Tag: Cloaked Press LLC

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Rab Foster gets cosy

 

© 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.

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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 activated

 

© Cloaked Press, LLC

 

Back in September 2020, I had a story called The Nuclei included in an anthology called Xenobiology: Stranger Creatures.  All its stories, in the words of one of the editors, Michele Dutcher, shared a theme of “biology that has been artificially produced, or biological creatures that have been produced by genetic material being acted upon by outside sources to produce something new.”  Being about artificially-created biological creatures, The Nuclei was classifiable as science fiction, but it definitely lurked at the horror end of the sci-fi spectrum.  In fact, the creatures featured in The Nuclei were the result of me attempting to imagine the most revolting monsters possible.  For that reason, the story was credited to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I use for my macabre fiction.

 

The Nuclei was also a post-apocalyptic story, set in the ruins of Edinburgh – we definitely need more post-apocalyptic stories set in the capital of Scotland – after my revolting, artificially-created creatures had decimated humanity and brought human civilisation to an end.  The human characters, some ragged, malnourished survivors who belonged either to a loony religious cult or to an equally loony militia, referred to an event called ‘the Activation’ shortly before civilisation fell, when the artificially-created horrors were first unleashed on mankind.  That gave me the idea of writing a prequel to the story, detailing what happened at the Activation, i.e., on Day One of the nightmare.

 

I have now written that story, called The Activation, and have just had it published under the penname of Jim Mountfield too.  It features in Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024, the latest instalment in the annual Nightmare Fuel collections of scary fiction put out by Cloaked Press, LLC.  As its title indicates, the theme for this year’s collection was body horror, which Wikipedia defines as “a subgenre of horror fiction that intentionally showcases grotesque or psychologically disturbing violations of the human body or of another creature.”  Well, the modus operandi of the creatures in The Nuclei involved a lot of body horror, so this seemed a natural home for its prequel.

 

The setting and main character of The Activation were inspired by something that happened to me once and by somebody I used to know.  Firstly, the happening was a misadventure I had while travelling on the London Tube back in 2016, somewhere between King’s Cross and Liverpool Street Stations – I must have been on either the Circle, Metropolitan or Hammersmith and City lines.  A young woman had what is euphemistically described as an ‘episode’ and started screaming hysterically at her fellow passengers.  Unfortunately, among the things she screamed was the claim that she was carrying a bomb.  The train promptly stopped at the next station and remained there with its doors sealed for 20 or 25 minutes.  Nobody could get in or out.  Meanwhile, the woman kept shrieking gibberish at everyone.

 

At one point, a pair of British Transport Police officers walked down the train, but didn’t actually stop to deal with the unhinged woman when they reached her.  No, they just walked past her, to the train’s far end, and then walked back – again doing nothing when they passed her a second time.  Later, when I researched the protocol for occurrences like this, I found out that the Transport Police officers had done an ‘assessment of the incident scene’.  Satisfied that they knew where the problem was, and that it wasn’t a case of terrorism, and that there weren’t any other problems elsewhere, they then informed the local police and told them where to find the problem.  When those police arrived on the platform, the nearest set of doors were opened so that they could board the train and remove said problem.

 

Obviously, this took time.  And with those doors sealed until the local police came, it made me wonder what would have happened to the folk stuck on the train if there’d been a real terrorist present.  I guess we were considered ‘expendable’.

 

By the time the Transport Police did their assessment, it’d become clear to everybody that the young woman causing the trouble wasn’t a terrorist.  She was just some poor, mixed-up soul who’d probably forgotten to take her medication that day.  I realised this when, at one point during her ravings, she started listing ‘all the great prophets in history’.  These were Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed and… Zippy, the gimpy zip-mouthed puppet from the British kids’ TV show Rainbow (1972-92).

 

I had to put that detail into my story The Activation.  Although, because Nightmare Fuel: Body Horrors is an American publication, I changed Zippy from Rainbow to the better-known Cookie Monster from Sesame Street (1969-present).  Sorry about that, Zippy, but you just aren’t internationally famous enough.

 

© Teddington Studios / Thames Television

© Sesame Workshop / BBC / From X

 

Secondly, the main character in The Activation was inspired by a former colleague, a PE teacher, who was employed by an English private school I worked at in 2002.  He was an ex-soldier.  One evening, the two of us were having a pint in the neighbourhood pub when he told me – with a preliminary request not to say anything about it to the school’s headmistress – that when he went to the school to be interviewed for the PE-teacher position, he’d been homeless.  At the time he was sleeping inside some giant concrete pipes at the side of a road that were soon to be popped in the ground for a sewage or drainage project.  Homelessness among former members of the Armed Forces is something that’s tragically common.

 

Anyway, for The Activation, I thought the hero would be somebody with experiences similar to my old colleague – a former soldier, homeless, desperately trying to turn his life around.  And then he gets caught up in the hideous events of the story and is put through hell.  Yes, I know.  I’m a sadist.

 

Containing 14 tales of grisly, gruelling terror, Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024 can now be purchased on Kindle here and as a paperback here.

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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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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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Jim Mountfield chimes in

 

© Cloaked Press LLC

 

Jim Mountfield, the nom de plume under which I write horror fiction, has just had another short story see the light of day.  This one is called The Chimes and it appears in Nightmare Fuel 2022: Objects of Horror, a new collection from Cloaked Press LLC.  As the blurb for the collection explains: “Sometimes it’s not what goes bump in the night, but what lurks in plain sight that is the true horror.   Come along for the chills and thrills as these Cloaked Press authors explore the terrors of such seemingly mundane items as an antique desk, a television, or a cute little stuffed elephant…”

 

In The Chimes, the terror-generating mundane item is a set of wind chimes that somebody finds hanging in a garden behind a newly-bought house.  Although wind chimes in other places and eras were believed to have positive powers, being able to scare off evil spirits, protect against the evil eye, bestow good fortune and facilitate good Feng Shui, these wind chimes, when they start tinkling sinisterly, have effects that are anything but good.

 

With 15 stories of supernatural-object-related horror and fun contained within its 258 pages, Nightmare Fuel 2022: Objects of Horror can be obtained in paperback or Kindle form here.