Edinburgh – Blood and Porridge

June 26, 2024June 26, 2024

An honest John

From wikipedia.org / © Scottish Government

John Swinney became leader of the Scottish National Party on May 6^th and was sworn into office as First Minister of Scotland two days later. His arrival in the two roles comes during a difficult period for his party. First, the SNP has had to endure the spectacle of its once-mightily-respected, once-seemingly-unassailable former boss Nicola Sturgeon, who served as First Minister from 2014 to 2023, mired in a scandal whereby her husband, Peter Murrell, has been investigated and arrested over possible mismanagement of the party’s finances.

Then came the sorry saga of Sturgeon’s replacement as party leader and First Minister, Humza Yousaf. Yousaf was brave enough to defy the British-establishment line and challenge Benjamin Netanyahu’s policy of killing huge numbers of innocent Palestinians in revenge for Hamas’s slaughter of Israeli civilians on October 7th, 2023. But in most other respects, he was pretty hapless.

Most notably, he didn’t so much shoot himself in the foot as blow the foot off at the ankle when he ended his party’s alliance with Scotland’s other pro-independence party, the Scottish Greens. The Greens were so outraged they made it clear that they would vote against Yousaf in a no-confidence vote in the Scottish Parliament. Realising he was going to lose that vote, Yousaf resigned. His resignation at least seems principled compared with the behaviour of another First Minister recently. Labour’s Vaughan Gething, First Minister of Wales, recently lost a no-confidence vote in the Welsh Senedd and blithely refused to quit, dismissing the vote as a ‘gimmick’.

Swinney’s arrival as Yousaf’s replacement happened at an incredibly inopportune time. Barely had he got through the door of Bute House, the First Minister’s official residence in Edinburgh, than Rishi Sunak, British Prime Minister and a politician so clodhopping he makes Humza Yousaf look like a smooth operator, announced a general election for July 4^th. The polls say the SNP are going to lose a swathe of seats in the London parliament to Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. Even if Swinney was the best politician in the world, I don’t see what he could do to avoid that.

Not that I think Scottish voters are enamoured with Labour, who are so obsessed with attracting former Conservative Party voters they’ve made their policies a continuation of the right-wing ones that’ve damned Britain to rack and ruin during the past 14 years. For instance, they’ve vowed not to revisit the terms of the Tories’ Brexit arrangement with the European Union, even though it’s hobbled British businesses and it’ll thwart their plans to ‘grow’ the economy; and they won’t countenance raising taxes, which makes you wonder how they’re ever going to lift Britain’s public services out of their current, dire state. But I suspect folk in Scotland are so scunnered by the SNP’s recent scandals and mishaps, and so desperate to see the back of the Tories, that they’ll vote for Labour en masse next month.

For this reason, and because of Swinney’s bespectacled, unexcitable and unshowy demeanour – he’s often likened to a ‘bank manager’ or an ‘accountant’, although I remember one Scottish hack comparing him to ‘Harry Potter’, which I’m sure didn’t please the famously anti-SNP J.K. Rowling – there’s been speculation that he’s serving merely as a ‘caretaker’ leader, steadying the helm until someone of more substance takes over. In particular, many in the Scottish media expect the leadership to soon go to Kate Forbes, who’s currently Deputy First Minister. Famous for his negotiating skills, Swinney managed to talk Forbes out of taking him on in a leadership contest in May.

Anyway, I should say that back in my misspent youth, I crossed paths a few times with John Swinney – whose youth, I imagine, was somewhat less misspent than mine. When I’d been a pupil at Peebles High School in the late 1970s and early 1980s, one of my best pals was a guy called Roger Small. Once we finished school, Roger went to university in Edinburgh and I to university in Aberdeen. I kept in touch with him and on a few weekends came down from Aberdeen to stay in his flat in Edinburgh. My reasons for those visits were not wholly because of friendship. They coincided with the Five Nations Rugby championship, as it was then, which was held every spring and saw two Scottish home-games played at Edinburgh’s Murrayfield Stadium. I’d get a ticket, arrange to spend the night at Roger’s place, go to see the game in the afternoon and enjoy the post-match festivities in the evening.

From www.sportspages.com

On February 4^th, 1984, I dropped my stuff off at Roger’s and went to Murrayfield to see Scotland play England. Scotland won 18-6. In the Scotsman newspaper, back in those long-ago, pre-Andrew Neil days when it was worth reading, Chris Rea – no, not that Chris Rea – opined: “The Scottish forwards… were immense – a finely blended unit, alert and supportive. Their breakaways forced England into elementary errors. They foraged with devastating accuracy… Every Scot… played his part to the full.”

When the final whistle blew, I was extremely pleased that Scotland had demolished England, the Auld Enemy. So pleased that, on my way back to Roger’s flat, I indulged in a wee, celebratory pub-crawl along Rose Street, taking in such hostelries as the Auld Hundred, the Kenilworth and the Abbotsford. It probably didn’t help that I’d already done a pub crawl of Rose Street in the late morning and early afternoon, on my way to Murrayfield. Anyway, the result was that I was well-refreshed when I returned to the flat.

Roger had told me he was entertaining some Edinburgh University mates that evening, with the intention of going to a party later on. I was welcome to join them. So, at about seven o’clock, I trotted into Roger’s living room, plonked myself on the sofa in the midst of some people I hadn’t met before and, trying to be sociable, joined in the conversation. After a few minutes, a tall, lean, slightly intense-looking young man sitting on the sofa beside me turned his head towards me and asked incredulously, “Are you drunk?”

