Category: Writing

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My 2021 writing round-up

 

© Midnight Street Press

 

On this blog one year ago, I remember writing a post that bid an unfond adieu to the outgoing hellhole plague-year of 2020.  However, the post also welcomed 2021 with some expressions of mild optimism.  After all, vaccines were being developed against Covid-19, the main reason for 2020’s hideousness.  And that man-slug of evil, Donald Trump, had just been defeated in the US presidential election.

 

Well, I’m not making that mistake again.  I’m not expressing even faint optimism about 2022, seeing as 2021 was nearly as dire as its predecessor.

 

While the vaccines arrived – and having been double-jabbed and boosted courtesy of Sri Lanka’s healthcare system, I’m feeling a lot safer personally – it’s depressing that much of the world’s population remains unvaccinated.  Economics and politics have denied many people access to vaccines in the Global South.  Gordon Brown isn’t someone I normally agree with, but he’s absolutely right when he argues that the estimated 23.4 billion dollars it’d cost to roll out vaccines to everyone would be a wise investment for the world’s rich countries.  (It’s also a fraction of what’s been spent on certain recent wars.)   Meanwhile, anti-vaxxers continue to boggle the mind with their stupidity.  It takes unfathomable levels of dumbness to believe that getting a vaccine means having Bill Gates seed your body with micro-transmitters.  As a result, for years to come, unvaccinated humans will provide a giant petri dish for new Covid variants to mutate and develop.

 

As for the USA, it looks increasingly likely that the Republican Party, with Trump quite possibly at its head again, will be back in control of the White House in 2024.  They won’t win the popular vote, but the voter suppression, voting-law changes and replacement of election officials they’re currently enacting by stealth in the crucial ‘swing’ states will get them over the line.  At which point, the world’s most powerful nation will become a totalitarian state.

 

Anyway, enough of the gloom.  For me, 2021 wasn’t a disappointment in one respect, at least.  During the year I got a fair number of stories published, under the pseudonyms Jim Mountfield (used for my horror fiction) and Rab Foster (used for my fantasy fiction).  There follows a round-up of those stories, with information about where you can find them.

 

© DBND Publishing

 

As Jim Mountfield:

  • In January 2021, my story Where the Little Boy Drowned was published in Horrified Magazine. A ghost story (with a smidgeon of J-Horror), it was about a flooded river, a forgotten childhood tragedy and – appropriately for January – a New Year resolution that goes wrong. It can be read here.
  • February saw The Stables – another ghost story, this time about three girls on holiday in the countryside who enter a seemingly deserted farmstead searching for a riding school – appear in Volume 16, Issue 13 of Schlock! Webzine. Kindle and paperback versions of the issue are available here.
  • Later in February, When the Land Gets Hold of You, another story set on a farm, was featured in an anthology from DBND Publishing called The Cryptid Chronicles. As its title suggests, the stories in this collection concerned cryptids, that pseudoscientific category of animals that some people claim to exist but nobody has ever conclusively proven to exist, such as Chupacabra, the Jersey Devil and Nessie.  The cryptids in my story were based on redcaps, the malevolent fairies that legends say inhabit the peel towers of Scotland’s Borders region.  The Cryptid Chronicles can be bought here.
  • Shotgun Honey, a webzine devoted to the ‘crime, hardboiled and noir genres’, published my story Karaoke in March 2021. The story is about – surprise! – karaoke and it can be read here.
  • In July, I was pleased to have my story Ballyshannon Junction included in the collection Railroad Tales, from Midnight Street Press. The stories in Railroad Tales involved both ‘railroads, trains, stations, junctions and crossings’ and the ‘horrific, supernatural or extraordinary’.  Ballyshannon Junction met this brief by being set in an abandoned railway station in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and featuring a main character who’s plagued by possibly supernatural visions.  It also allowed me to use as inspiration the real-life Bundoran Junction station-house and grounds in County Tyrone, where my grandparents lived when I was a kid.  Railroad Tales can be purchased from Amazon UK here and amazon.com here.
  • A story inspired by a very different period in my life – when I worked in Libya – appeared in Volume 16, Issue 21 of Schlock! Webzine in October. The story was called The Encroaching Sand and the issue is available in kindle and paperback forms here.
  • Also in October, my story Bottled Up was included in the anthology Horror Stories from Horrified (Volume 2): Folk Horror, published by Horrified Magazine. Folk horror is defined by Wikipedia as “a subgenre of horror… which uses elements of folklore to invoke fear in its audience.  Typical elements include a rural setting and themes of isolation, religion, the power of nature, and the potential darkness of rural landscapes.”  Accordingly, Bottled Up was set in that rural and folkloric part of England, East Anglia, and featured the remnants of a cult that worship a pagan sea deity.  The anthology can be purchased here.
  • Finally, my story Problem Family – about, unsurprisingly, a problem family, but also with a dash of H.P. Lovecraft – appeared in Horla in December. Currently, it can be read here.

