© Cloaked Press
Fall Into Fantasy 2026, this year’s instalment in the Fall into Fantasy series of short-story anthologies from the publisher Cloaked Press, went on sale a couple of days ago. Its 15 stories include one entitled Jerthemia the Healer, which is attributed to Rab Foster, the penname I use when I write fiction in the fantasy genre.
Jerthemia the Healer is a rare thing from me. It belongs to the sub-genre of fantasy known as ‘cosy fantasy’. The Wikipedia entry on cosy fantasy describes it as being “characterized by its focus on comforting, low-stakes narratives set in fantasy worlds. It emphasises themes of community, friendship, healing, and everyday life, often eschewing violence, war, and other serious conflicts which are typical of high fantasy… Relationships, including family, found family, friendship, and healthy romance, are central…” The entry goes to list some examples of cosy fantasy, such as Sarah Beth Durst’s The Spellshop (2024) – a novel “full of stolen spellbooks, unexpected friendships, sweet jams, and even sweeter love” – and Travis Baldree’s Legends & Lattes (2022), which is about a retired orc who joins forces with a succubus and opens a coffee shop.
Well, anybody who knows me would undoubtedly say that cosy fantasy sounds much too wholesome and un-cynical a sub-genre for someone with my unwholesome and cynical character to be working in. And yes, usually, any time I’ve tried to write a cosy fantasy story, it hasn’t gone well – by the second or third page, one of the characters is puking up their intestines or getting their face ripped off or having horror-slugs crawl out of their eye sockets. I guess I’m not mentally programmed to write that gentle, nice sort of fiction.
However, with Jerthemia the Healer, the central idea was strong enough for me to put the whole story on paper without turning it into a bloodbath. And that idea is… Well, I think I can give it away here because it’s already been given away in the blurb accompanying Fall into Fantasy 2026 on Amazon… The central character, Jerthemia Ros, is a fantasy-world vet who has to attend to sick or injured mythical animals.
An obvious inspiration for Jerthemia the Healer is literature’s most famous veterinarian surgeon, James Herriot, who wrote eight books between 1970 and 1992 based on his life as a vet in the Yorkshire Dales during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. These inspired the very popular TV series All Creatures Great and Small, which ran from 1978 to 1980 and later from 1988 to 1990 and starred Christopher Timothy, Peter Davison and Robert Hardy. I’ve only read one of Herriot’s books and it wasn’t quite my cup of tea, and I always found the TV show a bit twee, But from all accounts Herriot was a decent and humble man who genuinely loved the animals he worked with, so all power to his memory.
By the way, ‘Jerthemia Ros’ is an anagram. Have you worked it out yet?
One other inspiration for Jerthemia the Healer (and a huge influence on my fantasy writing generally) is the legendary stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen, whose films were populated with all manner of mythical creatures brought to life by his special-effects wizardry: dragons, rocs, cyclopes, hydras, harpies, gorgons, krakens, etc. In my story, the appearance of one of the creatures is entirely modelled on a beastie that Harryhausen animated in his 1973 movie The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.
© Morningside Productions / Columbia Pictures
The tenth volume in Cloaked Press’s Fall into Fantasy series, Fall into Fantasy 2026 can be purchased at Amazon here.