Category: Writing

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Jim Mountfield takes to the trees

 

© Spiral Tower Press

 

Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write horror stories, has been on a roll this month – which, appropriately enough, is October, the month of Halloween.  Already in October 2023 he’s had short stories appear in the online publication Schlock! Webzine and in the collection Nightmare Fuel: Mind Terrors 2023.  Now he’s just had a third story, entitled The Shelterbelt, published in Issue 3 of the magazine Witch House.

 

As its title implies, The Shelterbelt concerns a plantation of trees grown next to a property to shield it against the elements.  In the story, the property is a farm in a remote part of southern Scotland.  I didn’t have to look far for inspiration for The Shelterbelt.  In 1977, my parents sold our farm in Northern Ireland and purchased and moved to a new farm in southern Scotland, near the town of Peebles.  But the steading we found ourselves living in was hardly ‘new’ – it was a dilapidated and bleak-looking place at the time, with scarcely a tree anywhere, which was unfortunate because the steading was in a north-south-running valley and in the pathway of any bad weather borne by the north wind.  Several times during our first few winters there, we had to dig our way out from our front door, so heavily had snow been piled against it.  How long ago that seems now in these globally-warmed times…

 

My Dad immediately decided to create a shelterbelt on the northern side of the steading.  I still remember the day when he, my Mum and a good friend from Northern Ireland, Hugh Buchanon, planted the saplings.  Maybe I remember it because I discovered then how seriously my Dad – who was normally relaxed and easy-going – took his work.  He was very exacting.  He was very particular about how far apart those saplings were placed – not too close, not too distant.  After an hour of listening to him, my Mum and Hugh looked ready to plant him along with the trees.

 

Meanwhile, a literary influence for The Shelterbelt is the 1914 short story Ancient Lights by the author, broadcaster and occultist Algernon Blackwood.  And I’d be lying if I said a certain 1973 movie, about an uptight, virginal, Free Presbyterian policeman investigating a possible case of human sacrifice on a remote Scottish island, didn’t provide a little inspiration too.

 

For more information about Witch House magazine, click here.  And Issue 3, containing my story and a dozen others, can be downloaded here for free.

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Jim Mountfield is mad about books

 

© Cloaked Press LLC

 

Nightmare Fuel: Mind Terrors 2023 is a new anthology of psychological horror stories published by Cloaked Press LLC.  I’m delighted to say it includes a story I wrote under the nom de plume of Jim Mountfield, which I use for scary fiction.  My tale is entitled One for the Books and is about weird, then macabre happenings in a second-hand bookshop that might – possibly – be taking place only in the fevered imagination of one of the bookshop’s customers.

 

The bookshop in the story is inspired by the real and wonderful Armchair Books, which resides at 72-74 West Port in Edinburgh.  It’s been many years since I was last in the shop.  I haven’t been in it since 2014, in fact.  Back then, I wrote of it: “A guddle of boxes of super-cheap books on the pavement outside, its walls inside stacked to the ceiling with thousands, if not zillions, of tomes, it is actually two premises – number 72 mostly sells fiction, number 74 next door sells non-fiction…  It does seem a bit better organised these days…  In times past, the supposed alphabetical arrangement of the books’ authors would lead you on a merry dance, back and forth and into all sorts of awkward nooks and crannies.  Also, the cranky and entertaining notices that used to be stuck on the walls, in which the management expressed its disdain for health-and-safety inspectors – I assume at some point the council criticised the place, with its vertiginously high shelves, for exposing customers to possible death-by-avalanche-of-books – seem to have all come down now.”

 

During the Covid-19 pandemic I worried about how Armchair Books was faring.  And, although I was in Edinburgh just a few weeks ago, I didn’t have time to venture down to West Port to check if it was still on the go.  Thankfully, according to its website, it is still operational.   I hope the same applies to the other second-hand bookshops that I used to visit on West Port and along the adjoining Bread Street – Peter Bell Books, Edinburgh Books, Main Point Books, Pulp Fiction, etc. – and that made the neighbourhood such a pleasure to explore.

 

Meanwhile, Nightmare Fuel: Mind Terrors 2023, among whose 219 pages of madness my story lurks second from the end, can be purchased on Kindle or as a paperback here.