 

© Horrified Magazine

 

As Rab Foster:

  • In May, Perspectives of the Scorvyrn was published in Volume 16, Issue 16 of Schlock! Webzine. This tale attempted to subvert the more macho, musclebound, boneheaded conventions of that sweaty sub-genre of fantasy fiction, the sword-and-sorcery story.  For one thing, it was told from multiple viewpoints and, for another, it was written in the present tense.  Conan the Barbarian would not have approved.  Kindle and paperback versions of the issue can be obtained here.
  • In July, my 13,000-word story The Theatregoers appeared in the Long Fiction section of Aphelion. It can be accessed here.
  • October saw The Orchestra of Syrak, a story inspired by the phantasmagorical (if overly verbose) work of pulp writer Clark Ashton Smith, appear in the 116th issue of Swords and Sorcery Magazine.  You can read it here.
  • And in November, Parallel Universe Publications unveiled a collection entitled Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3, which included my story The Foliage.  An extremely handsome volume (thanks to its illustrations by the talented artist Jim Pitts), kindle and paperback copies of it can be ordered from Amazon UK here and amazon.com here.

 

© Aphelion

 

And that’s that – proof that 2021 wasn’t so bad for me writing-wise, even though it sucked on most other levels.

 

I shan’t tempt fate by making any optimistic predictions about 2022, but let’s just hope it turns out to be better than its two predecessors.  And yes – I’m touching a large wooden surface as I write this – a Happy New Year, everyone!

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Jim Mountfield keeps it in the family

 

© Horla Magazine

 

A new short story of mine, Problem Family, is now available to read online at Horla Magazine.  As it’s a horror story, it’s attributed to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write macabre fiction.

 

The main inspiration for Problem Family was a real-life incident that happened to me in Colombo a couple of years ago, when I was living in a different apartment building from the one I live in today.  An extremely noisy family lived in an apartment on the floor below mine.  For some reason – the building’s acoustics, the way the stairwell was positioned – the noise they generated seemed to flow straight up to my front door.  Indeed, it sometimes seemed like the loud melodramas they were enacting were taking place right on the other side of my door.   One evening, I heard adult male and female voices screaming at each other and became convinced that, if this went on for much longer, the woman was going to be assaulted.  So, reluctantly, I ventured downstairs, ostensibly to tell them to shut up, but really to find out if I needed to report something to the police.  Thankfully, the situation proved to be non-violent – and at my appearance, the pair of them did shut up.

 

© SpectreVision / RLJE Films

 

Also, in part and completely differently, Problem Family was inspired by the famous 1927 sci-fi / horror story The Colour Out of Space by H.P. Lovecraft.  This is an account what happens after a meteorite strikes a remote area of Massachusetts.  A nearby farming family begin to succumb to what initially seems to be a weird, creeping, expanding poison but is actually a grotesque alien lifeform exuding an indescribable colour – it was ‘only by analogy that they called it a colour at all’.  The Colour Out of Space has been filmed several times, starting with a rather duff version starring Boris Karloff and directed by Daniel Haller in 1965, and most recently in 2019 with a phantasmagorical version courtesy of director Richard Stanley.  The 2019 film is slightly too reminiscent of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), but benefits from a striking colour palette – it’s difficult to depict unknown alien colours on celluloid, so Stanley settles for making everything a garish purple – and from Nicholas Cage in the lead role, doing the sort of acting things that only Nicholas Cage is capable of doing.