Ladies and gentlemen, meet John Swinney, future leader of the Scottish National Party, an outfit dedicated to the cause of Scottish independence, to freeing Scotland from the shackles of political rule from London, capital of England. Shocked that someone in Edinburgh, capital of Scotland, should be a wee bit inebriated after Scotland had trounced England at rugby.

But I can’t have been that inebriated because I managed to accompany Roger, John and friends to the party that night and managed to participate in the conversation enough to form the opinion that Roger’s mate John was a decent-enough, if sober, bloke. It turned out that the party was being held by someone from Peebles, the town where Roger and I had attended school, so I knew some of the folk there. Actually, it amuses me to think that the future First Minister of Scotland was once at a party rubbing shoulders with such well-kent Peebles eccentrics as the late Andrew Cleghorn.

Thereafter, I encountered John Swinney a couple of times in Edinburgh, briefly, while I was in Roger’s company. The last time was a summer or two later, during the Edinburgh Festival, when Teviot Row, the Edinburgh University students’ union building, had been turned into a venue and the pair of them were working there as bouncers. What a pity Oxford University’s notorious Bullingdon Club didn’t arrange a field-trip to Edinburgh at the time and try to subject Teviot Row to their yobbish antics… I would have paid good money to see John Swinney eject Boris Johnson from the premises.

I lost touch with Roger for a while after that, but bumped into him again in the late 1980s after I’d moved to Edinburgh. He kindly fixed me up with a part-time job at the (now-long-gone) Greyfriars Bookshop at the bottom of George IV Bridge. At some point I asked how John Swinney was getting on and Roger told me he was ascending in the ranks of the SNP. Later, when I mentioned his name to some mates from Aberdeen who were heavily into the cause of Scottish independence, they reported they’d seen him deliver a speech at an SNP conference and were greatly impressed by him.

I completely lost touch with Roger Small in the 1990s – he took off for Australia – and, several years ago, wondering what’d happened to him, I tried Googling him. I didn’t find him, but learnt something about his mother, Christian Small, who’d passed away in 2016 at the age of 90. Christian had been an immensely-talented amateur painter, but according to a friend she was ‘extraordinarily diffident about her work’ and needed ‘a great deal of persuasion’ to allow her paintings to appear in local exhibitions. Because of her modesty, presumably, it didn’t really dawn on people – family and friends alike – how good an artist she’d been until after her death. However, in 2018 and 2019, some events were held to commemorate her and her art, including exhibitions and the launch of a book called Inside & Out. The book featured her paintings interspersed with verse written by another friend, the poet and actress Gerda Stevenson.

One of those events was attended by John Swinney, who by then was Deputy First Minister of Scotland. On Twitter, he remarked that Christian Small had been the mother ‘of my dear university friend Roger.’ So, I’m glad he still remembers his old mate and still holds him in high regard.

© Scotland Street Press

Though he’s made his name as a cautious type – too cautious for some people’s tastes, which has led to them questioning his political acumen – it’s hard to find anyone with a bad word to say about John Swinney as a person. For example, the former Scottish Labour Party leader Jim Murphy once commented: “There’s nobody in Scotland who doesn’t like John Swinney.” I recall my old English teacher, Ian Jenkins, who served in the Scottish Parliament for four years as the Liberal Democrat representative for Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale, speaking highly of him too.

Thus, I’m pleased that Swinney now holds the highest political office in his country. He struck me as a decent guy and it’s good to see decency rewarded. Unfortunately, politics isn’t an arena where being decent always works in your favour. I suspect he has his work cut out for him – especially if the polls prove to be right and his party takes a pounding in the general election.

February 6, 2024February 6, 2024

Some archery with Jim Mountfield

© The Sirens Call

Underneath the Arches, a short horror story I wrote a long time ago, is among the 167 pieces of fiction and poetry that appear in the newly-published Winter 2023 / 2024 edition of the magazine The Sirens Call. The story was inspired by the arched cavities along the western side of the graveyard behind the Church of St John the Evangelist, which stands at the junction of Princes Street and Lothian Road in central Edinburgh. In August each year – Edinburgh Festival time – the church’s grounds become the home of an art, crafts and design fair. Stalls set up shop in the area between the church and its graves of illustrious, well-heeled Edinburgh citizens of times past. According to its Facebook account, this is now known as the West End Fair.

What caught my fancy when I first encountered the St John’s craft fair in the late 20^th century was how those western arches, underneath Lothian Road, had been drafted into use too. During August, they became mini-shops, out of which vendors sold their wares to the market’s customers. Thus inspired, I wrote a macabre story about a young man who buys something from one of the arches and, inevitably, lives to regret it. (Hint: the market is sited in a graveyard… A place of the dead!)

When I was looking for something to submit to the latest edition of The Sirens Call, I stumbled across Underneath the Arches on my computer’s hard drive. Talk about a blast from the past. It’d obviously been written by a much younger version of myself, angsty, pretentious, and in thrall to Edgar Allan Poe (and, indeed, Franz Kafka). Predictably, the story itself was pompous and overwrought, ridden with adjectives, adverbs, metaphors and similes. I ended up cutting about 2000 words – 45 percent of its original length – out of it before I submitted it.

Reading it now, I have to say I wish I’d been even more stringent in my editing of it. There’s a sentence at the end where the word ‘ridge’ is used twice, and I manage to use ‘seemed to’ three times in the opening paragraphs. (Coincidentally, the editor of a different publication recently told me: “Mark Twain famously said; ‘Anytime you have the urge to write the word ‘just’, use ‘damn’ instead, that way your editor will remove it for you.’ The same is true of the phrase ‘seemed to’.”)

