© Cloaked Press
The independent publisher Cloaked Press has just brought out the latest instalment in its series of annual horror-story anthologies, Nightmare Fuel. The 2026 anthology is called Angels & Demons and, as its title indicates, its contents are about supernatural entities either of the angelic or demonic varieties. I’m pleased to say I have a story included in Nightmare Fuel 2026: Angels & Demons. It’s entitled Asmodeus 86 and it’s attributed to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write macabre fiction.
My story is about a demon, not an angel – the ‘Asmodeus’ of the title is, according to his Wikipedia entry, ‘a king of demons in the legends of Solomon and the constructing of Solomon’s temple’ and ‘associated with lust’. He’s mentioned in various holy texts in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as well as being referenced in the notorious 1486 treatise on witchcraft the Malleus Maleficarum (the Hammer of Witches in English) and supposedly involved in the famous possession of a convent of Ursuline nuns in Loudon in France in 1634.
Oddly, though, I first became aware of the name Asmodeus through something entirely different. In Geoffrey Household’s 1939 thriller Rogue Male, the novel’s anonymous narrator and hero gives the name to a feral cat who befriends him while he’s literally holed up in the English countryside, hiding from the bad guys. ‘Asmodeus’ is an appropriate moniker for the cat since he’s rather supernatural in appearance, being wholly black. Also, the kinship the narrator feels with the cat whilst under extreme pressure – he spends ages concealed in a dark, filthy cubbyhole under a huge hedgerow in Dorset – becomes intense and spooky: “…there is, I believe, some slight thought transference between us… back and forth between us go thoughts of fear and disconnected dreams of action. I should call these dreams madness, did I not know they came from him and that his mind is, by our human standards, mad.”
So Asmodeus-the-demon is the exotic subject of my story in Nightmare Fuel 2026: Angels & Demons. But Asmodeus 86’s setting is a mundane one. It takes place in a state secondary school in the south of Scotland in the 1980s, just like the one I attended back then, Peebles High School. The story concerns a group of school-pupils who resort to using black magic to achieve their ends and one hapless kid who unwittingly gets caught up in their shenanigans. If you map the ages of the characters onto my high-school experiences, the events in the story would have happened in 1982, my final year, when I did my final exams there.
However, at that time in 1982, the news in Scotland, and the United Kingdom generally, was dominated by the war between Britain and Argentina over possession of the Falkland Islands. So I shifted the setting forward to 1986, when the story’s characters would have less ‘background noise’ coming from the TV, newspapers and conversations around them. (Not that big events weren’t happening in 1986. The story namechecks a certain Mr. Gorbachev, a certain disaster at Chernobyl and… psychobilly music.)
Lastly, I titled the story Asmodeus 86 as a tribute to Artemis 81, the baffling, barmy and fascinating three-hour occult / mystery / fantasy / sci-fi TV play broadcast by the BBC in December 1981, written by David Rudkin, directed by Alastair Reid, and starring such thespians as Hywel Bennet, Dan O’Herlihy, Anthony Steel, Roland Curran, Ingrid Pitt, a very young Daniel Day-Lewis and, er, Sting as a gay angel. Yes, I can safely say the days when the BBC would be so bold as to spend money on an audacious and willfully headache-inducing project like Artemis 81 are long past.
Containing 13 stories dedicated to the ‘divine and the damned, the celestial and the unholy’, the 285-page Nightmare Fuel 2026: Angels & Demons can be purchased on kindle here and as a paperback here.
From wikipedia.org / © BBC