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Jim Mountfield eats his neeps

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

We’re now into October, a month that climaxes with the festival of Halloween.  Thus, it’s appropriate that I have just had a Halloween-themed short story published in the October 2023 of the online fiction publication Schlock! Webzine.  Entitled The Turnip Thieves, it appears under the name of Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I use for horror, ghost and generally ‘dark’ stories.

 

The Turnip Thieves takes place on a Scottish hill farm in the early 1980s.  It begins with a farmer noticing strange activity on a distant strip of ground where he’s planted turnips – ‘neeps’ as they’re called in the Scots language.  As it’s one day before Halloween, he thinks he knows what’s afoot.  Kids from a nearby town, he assumes, must be trying to steal his neeps, so they can make lanterns from them for the upcoming festival.  And, vengefully, he sets off to intervene…

 

The story is a nostalgic invocation of a time before pumpkins became widely available in Scottish supermarkets and when Scottish trick-or-treaters – or ‘guisers’, to give them the correct Scottish terminology – had to make do with the turnip, the pumpkin’s humble root-vegetable cousin, as a substitute for fashioning Halloween lanterns.  Actually, the shrunken, wizened visage of a turnip lantern is, to my mind, much creepier than that of a pumpkin one.  On the other hand, howking the hard, pale flesh out of a turnip required a lot more effort than gutting a pumpkin did.  And once you had a candle burning inside it, a turnip lantern stank…  Or, as they say in Scotland, it reeked.

 

The main page of Schlock! Webzine’s October 2023 edition – Volume 17, Issue 15 – can, for the next few weeks, be accessed here.  The Turnip Thieves itself can be read here.

 

And during the run-up to Halloween, I hope to post a few things relating to the macabre, ghostly and generally dark on this blog, in keeping with the spirit of the season.

 

© Dave Cockburn

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Rab Foster does fear the reaper

 

© Cloaked Press LLC

 

Vision of the Reaper, a short story by Rab Foster, the pseudonym under which I write fiction of a usually sword-and-sorcerous hue, is one of the tales in a new collection called Fall into Fantasy 2023 from the publisher Cloaked Press.  The story takes place in a giant wheatfield and has among its ingredients not only the titular, fearsome Reaper but also windmills, crop circles, corn dollies and pretty-much everything connected with the culture of crops and harvesting that I regard as cool.  (Not scarecrows, though – I think scarecrows are overused in the fantasy genre.)

 

The story also introduces a character called Cranna the Crimson, about whom I hope to write more fiction in the future.  She’s a swordswoman who, in addition to having to deal with the usual sword-and-sorcery fixtures of evil magicians, monstrous creatures and so on, has to deal with medieval-style male chauvinists as well.  Cranna is well-equipped for this, being the sort who takes no shit from anyone.

 

Offering 16 stories and 343 pages of fantasy-related goodness, Fall into Fantasy 2023 is available on kindle and as a paperback here.

 

And of course, this gives me an excuse to link you to one of the greatest songs in American rock-music history.  Guess which song.

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More gibbering, and gibbeting, from Rab Foster

 

© Swords and Sorcery Magazine

 

Rab Foster, the pseudonym I use when I write fantasy fiction, has just had a second short story published in 2023.  As with the previous Foster story, The Pyre of Larros, which appeared in print five months ago, this one is featured in Swords and Sorcery Magazine and has as its main character the swordsman Drayak Shathsprey, who seems doomed to get into serious trouble wherever he goes.  In The Gibbeting of Azmyre, now available to read in issue 138 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine, that trouble involves being hired by a shady character to retrieve an insalubrious item – the corpse of an executed criminal, currently hanging on display in a city’s main street.

 

The idea for The Gibbeting of Azmyre came to me a while back when I started reading the 1951 novel My Cousin Rachel by one of my literary heroines, Daphne du Maurier.  This begins with an account of how the narrator, Philip, is brought by his cousin and guardian Ambrose to view the gibbeted body of a murderer.  “I can remember as a little lad seeing a fellow hang in chains where the four roads meet.  His face and body were blackened with tar for preservation.  He hung there for five weeks before they cut him down, and it was the fourth week that I saw him.”