Anyway, no matter. As usual with my horror stories, Underneath the Arches appears under the pseudonym Jim Mountfield. And available for free, with all sorts of ghoulish goodies loaded into its 253 pages, the new issue of The Sirens Call is a rare bargain these days. You can download it here.

November 15, 2023November 15, 2023

The return of Steve Cashel

© Close 2 the Bone Publishing

Because I have a dull name, I’ve normally written fiction under pseudonyms. Most of the stories I’ve had published have been horror ones, which I’ve written under the pen-name Jim Mountfield, or fantasy ones, which I’ve written as Rab Foster. However, many years ago, I had a couple of pieces published that didn’t qualify as horror or fantasy. One was a crime story and I suppose the other was ‘non-genre’ – what snobby critics approvingly describe as ‘mainstream literature’. Both were set in Scotland and I thought I’d attribute them to a different pseudonym: ‘Steve Cashel’.

Well, since then, I seem to have specialised in being a horror and fantasy writer and the names Jim Mountfield and Rab Foster have appeared fairly regularly in various short-fiction magazines and ezines. On the other hand, I’d assumed that Steve Cashel had been retired… Until now.

That’s because I’ve just had a crime story entitled The Folkie published in the online magazine Close 2 the Bone. As the story’s action takes place in Scotland, in Edinburgh, it seemed appropriate to put Steve Cashel’s name at the top of it.

The Folkie is about three hoodlums tasked with hurting someone who’s antagonised their crime-lord employer. Searching for their victim, they go round several Edinburgh pubs he’s known to frequent. They find to their disgust that he’s a folk-music fan, for the pubs are ones offering live folk music and drawing crowds of enthusiastic folk-music fans, i.e., folkies. And then things take the inevitable Unexpected Turn… The three pubs appearing in the story are based on real ones – the Royal Oak on Edinburgh’s Infirmary Street, the Tass on the High Street and the Hebrides Bar on Market Street. Though for the purposes of the plot, I changed the layout of the Hebrides’ interior.

Due to its conflicting story-elements, The Folkie is a rare beast indeed – a tale that references Coolio, the great Dick Gaughan (whom I was lucky enough to see perform once, at Norwich Labour Club in 1998) and… Andy Stewart.

For now, at least, The Folkie can be read here, while you can access the main page of Close 2 the Bone here.

© Hallmark

October 12, 2023October 12, 2023

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.

September 11, 2023September 19, 2023

A Dad story

From amazon.co.uk / © Smith, Smith & Swan

Back in 2006, I returned to my family’s home in the town of Peebles, in southeastern Scotland, for a fortnight’s vacation from a job I was doing in a particularly authoritarian, under-developed and hard-to-live-in country. As that country offered little in the way of social life, I had plenty of free time on my hands when I wasn’t at my workplace. And to fill in that free time, I’d spent the past year working on a project initiated by my brother Gareth and his mate Douglas Swan. Basically, Gareth and Douglas wanted to publish a book about the history of a local football team, Peebles Rovers. They conducted the research for it and sent the notes, newspaper cuttings, interview transcripts and so on to me. I’d always fancied myself as a writer, so I took on the job of turning their research into prose.

The research had all been written up and the book was soon to be published when I arrived home that August. As a thank-you for the work I’d put into it, Gareth and Dougie bought me a present: a ticket for the Rolling Stones concert on Friday, August 25^th, at Hampden Stadium in Glasgow, which coincided with my return to Scotland.

This was a little sudden and unexpected. Also, my parents’ house, where I was staying, was offline and I didn’t have a phone – so dictatorial was the country I was working in that private citizens weren’t allowed to carry one. Thus, I was somewhat unprepared that Friday morning when I set off, via bus from Peebles to Edinburgh, and then train from Edinburgh to Glasgow. I hadn’t, for example, been able to search for accommodation that night in Glasgow, after the concert. “Och,” I thought to myself in my haphazard way, “I’m sure something will turn up.”

However, before I left the house in Peebles, my Dad told me: “If you can’t find a place to stay, and have problems getting home, call me from a pay-phone. I’ll come and collect you.”

“Sure,” I said. But as I prided myself on being an independent, ‘low-maintenance’ sort of person, I had no intention of phoning him late at night, and probably getting him out of bed, to lament that I needed help getting home.

Anyway… I got to Glasgow and first of all visited the Tourist Information Centre in George Square to ask if the city had any hotel rooms free that evening. “Not really,” the lady at the desk replied. “There’s a big concert here today, you see…” Well, I knew that, having come to attend it. From what she said, it sounded like the nearest hotel that did have vacancies was halfway between Glasgow and John O’Groats. Oh well, I thought. I’ll just have to head back to Edinburgh afterwards and see if I can get to Peebles from there. Because the Edinburgh Festival was in full swing at the time, all accommodation in the Scottish capital was already booked too. It’d been snapped up months ago.

From mixcloud.com

I enjoyed the Rolling Stones and the Charlatans, their support band, at Hampden that evening. Following the show, I hopped on a late train to Edinburgh. Unfortunately, I arrived in Edinburgh sometime after the final bus of the day had left the city for Peebles. What to do? Well, from previous experience of the Edinburgh Festival, I knew it was virtually impossible to find a taxi at night-time. But there was a very late bus, leaving at around three o’clock in the morning, for the town of Penicuik, which was halfway between Edinburgh and Peebles. From Penicuik, home was another ten miles away. First, you had to traverse the wilds of Leadburn Moor, then you had to make your way along the more sheltered and scenic Eddleston Valley.