 

You can also hear The Colour Out of Space being read aloud on this video from the BBC’s ‘interactive culture magazine’ Collective.  Brilliantly, the reader is none other than the late, great Mark E. Smith, vocalist with and guiding light of abrasive post-punk / alternative rock band the Fall.  The sound of Smith’s thick Mancunian accent and the Massachusetts accents of Lovecraft’s characters battling for supremacy is something else.  I have to say, though, that the bit at the beginning where Smith sticks out and wiggles his tongue is as terrifying as anything in the story itself.

 

Fittingly for a magazine that takes its name from The Horla, the classic 1887 story by Guy De Maupassant, Horla describes itself as ‘the home of intelligent horror’.  Its main page, which gives access to a bevy of cracking stories, can be reached here.  Meanwhile, Problem Family itself can, for now, be read here.

 

© Librairie Ollendorff

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Rab Foster clears the foliage

 

© Jim Pitts / Parallel Universe Publications

 

Rab Foster, the pen-name under which I write fantasy fiction, has just had a short story published in the collection Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3.  This is the tenth piece by Mr Foster that’s seen publication in recent years, which I’m pleased, but also surprised about.  I’ve always enjoyed reading fantasy literature by the likes of C. L. Moore, Karl Edward Wagner, Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock, but for most of the 21st century I’d assumed there were few outlets where you could get works in the genre published – at least, in its short-story form, which is my speciality.  However, lately, there seems to have been a surge in the number of magazines, ezines and anthologies devoted to fantasy fiction, which has created many new opportunities.  Maybe this is due to the popularity of the Games of Thrones TV series (2011-19).  If so, thanks for that, George R.R. Martin.

 

I’m particularly happy to have a story published in this collection because it’s been put together by David A. Riley and Jim Pitts at Parallel Universe Publications.  Lancastrian artist Jim Pitts has illustrated the volume and I well remember his artwork from 40 years ago when it appeared in a magazine called Fantasy Tales.  As I said in a recent blog-entry, Fantasy Tales was the first publication that I, as a young, aspiring and acne-ridden writer, submitted stories to.  While they weren’t accepted, one of Fantasy Tales’ editors, Dave Sutton, was decent enough to write back and offer advice about how to make my work more organised and presentable.  He told me to leave spaces after punctuation marks when I was typing my manuscripts, so that my sentences didn’t turn into typographical pile-ups.  Also, in an effort to build tension, I employed a lot of one-sentence paragraphs, which hit the protagonists with one revelation after another.  Probably not a good idea, he pointed out, to have six or seven one-sentence paragraphs in a row…

 

I remember Fantasy Tales as a gorgeous-looking little magazine, with Pitt’s colour artwork adorning its cover and his intricate, atmospheric black-and-white illustrations on the pages inside.  Here’s a few examples.

 

© Jim Pitts / Fantasy Tales

© Jim Pitts / Parallel Universe Publications

 

Anyhow, I’m chuffed that one of my stories is sharing a book with Jim Pitts’ artwork at last.

 

Rab Foster’s story in Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3 is entitled The Foliage, and I suspect it’s no coincidence that I started writing it soon after watching the movie In the Earth (2021), a forest-set piece of sci-fi / horror eco-weirdness from filmmaker Ben Wheatley.  The story also owes something to a 1976 Doctor Who adventure called The Seeds of Doom, which featured Tom Baker as the Doctor and a marvellously-deranged Tony Beckley and John Challis (who later became a much-loved comedy actor and who, sadly, died in September this year) as the villains.  I know nerds between the ages of 15 and 70 will argue till the cows come home about what the scariest ever Doctor Who adventure is, but for my money, The Seeds of Doom is the one.