 

Meanwhile, the windswept and snow-scoured city street where the action in The Gibbeting of Azmyre takes place – “its floor a band of flagstones and cobbles carpeted with snow, its walls two towering rows of facades and edifices, spires and turrets, five and six-storeyed townhouses” – was inspired by the Royal Mile in Edinburgh.  (Yes, it’s appropriate that I had the Scottish capital in mind while I wrote a story about bodysnatching, although strictly speaking Edinburgh’s two most famous bodysnatchers – Burke and Hare – didn’t actually snatch bodies.  They murdered people, and then flogged off their victims’ remains to Dr Robert Knox for vivisection during his anatomy lectures.)  The Royal Mile doesn’t experience many snowstorms in these globally-warmed times, but it’s still a challenge to walk along when there’s a stark east wind flaying in from the nearby North Sea.

 

For the next month, The Gibbeting of Azmyre can be read here, while the main page for issue 138 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine is accessible here.

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Jim Mountfield hunts for cryptids

 

© Sirens Call Publications

 

My short story The Watchers in the Forest, which is attributed to the pseudonym Jim Mountfield, can now be read in issue 62 – the summer 2023 edition – of the fiction and poetry magazine The Sirens Call.

 

Much of the writing in this issue is on the theme of cryptids – a ‘cryptid’ being defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “an animal (such as Sasquatch or the Loch Ness Monster) that has been claimed to exist but never proven to exist.”  Accordingly, the young hero of The Watchers in the Forest one day notices something strange in the woodland that rises at the end of his grandparents’ garden, woodland in which there have been reports of mysterious ape-like creatures, and unwisely goes to investigate…

 

As usual with The Sirens Call, issue 62 is the sort of bargain that’s rare nowadays.  It contains 274 pages and features 169 stories and poems, yet is available free of charge.  It can be downloaded here.

 

Incidentally, while we’re on the subject of ape-like cryptids, here are my five favourite examples of them from the real world.  Well, I don’t think any of them are real, but there have certainly been real reports about them.

 

The Big Grey Man of Ben Macdui

This is Scotland’s number-one simian-cryptid.  The Big Grey Man of Ben Macdui (Am Fear Liath Mòr in Gaelic) is a huge, hairy creature that’s supposed to follow and loom up terrifyingly behind lone hikers and climbers on the country’s second-highest peak, the often-misty Ben Macdui in the Cairngorm Mountains.  Alas, nice though the idea of ape creatures lurking in Cairngorms is, I’m inclined to attribute the sightings of the Big Grey Man to the creepy optical effect known as the Brocken Spectre.  This involves the sun casting your shadow from a high position onto mist, fog or cloud and making it look monstrous.

 

The Bukit Timah Monkey Man

Fabulously, an ape-like cryptid is rumoured to stalk my current abode, Singapore, the island city-state that has an area of just over 700 square kilometres and is the third most densely populated nation in the world.  If cryptids can escape detection here, they can do it anywhere.  It’s said the Bukit Timah Monkey Man was originally sighted in 1805 and most recently in 2020.  In the intervening two centuries, those who claim to have seen the beast include Japanese soldiers during their country’s occupation of Singapore in World War II.

 

The Monkey Man’s sightings have centred around the Singaporean district of Bukit Timah where, on the slopes of Bukit Timah Hill (Singapore’s highest peak at 164 metres) there’s a nature reserve with a population of crab-eating macaque monkeys.  It’s assumed that people have seen the real monkeys in poor visibility and distorting light conditions and mistaken them for the cryptid.  Though as the crab-eating macaques are at most a half-metre long, and the Monkey Man is supposed to walk upright at a height of 1.75 metres, it seems an odd mistake to make.

 

A fixture in Singaporean popular culture, the Bukit Timah Monkey Man is sometimes known by the abbreviation BTM, which makes him sound like a Korean-Pop boy-band.

 

The Monkey Man of Delhi

Delhi is no stranger to monkeys.  The last time I was in the city, in 2014, I couldn’t believe the size of the monkey-gangs that were roaming the streets in the neighbourhood of the Indian parliament.  They swaggered about as if they owned the place.  Predictably, I heard jokes from local people about the parliament being full of monkeys in more way than one.