Ten miles, I thought to myself in a gung-ho manner, having downed quite a few pints that day and being full of Dutch courage. I could walk that in two-and-a-half hours. And, just in case there are any cars using the road at that late hour – I can always try hitchhiking. Maybe I’ll strike it lucky and get a lift, and get back to Peebles sooner.

Because it was Festival time, many of the pubs in Edinburgh were open very late. And because I felt I could do with just a wee bit more Dutch courage, I spent the run-up to three o’clock sinking more pints in the Scotsman Lounge on Cockburn Street. Finally, it was time to go. I got on the three o’clock bus and a half-hour later got off in the centre of Penicuik, which was utterly still and silent.

From there, I walked down a street towards the southern edge of the town. I didn’t see another soul on the pavements. Neither did a single vehicle pass on the road. The outskirts of town neared and, beyond, the darkness of Leadburn Moor beckoned. I steeled myself. Okay, I thought. This is going to be a hell of a walk. But I can do it…

As I got to the town’s edge, and the beginning of the darkness, a pair of headlights went blazing past on the other side of the road – northwards, into Penicuik, the opposite direction from where I was going. A pity, I thought. But there’s at least one person on the road at this hour. Maybe there’ll be others, heading my way…

And sure enough, a minute later, I heard a car engine approaching behind me – driving southwards, towards Peebles! I turned just before the headlights reached me and stuck out my hitchhiking thumb. The car passed, and slowed, and stopped a few yards ahead. Fortune was smiling on me for sure. I ran to the car, grabbed the passenger’s door, yanked it open, stuck my head in and blurted: “Are you going towards Peebles – ?”

My voice died. For sitting in the driver’s seat was… my Dad.

I spluttered, “What are you doing here?”

“Och,” he said, “I woke up a while ago and thought to myself, that fellah hasn’t come home yet. So I wondered what you would do. I figured you’d be daft enough to get the bus from Penicuik and try walking home from there. So I thought I’d get in the car and take a wee scoot up the road and have a look for you. I spotted you on the pavement there a minute ago, found a place to turn and came back.”

I didn’t know whether I should feel annoyed, insulted, pleased, amused or relieved. I probably ended up feeling a mixture of all five, but the biggest feeling was one of relief.

That wasn’t the only occasion that my auld man, kind and shrewd, came to my rescue. But it was perhaps the most memorable one.

My Dad passed away at the end of last month, aged 88. So I thought I would share this Dad story with you.

Four years after the event described above, I met up with my Dad for a week’s holiday in Malta. Yes, we did end up one day in the pub in Valetta where thirsty movie star Oliver Reed breathed his last whilst filming Ridley Scott’s Gladiator there in 1999.

August 1, 2023January 1, 2024

More gibbering, and gibbeting, from Rab Foster

© Swords and Sorcery Magazine

Rab Foster, the pseudonym I use when I write fantasy fiction, has just had a second short story published in 2023. As with the previous Foster story, The Pyre of Larros, which appeared in print five months ago, this one is featured in Swords and Sorcery Magazine and has as its main character the swordsman Drayak Shathsprey, who seems doomed to get into serious trouble wherever he goes. In The Gibbeting of Azmyre, now available to read in issue 138 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine, that trouble involves being hired by a shady character to retrieve an insalubrious item – the corpse of an executed criminal, currently hanging on display in a city’s main street.

The idea for The Gibbeting of Azmyre came to me a while back when I started reading the 1951 novel My Cousin Rachel by one of my literary heroines, Daphne du Maurier. This begins with an account of how the narrator, Philip, is brought by his cousin and guardian Ambrose to view the gibbeted body of a murderer. “I can remember as a little lad seeing a fellow hang in chains where the four roads meet. His face and body were blackened with tar for preservation. He hung there for five weeks before they cut him down, and it was the fourth week that I saw him.”

Meanwhile, the windswept and snow-scoured city street where the action in The Gibbeting of Azmyre takes place – “its floor a band of flagstones and cobbles carpeted with snow, its walls two towering rows of facades and edifices, spires and turrets, five and six-storeyed townhouses” – was inspired by the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. (Yes, it’s appropriate that I had the Scottish capital in mind while I wrote a story about bodysnatching, although strictly speaking Edinburgh’s two most famous bodysnatchers – Burke and Hare – didn’t actually snatch bodies. They murdered people, and then flogged off their victims’ remains to Dr Robert Knox for vivisection during his anatomy lectures.) The Royal Mile doesn’t experience many snowstorms in these globally-warmed times, but it’s still a challenge to walk along when there’s a stark east wind flaying in from the nearby North Sea.

For the next month, The Gibbeting of Azmyre can be read here, while the main page for issue 138 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine is accessible here.

June 9, 2023June 14, 2023

Remembering Iain Banks

From wikipedia.com / © Tim Duncan

Ten years ago today, on June 9^th, 2013, the Scottish novelist Iain Banks passed away at the age of 59, struck down by a gall-bladder cancer that’d only been diagnosed two months earlier. Here’s a slightly updated version of the tribute to him I wrote at the time.

Iain Banks became a big thing for me, and for many people like me, when he found success, fame and a certain notoriety with the publication of his first novel, The Wasp Factory, in 1984. This was because he seemed to tick a lot of important boxes.

