they become prisoners of war.  This issue of Savage Realms Monthly can be bought here.
  • The Fleet of Lamvula, a heady story inspired by my love of ‘lost graveyards of ships’ stories, and the movies of Ray Harryhausen, and the trippiest song ever recorded, Black Sabbath’s Planet Caravan, appeared in late January in Issue 144 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine. The story can now be read in Swords and Sorcery Magazine’s archive, here.
  • In July, my Rab Foster story The Drakvur Challenge made it into the pages of Issue 3 of Crimson Quill Quarterly.  This was a milestone for me, being (by my calculations) the 100th short story I’ve had published.  The Drakvur Challenge was inspired by a visit I made to Tirta Gangga Royal Water Garden in Bali, Indonesia – a place I found fascinating because of its beautiful ponds, fish, fountains and networks of stepping stones… while, stowed away in a compound at the back, it also had some surprisingly monstrous-looking statues.  However, like much of my fantasy fiction, The Drakvur Challenge owed a big debt to the cinematic marvel that was Ray Harryhausen too.  Issue 3 of Crimson Quill Quarterly can be obtained as a paperback here and on Kindle here.

 

© Crimson Quill Quarterly

 

  • August saw the appearance of my story The Scarecrow of Terryk Head in Issue 151 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine.  In it, one of my recurring fantasy-fiction characters, Gudroon the Witch, had to deal with not only the evil scarecrow of the title but with three doltish farmers – and with three even-more-doltish farmers’ sons.  Again, The Scarecrow of Terryk Head is now available to read in the magazine’s archive, here.
  • In November, Rab Foster strayed into the controversial sub-genre of fantasy known as ‘grimdark’ and served up a tale of violence and gore, nihilism and despair, entitled The Mechanisms of Raphar.  (What, I wonder, inspired this?  What event in the real world in November 2024 could have induced nihilism and despair in me?)  Owing something to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum (1842) and also something to the ’10 Courts of Hell’ display at Singapore’s most remarkable museum, Haw Par Villa, The Mechanisms of Raphar appeared in Volume 18, Issue 13 of Schlock! Webzine, now purchasable at Amazon here.

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

As Steve Cashel:

  • Steve Cashel, the penname I put on non-horrific, non-fantastical and often crime-tinged stories set in Scotland, had one piece published in 2024.  In fact, it appeared only yesterday, on December 31st, the final day of the year.  It’s called Malkied and appears on the short-fiction page of the website for the crime-and-mystery publisher Close to the Bone.  It’s accessible here.

 

And finally…

  • This is cheating.  Self-publishing doesn’t count.  But on September 18th, 2024 – the tenth anniversary of Scotland’s referendum on independence – I took the opportunity to post on this blog a short story entitled Mither, which I’d written in 2014 soon after I’d heard the referendum’s result.  A mixture of Scottish politics and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), it was too weird to ever get properly published.  (Still, even if I say so myself, I think Norman Bates and his mom are a good metaphor for Scotland and the divisions between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ voters that supposedly materialised at the time.)  Anyway, if you’re interested, you can read it here.

 

So, I had 17 short stories published in 2024, which makes it my most successful year as a writer ever.  I suspect I will be hard-pressed to equal or better that record in 2025, however.  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.

 

Meanwhile, 2025 looks like it’s going to be garbage, largely due to Donald Trump regaining the American presidency, which will embolden fascists, climate-change deniers, anti-vaxxers and conspiracy-fantasist nutjobs around the world.  I suspect even somewhere as famously stable as Singapore will be affected, negatively, by the USA turning into a mafia state / an oligarchy / the political equivalent of a meth lab.  And there’ll be extra, unwelcome input from Elon Musk…  Oh well.  My strategy for surviving 2025 with my sanity intact will be to keep my head down and keep writing.

 

© The Sirens Call Publications

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Steve Cashel gets malkied

 

© Close to the Bone Publishing

 

Malkied – a Scottish word meaning ‘murdered’ – is the title of a short story of mine that has just appeared today, New Year’s Eve 2024, on the website of the crime and mystery fiction publisher Close to the Bone.  It’s attributed to Steve Cashel, the pseudonym I use when I write Scottish stories, often with a crime-related bend.

 

I suspect Close to the Bone scheduled Malkied for publication today because it’s set in Edinburgh, and Edinburgh is famous for its Hogmanay Street Party held every December 31st to welcome in the New Year.  However, by a sad irony, this evening’s Edinburgh Street Party has just been cancelled on safety grounds.  The weather forecasters have warned that the city tonight is going to be dangerously stormy.  A few Edinburgh Hogmanay events are still going ahead, though.  These include the New Year’s Eve concert at the George Street Assembly Rooms featuring the excellent indie-rock band Idlewild, whom I’ve seen play live on no fewer than four occasions; and, also at the Assembly Rooms, the New Year ceilidh – among the ceilidh bands providing music for it is the brilliantly-named Jimi Shandrix Experience.

 

Malkied is inspired by a real-life incident that involved my brother…  And that’s all I’m saying, because I don’t want to give anything away about its plot.  It can be accessed here.

 

And meanwhile, a Happy New Year to you all.