 

 

However, in 2001, the city’s monkey phenomenon took a sinister turn with reports about the Monkey Man of Delhi.  According to eyewitnesses, this apparition was a simian-type creature that ranged from four feet to eight feet in height.  It was seen about 350 times and supposedly attacked and injured some 60 people, even causing a couple of deaths.  The Monkey Man of Delhi’s reign of terror has been attributed to mass hysteria, not unlike the Spring-Heeled Jack panic that gripped Britain nearly two centuries earlier.  Thus, the creature is probably more of an urban myth than a ‘real’ cryptid.

 

The Monkey Man of Delhi had some surprisingly human tastes in accessories.  His Wikipedia entry mentions how eyewitness accounts had him not only “covered in thick black hair” but also endowed with “a metal helmet, metal claws, glowing red eyes and three buttons” on his chest.  “Some reports also claim that the Monkey Man wore roller-skates.”

 

The Nittaewo

Sri Lanka, the country where I lived from 2014 to 2022, is also home to tales of anthropoid cryptids.  The Nittaewo were said to be a species of bipedal, tailless primates dwelling in the nation’s forests, with talon-like fingers and a strange language that resembled the twittering of birds.  According to the traditions of the Vedda people – who are believed to be Sri Lanka’s oldest human inhabitants – the Vedda fought against and finally destroyed the Nittaewo in the 18th century.  All the same, there have been alleged sightings of the Nittaewo since then, indeed, as late as 1984.

 

But if you go down to the Sri Lankan woods today and hear strange rustlings and twittering sounds coming from the undergrowth, you needn’t be too alarmed.  The Nittaewo were said to be three feet tall at most.  So if they did exist, they shouldn’t have looked any more threatening than a Hobbit.

 

The Yeti

Obviously, the Yeti, the Abominable Snowmen of the Himalayas, vie with Bigfoot as being the world’s most famous ape-like cryptids.  I like them for two reasons.  Firstly, they inspired the haunting, wistful song Wild Man by Kate Bush, released in 2011.  (“Lying in my tent, I can hear your cry echoing round the mountainside / You sound lonely…”)

 

Secondly, I used to see a yeti regularly in Colombo, the Sri Lankan capital.  The venerable street-side walkway on York Street in the city’s downtown area had a huge fibreglass yeti hulking behind, and glowering out through, one of its shop windows.  The thing had been created as an eye-catching advertising gimmick for a product called Yeti Isotonic Energy.  This was a rehydrating sports drink “developed in collaboration by Austrian and Sri Lankan scientists”, and bottles of it were on display in the same window.

 

I wonder if he’s still there today?

 

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Jim Mountfield gets stoned

 

© Aphelion

 

Ask me to name my favourite band of all time and four days of the week I’ll say the Rolling Stones, at least during their 1969-1974 period when they had Mick Taylor playing guitar with them.  (If you ask me on the other three days of the week, I’ll say the Jesus and Mary Chain.)

 

Though nowadays the Rolling Stones are most likely to evoke an affectionate chuckle from all and sundry, usually due to the lovable antics and anecdotes of Mr Keith Richards – Keef falling out of a palm tree in Fiji and needing emergency surgery for the acute cerebral hematoma he incurred, Keef smoking some of his recently deceased and cremated dad’s ashes in a spliff, Keef spilling the beans about Mick Jagger’s ‘tiny todger’ – there was a time when some very dark stuff indeed seemed to swirl around the band.

 

This dark stuff included the mysterious (and conspiracy-theory-laden) death of the Stones’ original lead guitarist Brian Jones, who was found drowned in his swimming pool in July 1969…  The band’s headlining of the ill-fated Altamont Speedway Free Festival in December of the same year, which saw the Hells Angels who’d been hired to act as concert security stab someone to death in the crowd…  Jagger’s involvement with Performance (1970), Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s dark, sleazy, druggy and violent movie about decadent rock stars and Kray Brothers-style gangsters, which so affected Jagger’s co-star James Fox that afterwards he took a decade-long hiatus from acting and became an evangelical Christian (though, alas, more horror was in store for poor old James, because in 1978 he fathered the idiotic far-right-wing nincompoop Laurence Fox)…  The band’s fondness for referencing Auld Nick when titling albums, such as Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967) and Goat’s Head Soup (1973), and songs, such as Sympathy for the Devil (1968) and Dancing with Mr D (1973)…  And generally, the whole image the band cultivated during the late 1960s and early 1970s. of outrage, hysteria, decadence, heroin, cocaine, Jack Daniels, groupies, partying, dabbling in the occult and doing naughty things with Mars Bars.