Like me and the crowd I hung out with, he came from a Scottish background, so we were familiar with many of the places he wrote about. Like us, his politics were left-of-centre, with a leaning towards the cause of Scottish independence because independence seemed the best way to avoid being saddled with right-wing Tory governments whom few people in Scotland ever voted for. And like us, he was obviously into literature, but he was also into some strange, off-beat writers whom stuffy literary critics would dismiss as being too ‘genre’ for serious consideration – Mervyn Peake, Brian Aldiss, M. John Harrison, and so on.

You could argue that Alasdair Gray had blazed the same trail a few years earlier with his 1980 novel Lanark, but there was one important difference. Gray had been a young man in the 1950s. Banks, like us, was clearly of the 1980s. Like it or not – and we did not – Banks and us, his readers, were Maggie Thatcher’s children.

The Wasp Factory made an immediate stir with its blackly funny plot about Frank Cauldhame, a maimed delinquent living in a remote part of Scotland, who amuses himself with the shamanistic killings of insects, seagulls, rabbits and young children. In quick succession Banks followed it with Walking on Glass (1985), which showed the influence of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books (1946-59); The Bridge (1986), a paean to both the Forth Rail Bridge and Gray’s Lanark, with a healthy dose of the J.G. Ballard short story Concentration City (1957) mixed in; and in 1987 Consider Phlebas, the first of many epic outer-space novels about an interstellar anarcho-utopian society called the Culture. The Culture novels were attributed to Iain M. Banks, a move by his publisher to help fans of ‘serious’ mainstream fiction and fans of science fiction identify what was what in his output. At the time, the speculative fiction magazine Interzone remarked that it was delighted to see Banks at last ‘come out of the closet’ as a sci-fi writer.

In August 1987 Banks was scheduled to appear on a discussion panel at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Around the same time I’d agreed to edit the latest edition of a small literary magazine called Alma Mater, published by some fellow-students at the University of Aberdeen’s English Literature Department. Dr Isobel Murray, who’d been my tutor at Aberdeen for the past year, was chairing the Book Festival panel and I used my connection with her to persuade Banks’s agent to let me interview him after the panel, for Alma Mater. I later offered Dr Murray a grovelling apology for brazenly using her name as my calling card.

© Abacus Books

The panel, which I attended, produced a few sparks. In addition to Banks and Murray, it featured the Glaswegian writer Frederic Lindsay, whose 1983 novel Brond had recently been made into a TV series, directed by Michael Caton-Jones and starring a very young John Hannah. (By a sad coincidence, Lindsay also died in 2013, just ten days before Banks did.) And it was rounded off by another Glaswegian, Ronald Frame, author of the just-published novel Sandmouth People. If it’s unfair to say that the tweedy Frame was a young fogey at the time, he certainly gave the impression of being one. When somebody in the audience asked the authors about their views on self-censorship, he said pompously: “I would never include anything I might regret in five years’ time.”

Banks immediately spluttered, “But those are the best bits!”

Afterwards I met up with Banks and a few of his friends and conducted the interview in a pub in Edinburgh’s Rose Street – either the Kenilworth or the Auld Hundred, if I remember correctly – with Banks speaking into the mic of the clunky tape recorder I’d bought with me, transferring his voice onto a crackly cassette tape that, like almost everything else I possess, now resides inside a cardboard box somewhere in my Dad’s attic.

I asked him about the hostile reception that The Wasp Factory had received in some quarters. (The Irish Times had described it as ‘a work of unparalleled depravity’.) Banks had been surprised by this. He’d expected some flak from animal rights groups, but not from the critics. He’d learned that one reviewer who’d blasted the book as ‘the literary equivalent of a video nasty’ also worked in the Conservative Party office in London, which pleased him no end. Offending that guy had been an honour.

I also asked him about his fondness for peppering his novels with references to the popular culture of the time. In The Bridge, for example, just before the car accident that sets the surreal plot in motion, the hero slots a copy of the Pogues album Rum, Sodomy and the Lash (1985) into his car stereo. Wouldn’t that make the books look rather dated a few years later? “Yeah,” he agreed, “it’ll date them. But what the hell?” He believed that characters living in a particular time and particular place would be influenced by the current popular culture, so he didn’t see why he should shirk from mentioning the music, books, films and TV programmes of the moment.

I quoted Brian Aldiss at him – Aldiss had famously said that all good science fiction hovers at the edge of being something different from science fiction. Banks agreed with that, sort of, but he also disagreed. Enthusiastically, he told me how Consider Phlebas came with all the trimmings of the traditional Isaac Asimov / Robert Heinlein ‘space opera’: giant spaceships, laser cannons, inter-planetary battles.

© Little, Brown

Did he, I asked finally, worry about being pigeon-holed, with one half of the world viewing him as a ‘Scottish’ author and the other half viewing him as a ‘sci-fi’ one? Not at all, he said. He was quite at ease with being regarded as Scottish. And being seen as a sci-fi author didn’t bother him either, since science fiction was an ‘old love’ for him.

From Rose Street, we moved to Greyfriars Bobby’s Bar in Candlemaker Row, just behind the statue of the famous Edinburgh terrier who’d spent 14 years in the adjacent graveyard guarding the grave of his dead master. Poor wee Bobby, I remember musing, wouldn’t have lasted long if he’d been a character in The Wasp Factory. By then a good number of pints had been drunk and the conversation had descended somewhat from the lofty heights of literary discussion. I recall talking to Banks about Arthur Montford, the lugubrious Scottish TV football commentator famous for his eccentrically patterned sports jackets and for his catchphrases that included “What a stramash!” and (uttered all too often) “Disaster for Scotland!” At some point too we discussed the 1966 Hammer horror film Dracula Prince of Darkness, which had featured the Scottish actor (from Shotts in North Lanarkshire) Andrew Keir.