 

Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3 is currently available at amazon.co.uk here and at amazon.com here.

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Jim Mountfield’s folky fortieth

 

© Horrified Magazine

 

My horror-writing alter-ego Jim Mountfield has just had a short story published in the new anthology Horror Stories from Horrified (Volume 2): Folk Horror.

 

‘Horrified’ refers to Horrified Magazine, a webzine devoted to British films, television and literature in the horror genre.  The magazine’s current literary editor William J. Brown, its former literary editor John Clewarth and its editor-in-chief Jae Prowse have put this collection together.  Meanwhile ‘Folk Horror’ refers – quoting its entry in Wikipedia – to “a subgenre of horror… which uses elements of folklore to invoke fear in its audience.  Typical elements include a rural setting and themes of isolation, religion, the power of nature, and the potential darkness of rural landscapes.”  Or as Jae Prowse puts it more poetically in his introduction to the collection, it’s macabre storytelling with evocations “of briar and bramble, of the quiet eeriness of rurality, of secrets buried in the earth, and of the fiend in the furrows.”

 

According to my calculations, my story in Folk Horror is the 40th one I’ve had published under the pseudonym Jim Mountfield.  Entitled Bottled Up, it’s set in East Anglia, a place where I lived in 1998, again in 2002, and then again in 2008-2009, and a place that ranks as perhaps my favourite part of England.  While a lot of examples of folk horror have strange rural communities welcoming hapless outsiders into their ranks, for nefarious reasons – see Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973) or Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) – Bottled Up is about an ancient sect that’s just fearful of outsiders and exists to keep them at bay, something that might resonate in the 2021 Britain of Brexit and Covid-19.

 

Horror Stories from Horrified (Volume 2): Folk Horror is now available at the Horrified Magazine shop and can be ordered here.  Incidentally, the magazine’s previous collection, Horror Stories from Horrified (Volume 1): Christmas is still available, contains another Jim Mountfield story called First Footers, and might be a timely purchase as Christmas 2021 approaches.

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Another encroachment by Jim Mountfield

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

Hot on the heels of my previous announcement about my fantasy-writing pseudonym Rab Foster having a story published in Swords and Sorcery Magazine comes the news that my horror-writing pseudonym Jim Mountfield has just had story published too, in Volume 16, Issue 21 of Schlock! Webzine.  Entitled The Encroaching Sand, it’s as much a pessimistic meditation on the inescapability of fate as it is a horror story and it was inspired by a year I spent in a remote part of Libya, working as an academic manager and living in an adjacent apartment at a university campus that was, basically, in the middle of nowhere.

 

When I wasn’t working, and especially at weekends, there was absolutely nothing to do and, it seemed, absolutely nobody else around in this place.  It was possibly the most psychologically difficult thing I’ve ever done.  Although in hindsight, of course, I was fortunate.  I left Libya just a few months before the drawn-out revolution, anarchy and bloodshed that saw, finally, the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi.  I just hope that during that difficult time no harm came to the people I worked with.

 

One thing I did during that year to combat boredom – I started writing and submitting horror stories under the penname Jim Mountfield.  That was almost 40 published Mountfield stories ago.  So eventually, for me, the experience had a positive result.

 

During October 2021, Schlock! Webzine, Volume 16, Issue 21, can be accessed here and The Encroaching Sand itself can be accessed here.

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Another orchestration from Rab Foster

 

© Swords and Sorcery Magazine

 

My short story The Orchestra of Syrak is now available to read online in the 116th issue of Swords and Sorcery Magazine.  As the name of the magazine suggests, The Orchestra of Syrak belongs to the fantasy genre and for that reason it’s been published under the penname Rab Foster, the name I attach to any fiction I write that involves magic, castles, mythical monsters and brawny, heroic swordsmen lumbering around clad in nothing but leather jockstraps, and that evokes the spirit of such writers as Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock and Karl Edward Wagner.