 

© Goodtimes Enterprises / Warner Brothers

 

Since I write horror stories, under the nom de plume Jim Mountfield, I’d always wanted to pen a macabre tale about the Rolling Stones during their young, hedonistic and scary days.  Well, I’m pleased to announce that I’ve finally managed to do so and the result, a 12000-word story called The Lost Stones, has just been published in the long-fiction section of the May 2023 edition of the ezine Aphelion.

 

Okay, it’s not quite about the Stones themselves – it’s about a mysterious cover band called the Lost Stones, who bear an uncanny resemblance to the real Stones in their youth, when Brian Jones was still alive and part of their line-up.  And the Lost Stones’ post-gig parties are really not events you want to get invited to…

 

I had a lot of fun writing The Lost Stones, especially as I managed to set the story in Sapporo, the main city of Japan’s northernmost island and prefecture Hokkaido, where I spent five very happy years during the 1990s.

 

Furthermore, I was able to mix into the story some folklore from North Africa.  The Maghreb, i.e., Arab and Berber North Africa, is another place where I’ve lived, from 2009 to 2013.  The Stones have a connection with that region because of their hook-up in the late 1960s with the Sufi-music-playing group the Master Musicians of Joujouka, who are based in the Rif Mountains of Morocco.  Brian Jones was particularly enthusiastic about the Master Musicians and an album he produced of their music, Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka, is fascinatingly trippy.

 

The main page of Aphelion is available here and, until early June, Jim Mountfield’s story The Lost Stones can be accessed here.

 

© Rolling Stones

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Jim Mountfield gets something woolly for his 50th

 

© The Sirens Call Publications

 

Jim Mountfield, the pen-name under which I write horror fiction, has today had a new story published in the spring 2023 edition of the short-story and poetry ezine The Sirens Call.   Entitled Wool, it’s set in rural Scotland in the near future and envisions a time when science has made agriculture – at least, agriculture where animals are reared for meat and wool – truly grotesque and nightmarish.  The Sirens Call’s spring edition can be downloaded here.

 

According to my calculations, Wool is the 50th story I’ve had published as Jim Mountfield.  I came up with the name a dozen years ago, when I realised I had some good ideas for horror stories and wanted to put them down on paper, but was painfully aware that my real name ‘Ian Smith’ was hardly a memorable one for an author of scary fiction – or any sort of fiction, for that matter.  While I was trying to think of a pseudonym, I noticed that I had playing in the background an album by the rock band Primal Scream.  And Primal Scream’s bass player at the time was the affable Gary ‘Mani’ Mountfield, who’d earlier played for – and would later play for again – the legendary ‘Madchester’ band the Stone Roses.  “Mountfield,” I thought, “what a cool surname!”  Meanwhile, the ‘Jim’ part of ‘Jim Mountfield’ came easily, as ‘James’ is my middle name.

 

Looking back over the 50 stories that have appeared in print bearing Jim Mountfield’s name, I think the following ten are my favourites.

 

Laughing Dragon, which appeared in the now-defunct ezine Flashes in the Dark in 2011, was a piece of flash fiction that featured a stained-glass window depicting a dragon and a man paranoid about the fact that his girlfriend was much younger than he was.  Despite the story’s 1000-word length, I managed to fit in some brazenly scatological humour too.  Laughing Dragon shouldn’t have worked, but I think it did, somehow.