The next issue of Alma Mater, containing my interview with Iain Banks, was published later that year. A series of cock-ups by the typesetter meant that it looked pretty ropey, though thankfully the pages featuring Banks were okay. The following year, I heard that Banks would be making an appearance at Edinburgh’s Science Fiction Bookshop in West Crosscauseway (now long vanished) and I went along to give him a copy of the magazine. To my surprise, he remembered me and enthused about the mini-pub crawl we’d done that day: “That was a good afternoon!”

After that I read several more Banks novels: Espedair Street (1987), Canal Dreams (1989), The Crow Road (1992), Complicity (1993). The Crow Road, his stab at writing a sprawling family saga, is the book that everyone talks about, although I have to say that it’s not one of my favourites. Sure, it has one of the best opening lines in modern literature (“It was the day my grandmother exploded”), but as with most other sprawling sagas about eccentric families, I find it too contrived for its own good.

© Little, Brown

On the other hand, I think Espedair Street, which is about a hapless rock musician who’s found fame, fortune and much unhappiness and is now trying to live anonymously in a rough part of Glasgow, is marvellous. I also think it’s the warmest and most relatable Iain Banks book that I’ve read. Among my all-time favourite novels about rock ‘n’ roll, it’s up there with Harlan Ellison’s Spider Kiss (1961) and John Niven’s Kill Your Friends (2008).

And I like Complicity, which welds a serial-killer plot onto Banks’ intense distaste for the corruption and inequalities of the recently-ended Thatcher era. Much of it is set in Edinburgh, where scuzzy journalist-hero Cameron Colley boozes in a series of pubs ranging from the upmarket Café Royal on West Register Street to the desperate, late-opening Casbah in the Cowgate. By then I’d lived in Edinburgh and I knew Colley’s haunts well. I’d even had an experience similar to one he has in the Café Royal, when he stands in front of the bar’s gantry (which doesn’t contain a mirror although it looks as though it does), can’t see his reflection and in a drunken panic believes himself to be a vampire.

After Complicity, however, I stopped reading Iain Banks, probably because by then there were just too many young Scottish writers competing for my attention: Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, James Robertson. Banks’s success in the 1980s, of course, had helped pave the way for all these slightly younger Turks. It wasn’t until after his death that I read more of his stuff: the collection State of the Art (1991), whose stories lean towards science fiction, so the name ‘Iain Banks’ on the cover contains that all-important initial-letter ‘M’ to warn readers of serious mainstream literature to keep clear; The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007); Stonemouth (2012); The Quarry, published posthumously in 2013; and Banks’s one book of non-fiction, Raw Spirit (2003), which details his experiences while he works on the rather enviable assignment of visiting, and sampling the products of, as many of Scotland’s whisky distilleries as he can.

Among these later novels, The Steep Approach to Garbadale, another sprawling family saga, perhaps sticks most in my mind. That’s largely because of the following quote, wherein the narrator muses on the connection between being right-wing and not having an imagination, and which could be the manifesto for Banks’s own politics: “We got talking about how some people were selfish and some weren’t, and the difference between right-wing people and left-wing people. You said it all came down to imagination. Conservative people don’t usually have very much, so they find it hard to imagine what life is like for people who aren’t just like them. They can only empathise with people just like they are: the same sex, the same age, the same class, the same golf club or nation or race or whatever. Liberals can pretty much empathise with anybody else, no matter how different they are. It’s all to do with imagination, empathy and imagination are almost the same thing, and it’s why artists, creative people, are almost all liberals, left-leaning.”

Meanwhile, I found Raw Spirit so informative that, as I read it, I tried to record what it said about the distilleries Banks visited, the whiskies he drank, and his opinions on their flavours, in a series of mind-maps.

Banks was so prolific that, looking at his bibliography, I see there are still nearly 20 books of his that I haven’t read yet. That includes the entire series of Culture novels. So, I still have much catching up to do with the great man’s oeuvre.

October 10, 2022November 1, 2022

Edinburgh Filmhouse fades to black

© Filmhouse Trading Limited

During the two decades since I last lived in Edinburgh, I’ve spent a lot of time bellyaching about the fact that, for a city that likes to advertise itself as home to the world’s biggest annual cultural festival, Edinburgh has seemed ridiculously determined to rid itself of its live-music venues and make itself about as musically vibrant as, say, Luton.

Those two decades have seen the demise of such venues, or part-time or occasional venues, as the Cas Rock, the Tap O’ Lauriston, the Venue, the HMV Picturehouse, Electric Circus, the Citrus Club and – one of my favourite Auld Reekie hangouts – Studio 24. At one point, I even felt compelled to write on this blog: “So, music lovers of Edinburgh… Your once proud city has fallen… into the hands of a bunch of suits, nimbies and money-chasing ghouls whose iPods are no doubt crammed with Ed Sheeran, James Blunt and Coldplay songs and whose idea of musical edginess is probably to tuck into a salad in the Hard Rock Café while a paunchy, balding cover band play Hotel California in the corner.”