 

Actually, The Orchestra of Syrak involves only a small dollop of magic and monstrousness and contains no castles or brawny swordsmen at all.  It’s about a group of thieves who discover a strange assortment of musical instruments and, if it’s indebted to any writer, then it probably owes something to the American pulp-ster Clark Ashton Smith.  In the 1920s and 1930s, Smith churned out dozens of phantasmagorical stories, many of which were published in the doyen of pulp-fiction magazines, Weird Tales.  In the 1970s, some of his better-known stories appeared in Britain, published by Panther Books in paperback collections with titles like Lost Worlds Volume 1 and Volume 2, The Abominations of Yondo and Genius Loci.  The collections’ covers featured some fabulously colourful and evocative artwork by Bruce Pennington.  In fact, I like Pennington’s artwork so much that I’ll use this entry as an excuse to reproduce it here:

 

© Panther Books

 

Returning to Clark Ashton Smith – one thing you can’t ignore about him is the unashamed verbosity of his prose.  He was never a writer to use one adjective when half-a-dozen, multi-syllabled and archaic ones would do.  I know I’m guilty of overwriting occasionally, but the opening paragraph of The Orchestra of Syrak contains six adjectives and adverbs, while in the similar-sized opening paragraph of the title story in The Abominations of Yondo I counted 21.  Still, although Smith’s prose veers off into dark shades of purpleness, I have to say I find it endearing, though it’s not something I can digest in more than small doses – any more than I’d want to eat slices of rich, dark, thickly-creamed Black Forest Gateau all the time.  (I think it’s a shame, however, that so many young, up-and-coming fantasy writers are so influenced by Smith that they laboriously try to emulate his writing style.  While Smith’s style is uniquely appealing, that of his imitators is often just unreadable.)

 

For the next month, The Orchestra of Syrak can be read here, while the home page of issue 116 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine can be accessed here.

 

And here’s a picture of the young Clark Ashton Smith, looking oddly like Jarvis Cocker in his His ‘n’ Hers period.

 

From wikipedia.org 

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Jim Mountfield takes a train

 

© Midnight Street Press

 

My short story Ballyshannon Junction is featured in the recent anthology Railroad Tales, edited by Trevor Denyer and published by Trevor’s Midnight Street Press.  Railroad Tales is a collection of stories ‘involving railroads, trains, stations, junctions and crossings’ that also involve the ‘horrific, supernatural or extraordinary’.  For that reason, Ballyshannon Junction is attributed to the pseudonym Jim Mountfield, the penname I attach to my macabre fiction.  (Well, my real name ‘Ian Smith’ hardly sounds as evocative as, say, ‘Edgar Allan Poe’ or ‘H.P. Lovecraft’ or even ‘Dean R. Koontz’.)

 

Ballyshannon Junction had a long gestation period.  It’s rooted in my childhood in Northern Ireland when, up until the age of eight or nine years old, I was lucky enough to have a former railway station as my personal playground.  My family were farmers and, after my parents got married, my grandparents decided to move out of the family farmhouse to let their son and new daughter-in-law get on with the running of the farm.  They bought the nearby Bundoran Junction, a former railway-station building and its surroundings that’d last seen trains in 1957 when the Irish Northwest line was closed, and they lived there in retirement.

 

The property had two platforms, one by the line to Enniskillen in County Fermanagh and one by the line to the seaside town of Bundoran in County Donegal.  My grandfather planted trees along one line and filled in part of the other to create a lawn.  I often spent the day there, or stayed with my grandparents overnight, and the place was like catnip to my young imagination.  The station house had a glasshouse-like annex that I’d always thought was the old waiting room, although I’ve recently learned that it operated as a ‘refreshment room’.  In addition, there were sheds, a pavilion building, a pond whose water was presumably used for filling the old steam locomotives and, best of all for a kid like me, an intact signal box with a staircase leading up to it – great for playing at being soldiers, knights, the Foreign Legion, the US Cavalry or anything else that might require a fort.  I also remember a section of rusty metal wall that, according to this website, had once been the station’s urinal and, obstinately, still stands today.