 

© Midnight Street Press

 

The Next Bus appeared in issue 4 of the magazine Hellfire Crossroads in 2014.  I had a lot of fun writing this story, which combines the misery of waiting for a bus that doesn’t seem to want to come with the terror of dealing with a knife-wielding psychopath at the bus-stop.  I also really liked The Groove, which appeared in the subsequent issue of Hellfire Crossroads, because it wasn’t just about horror but about something else close to my heart, music.  The story’s villainess was a scheming widow whose “CD collection consisted of just six titles: The Essential Mariah Carey, Phil Collins’ Hits, Robbie Williams’ Greatest Hits, Whitney Houston’s Ultimate Collection, Bryan Adams’ Best of Me and the musical soundtrack for Titanic.”  Her evilness was such that she had her music-loving husband’s funeral defiled by the playing of Robbie Williams’ Angels (1997).  Both issues of Hellfire Crossroads can be purchased here.

 

Ae Fond Kiss, also the title of a Robert Burns song, was about a circus, an automaton designed by Henri Maillardet and some teenagers holidaying on the coast of south-western Scotland.  I didn’t include the next words of the song – “And then we sever…” – in the title, as that would have given away the ending.  The story appears in the summer 2018 print edition of The Horror Zine, which can be bought here.

 

© The Horror Zine

 

The same summer saw the publication of In Hog Heaven in Aphelion.  This story feels special to me because it was the first time I tried setting a supernatural story in Northern Ireland, the place where I’d spent my childhood.  In Hog Heaven can be read here.  In July the following year, Aphelion published my story They Draw You In, about a teacher doing some groundwork for a school trip in a small, dingy, provincial art gallery that displays some unusual paintings by an artist who was known too for his Aleister Crowley-type proclivities.  Again, They Draw You In was one of those stories where the disparate elements seemed to work together nicely.  It’s accessible here.

 

The webzine Horrified was under threat of closure last year but, happily, it’s still on the go.  In November 2020, my story First Footers appeared in its collection Christmas – Horror Stories from Horrified: Volume 1.  Not quite set at Christmas, First Footers had a pair of lads in the Scottish Highlands attempting to revive the old Scottish tradition of first-footing on New Year’s Eve and having a series of increasingly bizarre experiences.  Like a lot of the stories in my top ten, I valued this one because it contained a fair amount of humour.  I can’t find a link to the collection now, unfortunately, but my story Where the Little Boy Drowned, published on Horrified’s fiction page in January 2021, can be read here.  The story of a man trapped in a hellish physical predicament, with the possibility that a vengeful ghost is lurking close by, Where the Little Boy Drowned received some good feedback from its readers.

 

© Horrified Magazine

 

March 2022 saw the publication of Never Tell Tales Out of School in Schlock! Webzine.  This one felt close to my heart because it revisited my memories of school in the 1970s, which was ‘rough and tumble’ to say the least.  Its plot had a troubled author returning to his old school, which is now ultra-child-safety-conscious, ultra-inclusive and ultra-politically-correct, hoping that they’ll stock his new book in their library, and then being tormented by visions of bullying he suffered there 45 years earlier.  This edition of Schock! Webzine is available here.

 

Also partly set in the 1970s was my story Guising, which was printed in the Halloween 2022 issue of The Sirens Call.  An account of some kids participating in the Scottish variation of trick-or-treating, back in the days when they could just go up to and knock on strangers’ front doors unaccompanied by an adult, I enjoyed writing this because I could tell the story through the kids themselves – whose grasp of what is going on is somewhat less-than-complete.  Like the current issue of The Sirens Call, the Halloween 2022 issue is downloadable here.

 

Finally, I’m delighted that Jim Mountfield should be celebrating the publication of his 50th story on May 1st, May Day, an auspicious date in the horror-genre calendar.  The climax of the greatest horror movie of all time, Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973), took place on this day, which is important in pagan, pre-Christian cultures because it falls halfway between the spring equinox and summer solstice and marks the beginning of summer.  Come to think of it, 2023 marks the fiftieth anniversary of The Wicker Man’s release.  There’s that number again, 50…

 

© British Lion Films

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Rab Foster gets fired up

 

© Swords and Sorcery Magazine

 

I’ve just had my first fiction published in 2023 under the name of Rab Foster – which is the pseudonym I usually attach to works in the fantasy genre.  A Rab Foster story with the combustible title of The Pyre of Larros is now available to read in the current, 133rd issue of Swords and Sorcery Magazine.  It’s the latest in a series of tales featuring Drayak Shathsprey, a wandering swordsman / mercenary / vagabond with a knack for getting himself into serious trouble.  He’s previously appeared in the stories The Tower and the Stars (published in the October 2022 edition of Aphelion) and Crows of the Mynchmoor (which Swords and Sorcery Magazine published back in January 2022).