Now, sadly, the blight that’s struck down Edinburgh’s live music scene seems to have infected its film scene too, for last Thursday the news broke that the charity Centre for the Moving Image (CMI) had filed for bankruptcy, with the result that the city’s Filmhouse Cinema, which the CMI has run since 2010, is closing immediately. This has also meant the abrupt end of the 75-year-old Edinburgh Film Festival, the oldest continually-running film festival in the world, and the closure of the Belmont, the Filmhouse’s sister cinema in Aberdeen.

The Filmhouse is, or was, what’s commonly known as an ‘arthouse’ cinema. ‘Arthouse’ is a label I hate, as it suggests a place showing pretentious movies made by pretentious people who consider themselves ‘artistes’ rather than mere filmmakers – incidentally, Stephen Frears’ Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) and Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster (2015) get my vote as the most up-their-own-arses films ever made. But it’s not about artiness. In reality, an ‘arthouse’ cinema is often the only place in your neighbourhood where films a little offbeat, non-Hollywood and daring to use a language that isn’t English have a chance of being seen. That’s while the multiplexes restrict themselves to showing movies about masked and / or caped vigilantes possessing superpowers, with lots of CGI and cameos by Stan Lee.

Unlike what’s happened to many of the music venues I mentioned above, the Filmhouse’s sad fate isn’t the result of corporate greed, gentrification, nimbyism and hostility or indifference on the part of the local authorities – although in these straitened times, I doubt if Edinburgh City Council will be swooping to the Filmhouse’s rescue. Rather, as this recent piece by Mark Cousins in the Guardian makes clear, the cinema’s demise was caused by a ‘perfect storm’ of economic and cultural factors: the huge hike in energy bills that’s currently panicking everyone in the UK bar the super-rich (you know, those people whom Liz Truss wanted to give generous tax cuts to), the loss of custom incurred during the Covid-19 pandemic and the slow return of custom afterwards, younger people preferring to watch movies on streaming services at home, and older people becoming, well, older and less likely to go out.

Besides offering you the opportunity to see certain films on a big screen that you wouldn’t otherwise see there, what makes cinemas like the Filmhouse precious is that they allow you to come out of the closet as a film nerd. They’re obviously run by folk with a genuine love for movies and, on their premises, you know you’re surrounded by like-minded punters too. Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to live in several cities blessed with such establishments. I have happy memories of them and can still reel off the films I watched on their screens.

For example, in the Japanese city of Sapporo, there was the Theater Kino, which coincidentally must have been one of the smallest cinemas in the country. At it, I remember seeing David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977), Rémy Belvaux’s Man Bites Dog (1992), John Dahl’s Red Rock West (1993) and – yay! – Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996). At Cinema City in Norwich, I saw the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading (2008), Armando Iannucci’s In The Loop (2009), Tom Hooper’s The Damned United (2009) and Sasha Gervasi’s hilarious but gruelling heavy metal documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2008). And at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle-upon Tyne, I saw Kitano Takeshi’s Zatōishi (2003), Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams (2003), Alexander Payne’s Sideways (2004), and, before it went on general release, a special screening of 28 Days Later (2002) attended by director Danny Boyle and scriptwriter Alex Garland, who answered questions from the audience afterwards. (I wanted to ask them how, if the rage-infected zombies had become so angry that they stopped eating food and eventually died of hunger, they didn’t also stop drinking water and die of thirst first, which would have ended the zombie apocalypse much sooner. However, not wanting to rain on Danny and Alex’s parade, I didn’t.)

I feel a bit hypocritical pontificating about the loss of the Filmhouse because it’s been a long time since I set foot there – as far as I can remember, the last movie I saw in it was Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight back in 2016. But I have an excuse. For much of the last dozen years I’ve been living in Africa and Asia. Still, with the Filmhouse’s closure, as with the closure of many a lovely old pub or lovely old shop, I suspect there’s currently a lot of people expressing outrage and grief about it on social media and in below-the-line comments on news websites who actually haven’t bought a ticket and watched anything on its premises for many years. Unfortunately, there’s truth in the old capitalist adage: “If you don’t want to lose it… use it.”

Here’s a link to an online petition expressing support for the Filmhouse, Belmont and Edinburgh Film Festival and the 102 cinema and festival workers who have just lost their jobs. And if there is an unexpectedly happy ending, and someone with deep, movie-loving pockets steps in and pulls the Filmhouse back from the brink, let’s hope folk show their appreciation by going to it and putting their bums on its seats again.

September 11, 2022September 12, 2022

London Bridge is down

London Bridge is down. No, I’m not referring to a movie that stars Gerald Butler. I’m talking about the code-phrase used to communicate the news of the monarch’s death to the British government, police, armed forces and broadcasters, triggering the start of an elaborate and much-prepared plan that oversees the monarch’s funeral, the period of national mourning and the coronation of a successor. Those words were sent to the British establishment earlier this week, for September 8^th saw the passing of Queen Elizabeth II at the age of 96.

Not long ago, at the time of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, I expressed my thoughts about the British monarchy on this blog. Namely that, while monarchies might work for other European countries, slimmed-down monarchies in countries with fewer historical neuroses and fewer modern delusions than Britain, the British monarchy just seemed to epitomise and encourage so much stupidity, unfairness and obsequiousness that it wasn’t worth conserving.

That’s been my view for most of my life. Admittedly, for a few years around the 2012 London Olympics I took a slightly more benevolent view of the institution: “…my opinion was more sanguine, at least of Elizabeth. It was one of indifference tempered with a certain, grudging respect.” This was “partly because I’d concluded that countries needed their symbolic heads of state – someone to open the supermarkets, launch the ships and sit down and sip tea with the US President or the Pope or whatever foreign dignitary happened to be in town. This was the stuff that the prime minister didn’t have time to do because he or she had a country to run….”