 

Just to make the Junction seem more exotic still, the strip of ground behind the station building, between the two platforms and lines, was covered in trees. This belt of woodland was only a few metres wide, but to someone of my small size and immaturity it seemed like a dense forest.

 

In the mid-1970s, my grandparents relocated to the village of Ballinamallard, three miles away, and Bundoran Junction was bought by a retired clergyman, the Reverend Robert Simmons, and his family.  However, after that, I remained a regular face at the Junction because I was at school with the Simmons’ two sons and sometimes got invited to visit them.

 

I’d been trying to use my memories of the Junction as the basis for a story since my teens. In fact, when I was 16, I wrote the first 20 pages of a story wherein a young homeless man, wandering about the countryside, stumbles across a disused railway line and starts living in an old signal box.  There were no station building or platforms in the story, and I added a railway tunnel, but otherwise the setting was identical to Bundoran Junction.  (The story’s premise was that the young man became convinced that something hideous and evil was lurking in the tunnel.  He’d even find weird slimy footprints in the mornings, leading up the stairs to the door of the signal box, which suggested the thing was stalking him.  But – curses! – I could never figure out what the thing in the tunnel actually was and eventually I abandoned the story.)

 

In the years since, I’ve tried several times to write other stories based on the Junction, but with a similar lack of success.  Then, earlier this year, when Trevor Denyer announced that Railroad Tales was open for submissions, I decided to try again.

 

It also occurred to me that with my previous attempts at Junction stories, I’d always set the action not in Northern Ireland, but in some anonymous, generic tract of the English countryside.  This time, I thought, why not write something about Bundoran Junction that’s actually set in Northern Ireland?  To my surprise, I got the story finished and, to my immense satisfaction, it was accepted for Railroad Tales.

 

Not only does Ballyshannon Junction – Ballyshannon is a town in Donegal that’s close to Bundoran, the place that the real Junction was named after – take place in Northern Ireland, but it’s set in the year 1982, which wasn’t long after the period when I played there as a kid.  For that reason, although it contains supernatural elements, Ballyshannon Junction is also informed by the mistrust, conflict, sectarianism and terrorism that blighted Northern Ireland at the time.

 

309 pages long, and bringing together 23 weird and creepy stories with a railway theme, Railroad Tales can be purchased through Amazon UK, here.

 

From eadiemcfarland.co.uk

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Rab Foster gets theatrical

 

© Aphelion Webzine

 

I’m pleased to announce that my 13,000-word story The Theatregoers has been published in the July 2021 edition of the webzine Aphelion.  The Theatregoers is a sword-and-sorcery story in, I hope, the tradition of such revered pulp writers as Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and C.L. Moore and, as usual with my fantasy fiction, I have published it under the pen-name Rab Foster.

 

On this blog I’m not normally presumptuous enough to offer other writers, or aspiring writers, advice on how they should go about creating stories.  On this occasion, though, I’ll suggest two strategies that helped me to put The Theatregoers together.

 

Firstly, when you have an idea for a story, get that idea written down as quickly as you can before it flits from your memory again.  (At my age, things flit from my memory with terrifying speed.)  I have a 17-page-long document on my computer hard drive containing more than 400 ideas I’ve had for stories over the years and I’m constantly adding to it.

 

Admittedly, many of those ideas will probably never see the light of day as stories and, to be honest, looking at some of the ideas I wrote down long ago thinking they were bolts of divine genius, I don’t think the world will be missing anything if they don’t.  I doubt if anyone really wants to read a story about the notoriously bad Dundonian poet William McGonagall building a time machine in order to travel back in time to prevent the Tay Bridge Disaster from happening; or about a Sri Lankan tuk-tuk driver who’s secretly a superhero; or about ‘a fashion show for serial killers’, where the dresses have been fashioned out of…  Well, you can probably guess what they’re made of.