 

The story’s setting – a small, crumbling town perched on the edge of a high escarpment – was inspired by a real place I’ve visited, the settlement of Ankober in Ethiopia.  This sits nearly 2,500 metres up on the lip of the eastern escarpment of the Ethiopian Highlands and is about 25 miles east of the larger town of Debre Birhan, where I lived from 1999 to 2001.  At one time a capital of Shewa, a kingdom within the Ethiopian Empire, Ankober looked pretty dilapidated when I arrived there one weekend.  I’d been hired to do some research about it by the editors of a forthcoming edition of the Footprint East Africa Handbook.  I came on an early-morning bus from Debre Birhan, which spent hours navigating a torturously narrow and rocky road, and found the place shrouded in a dense, eerie fog.  The people were friendly enough, though, and when the fog lifted I saw how beautifully positioned their town was.  Also, there were some fascinating Ethiopian Orthodox churches on the neighbouring hillsides.  Wikipedia informs me that since 2009 Ankober has had a new road linking it with Debre Birhan – built, I suspect, with Chinese help.

 

Meanwhile, the idea for the mural that appears early in the story, bearing a very flattering depiction of the King Larros of the title, came from things I’ve seen in two other countries: Libya (when the visage of the late Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was ubiquitous) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (ditto for the late Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il).

 

 

As for the basic scenario in The Pyre of Larros, which propels the plot towards its fiery denouement…  Well, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t at least partly inspired by a major event in the United Kingdom in the latter half of last year.

 

Just now, the main page of the 133rd issue of Swords and Sorcery Magazine is available here and The Pyre of Larros itself can be read here.

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Jim Mountfield walks among the shadows

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write horror fiction, has just had his first short story published in 2023.  The story is entitled Temple Street and it appears in this month’s edition – Volume 17, Issue 6 – of Schlock! Webzine.

 

Temple Street is set in the northern Sri Lankan town of Jaffna – a town so north in the island and so close to India, in fact, that it often feels more Indian in culture and temperament – and it’s particularly inspired by Kovil Road, the street where I usually stayed during the many occasions between 2016 and 2020 when I was sent to Jaffna as part of my job.  I found Kovil Road fascinating for the same reason that the story’s main character finds the fictional Temple Street fascinating: “Though it was narrow and its traffic consisted mainly of tuk-tuks, motorbikes and bicycles, it’d taken him past properties that seemed to represent every point on every spectrum of town life, from ancient to modern, poor to rich, wild to civilised.”

 

 

One night, though, I had an eerie experience walking back along Kovil Road after spending a few hours in my favourite local watering hole, the Colombo Restaurant – no, it wasn’t a restaurant and no, it wasn’t in Colombo either.  A strong wind was blowing, shaking the tops of the trees overhead, especially the palm trees, and I couldn’t help noticing how bestial-looking the shadows of the palm-fronds looked on the road beside me.  They seemed to twist and writhe on the asphalt like giant, black, shaggy beasts…  And that gave me the idea for Temple Street.

 

I’m wary of horror stories written by Western writers and featuring Western characters that use ‘exotic’ – i.e., non-Western – locales as their settings.  Often, intentional or not, the implication is that the locale is mysterious, dangerous and less ‘civilised’ because it’s culturally different from the West.  The laziest of these stories appropriate something from the local culture, from its mythology, legends or folklore, and use it as a cheap way to rustle up a monster and / or some horror.  Since I didn’t wish to do that with Jaffna, Temple Street stresses that the bad stuff comes from a combination of conditions that could arise anywhere in the world, Western countries included.  Unfortunately for the story’s protagonist, those conditions just happen to arise one night while he’s walking along the street of the title.

 

For the next month, Temple Street can be read here, while the main page for Schlock! Webzine is accessible here.