© The Horror Zine
A collection of scary short fiction entitled The Best of the Horror Zine: The Middle Years has just gone on sale. Its 31 short stories first appeared in the ezine The Horror Zine between 2013 and 2020 and were picked for this collection by its editor and assistant editor, Jeani Rector and Dean H. Wild. The stories include Coming Home, something I wrote under my horror-writer pseudonym of Jim Mountfield and originally published in The Horror Zine in 2014.
Coming Home is basically an old-fashioned haunted house story, but with a dash of extra flavour in that it deals with parallel universes too. The story was inspired by an irrational fear I sometimes experienced when I was 11 or 12 years old. My family had just moved from Northern Ireland to Scotland, and we were living in a new – well, new for us, though technically the building was old – house that wasn’t yet fully renovated or furnished. Compared to our former house in Northern Ireland, for a while at least, it just didn’t feel homely. That’s ‘homely’ in the British sense of the word, meaning ‘cosy and comfortable’, not the American sense, meaning ‘unattractive in appearance’.
Meanwhile, my parents, no doubt feeling slightly dislocated and lonely, managed to track down a few other Northern Irish families who’d moved to Scotland over the years and were living within driving distance of us. It was customary to invite these folk to lunch, or to be invited to their houses for lunch, on Sundays. Northern Irish protocols of hospitality being what they are (think Mrs Doyle in Father Ted), and the Northern Irish propensity for blethering being what it is, these ‘lunches’ would invariably extend to tea in the late afternoon, and to dinner in the evening. If you were an adult and not the designated driver, a fair bit of whisky was consumed too. It was usually late when the visitors headed home and, if we were being entertained in somebody else’s house, we frequently didn’t get back until after midnight.
And as a kid, after we finally arrived home on those dark Sunday nights, I felt distinctly uneasy. My parents would unlock the front door and we’d enter a black, silent house that we hadn’t yet got accustomed to living in. Amid the darkness and silence, just before someone found the switches and the lights came on, I’d hear an internal voice telling me: “This is not our house!”
And if it wasn’t our house, whose was it? Who – or what – was already living there? That’s a childhood fear that, nearly 40 years later, I tried to explore in Coming Home.
The Best of the Horror Zine: The Middle Years can be obtained on kindle or as a paperback here.