 

The other writing strategy I’d suggest is to keep reviewing your list of ideas and particularly think about how two or more ideas can be incorporated into one story.  In other words, don’t see each idea as a single seed from which a single story is grown.  Many times, I’ve had an idea that’s looked good on paper but that has resolutely refused to develop into a story – until it’s occurred to me to try splicing it together with another, seemingly totally different idea elsewhere on the list.

 

In fact, with The Theatregoers, I ended up throwing no fewer than four disparate ideas from my 17-page list into the creative blender.  I’d always wanted to write: (1) a story set in an abandoned city out in the middle of some inhospitable desert (similar to the setting of the 1921 H.P. Lovecraft story The Nameless City); (2) a story set in a theatre, where the characters would have adventures falling through trapdoors, scrabbling down stage curtains, flying about on wires above the stage, running through storerooms full of assorted props, and so on; (3) a story about vampire-like creatures that don’t drain their victims of blood but of moisture; and (4) a story about a tattooed person whose tattoos aren’t as inanimate as you’d expect, reminiscent of the title character in the classic Ray Bradbury collection The Illustrated Man (1951).  Somehow, I came up with a single, hopefully coherent narrative.

 

© Panther Books

 

For the next few weeks, the main page of the July 2021 edition of Aphelion can be accessed here, while The Theatregoers itself can be accessed here.

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Rab Foster gets perspective

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

I still remember the moment when I discovered Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories and, by extension, the joys of sword-and-sorcery fiction.  I was ten years old and my family had just boarded the ferry at Larne on the east coast of Northern Ireland.  We were heading across the Irish Sea to Stranraer in southwest Scotland, where we planned to spend a week’s holiday.  (In years to come, we would be on that ferry many more times.  However, by then, we’d moved to Scotland permanently and were travelling in the other direction, back to Northern Ireland to visit family and friends.)  Anyway, the ferry-trip took about two-and-a-half hours, which seemed like an eternity to a restless ten-year-old like me.  To escape the prospect of extreme boredom, I went straight to the ferry’s little onboard shop and bought a slim paperback from a bookrack there.

 

The book was Conan the Freebooter (1968), which caught my eye because its cover featured the titular barbarian engaged in a bloody fight with a giant ape.  It contained five short stories about Conan’s exploits in the Hyborian Age, a mythical era of forgotten civilisations, magic, monsters and romance that’d supposedly existed tens of thousands of years ago between the destruction of Atlantis and the beginning of recorded history.  Actually, only three stories of the five were proper Conan ones written by Robert E. Howard – Black Colossus (1933), Shadows in the Moonlight (1934) and A Witch Shall Be Born (1934).  The other two, Hawks Over Shem and The Road of the Eagles (both 1955), were actually non-Conan stories by Howard that’d been set in Egypt in 1021 AD and the Ottoman Empire in 1595 respectively.  However, another author, L. Sprague de Camp had sneakily rewritten them years after Howard’s death, resetting them in the Hyborian Age and replacing their original heroes with Conan.

 

Anyway, as I sat on that ferry reading that particular book, my enthusiasm for the sword-and-sorcery wing of fantasy literature was kindled.  Warriors, knights, sorcerers, witches, kings and queens, princes and princesses, goblins, trolls, ogres and dragons, populating castles, fortresses, palaces, citadels, gladiatorial arenas, mysterious forests, mist-shrouded lakes, dark caves and foreboding mountain passes, involved in the casting of spells, the summoning of demons, epic quests to locate mystical objects with fantastical powers, Machiavellian court intrigue, battles, sieges, swordplay, derring-do and much, much bloodshed…  How could the imagination of a ten-year-old not be fired by all that?  Admittedly, I found the busty, lascivious wenches who kept popping up in the Conan stories a bit boring, although needless to say I appreciated their presence more when I was a few years older.

 

Of course, decades have passed since then and my opinions of Robert E. Howard and his oeuvre have changed somewhat.  Yes, I still respect him for knowing how to tell a proper story.  But it’s difficult to read the average Conan story now without wincing at least half-a-dozen times at the barbarian’s swaggering sexism – those aforementioned busty, lascivious wenches had little to do apart from throw themselves adoringly at their hero’s feet – and the general undercurrents of racism and ableism.

 

And there are plenty of other sword-and-sorcery stories by other writers I’ve discovered since then that I prefer.  For example, there are the Jirel of Joiry stories, a swashbuckling fantasy series written both about a woman (Jirel) and by a woman (Catherine L. Moore), which appeared in the 1930s at the same time as the Conan ones, their polar opposite in the sex-war stakes.  There’s Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series (1958-1988), which wittily rip the piss out of the genre.  And there’s the Kane novels and short stories (1970-1985) written by the underrated Karl Edward Wagner, which feature an immortal swordsman who’s as violent and immoral as Conan but whose adventures are described with considerably more intelligence.

 

Anyway, this is all a preamble to saying that Rab Foster, the alias under which I write my own fantasy fiction, has a new sword-and-sorcery story called Perspectives of the Scorvyrn published in this month’s edition of Schlock! Webzine.  I see it as a back-handed tribute to Robert E. Howard.  The two main characters are opportunistic warriors in the mould of Conan and have a similar swing-your-sword-first-and-ask-questions-later attitude to life.  Unfortunately, their lack of scruples and imagination leads them into serious trouble.  And that’s trouble with a feminist tinge…   Moreover, much of the story is written in the present tense and, as its title suggests, it’s told from multiple perspectives.  That’s a style and approach that I’m sure a writer as traditional and old-school as Howard would have absolutely bloody hated.

 

For now, Perspectives of the Scorvyrn is available to read here, while the homepage of the May 2021 edition of Schlock! Webzine can be reached here.

 

© Lancer Books / John Duillo

Posted on

Jim Mountfield rides shotgun

 

© Shotgun Honey

 

Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write fiction of a (usually) dark hue, has just had a short story published in the webzine Shotgun Honey, which is dedicated to the ‘crime, hardboiled and noir genres’.

 

The story is called Karaoke and is inspired by the seven years I spent living in Japan – seven years during which, astonishingly, I spent a lot of my free time hanging out in bars.  The majority of those bars were frequented by suited salarymen, staffed by immaculate hostesses and equipped with karaoke machines.  Although I was always too shy to sing at the start of an evening, I’d have somehow overcome my shyness by the end of it – a dozen Kirin beers might have had something to do with it – and I’d be up there warbling into the microphone with the best, or worst, of them.  This was in the 1990s and the English-language selection on the machines was pretty middle-of-the-road and non-raucous – Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Tom Jones, Pat Boone and the early Beatles – which meant I was usually crooning stuff like Fly Me to the Moon or Love Letters in the Sand.  Eek.

 

As Shotgun Honey is about crime, however, the story features yakuza gangsters as well as karaoke-singing.  Incidentally, the three main characters are named after three people I knew in Japan.  Mr Ashikawa and Mr Hiraizumi were both teachers at the high school where I worked for the first two years – Mr Ashikawa was a calligraphy teacher and he’d answer the staffroom phone with a memorably singsong cry of “Ashikawa desu!”  Maybe that’s why I made his fictional namesake a talented singer.

 

The character Umeki, meanwhile, is named after a lovable rogue I had in my classes while I taught at a university in Sapporo, which was my job for the subsequent five years.  Let’s be tactful and just say he wasn’t the hardest working of my students.  A week before I left Japan, the real-life Umeki invited me out for a few drinks and we ended up in one of his haunts, a bar whose interior resembled Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s penthouse in Diamonds are Forever (1971).  I think he was keen to create the impression that he lived the lifestyle of an international playboy, but I can’t help suspecting that today he’s become a grumpy and greying Kacho-San (‘Section Chief’).

 

For now, Karaoke can be read here.  This story comes with a trigger warning for lovers of alcohol, who may be traumatised by the fate that befalls a 21-year-old bottle of Hibiki Whisky.

 

From unsplash.com / © Alex Rainer