Furthermore, Danny Boyle’s Opening Ceremony at the 2012 London Olympics had temporarily fooled me into believing “that with a bit of tweaking – for instance, modifying but not removing the Royal Family – Britain could become a decent, balanced, good-humoured and modern-minded country. Also, I was a big James Bond fan and, at the Opening Ceremony, I thought it was pretty cool when the Queen, or possibly her stunt double, parachuted out of a plane with Daniel Craig.”

By the time of her Platinum Jubilee earlier this year, however, and with the country infected by the jingoistic and backward-looking craziness of Brexit, which called to mind not Danny Boyle’s Olympic Opening Ceremony but Danny Boyle’s apocalyptic zombie movie 28 Days Later (2002), my tune had changed. Britain had become such a basket-case that if it was to survive in any sane form, it needed drastic surgery carried out on its many, ridiculously-archaic institutions. This included the abolition of its monarchy.

And I’m afraid the Platinum Jubilee’s sequel to the Queen’s hook-up with James Bond at the 2012 Olympics, which featured her having tea and marmalade sandwiches with Paddington Bear, didn’t work for me. Paddington, after all, was an immigrant who’d arrived undocumented from Peru and, in the rabid atmosphere of 2022 Britain, Priti Patel would probably have stuck him on a plane and flown him off to Rwanda for ‘processing’. Also, I thought it must have been terrifying for poor Paddington to find himself in a palace guarded by men wearing the skins of his relatives on top of their heads.

The next days – weeks, months – will showcase all the idiocies that afflict modern-but-monarchist Britain. The Queen’s funeral and the coronation of son Charles will be a never-ending ordeal of Ruritanian faff and ritualistic flummery. Many Britons, of course, approve of this and believe it represents threads of tradition that run back to the country’s distant past. Actually, much of this arcane pomp was devised by that randy old goat Edward VII at the start of the last century. I find it fascinating, incidentally, that one of Edward VII’s many mistresses was Alice Keppel, great-grandmother of a certain Camilla Parker-Bowles.

There will also be tsunamis of sanctimonious and sycophantic drivel written and broadcast about the Queen by the toadies, grovellers, cap-doffers, forelock-tuggers and brown-nosers that infest Britain’s mainstream media. One of life’s great ironies is that the media currently churning out drooling eulogies about the wonderfulness of the departed monarch was the same media that made life hell for many of her family’s members. Her ex-daughter-in-law wouldn’t have died in a car-crash in 1997 if there hadn’t been a fleet of paparazzi pursuing her, desperate for photos to sell to the tabloids. Incessant media hounding and tittle-tattle was a major reason why Prince Harry chose to bail out of the royal circus. And who can blame him? If British journalistic hacks thought they could accuse his wife Meghan Markle of murdering the Queen and get away with it, they would.

And inevitably, the Queen’s passing will add a tankerload of fuel to the culture-war fires that have burned across Britain since 2016 and Brexit. Already, social media has been overrun by people, swivel of eye and gammon-pink of complexion, desperate to weaponise her death against the woke, lefty snowflakes they hate so much. Spencer Morgan, son of the dreaded Piers Morgan and a supposed champion of free speech, opined the other day: “Sad thing is there will be people in this country celebrating this. They’re the ones we need to focus on deporting.” Correction: a champion only of free speech he agrees with. In his case, obviously, the blighted apple hasn’t fallen far from the twisted old tree.

Meanwhile, Henry Bolton, embarrassingly short-lived leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (he lasted less than five months), expressed his disgust that “most British schools no longer teach their pupils the National Anthem, or fly the Union flag” and called on Liz Truss to “issue an instruction to all schools to rectify this omission, and do so prior to Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral.” Funnily enough, I went to school in the 1970s and 1980s and I don’t remember being taught the National Anthem or seeing the Union Jack flying back then. And a couple of my schools were attended by Northern Irish Protestants, generally the most Queen-adoring, flag-respecting folk in the UK.

Meanwhile, at this moment, I’m sure social media accounts are being scoured the length and breadth of the country. This is as right-wing journalists, politicians and rabble-rousers search for any off-message disloyalty towards Her Majesty expressed by supporters of political parties they disapprove of (Labour, the Scottish National Party, the Greens), members of news outlets they disapprove of (Novara Media), fans of football clubs they disapprove of (Liverpool, Celtic), comedians they disapprove of (Joe Lycett), etc., intent on starting a holy war if they find something. Already on twitter, I’ve seen one right-wing gobshite fulminate at Jeremy Corbyn for, in a tweeted tribute to the Queen, reminiscing that he “enjoyed discussing our families, gardens and jam-making with her.” Clearly, it was okay for Paddington Bear to discuss marmalade with the recently deceased Her Majesty, but not okay for Jeremy Corbyn to discuss jam with her.

From twitter.com/jeremycorbyn

Thanks to all the patriotic breast-beating and blabber, this is a golden opportunity too for newly-anointed Prime Minister Liz Truss and her government, a government in which talent is not so much lacking as non-existent, to sweep under the carpet the multiple crises facing the country. Mind you, as those crises include skyrocketing energy bills and inflation, Brexit’s crippling of the economy, the war in Ukraine, the potential arrival of new, deadlier Covid variants and the climate-change emergency, the bulge created under the carpet will be pretty huge. The right-wing mainstream media will aid and abet this. Already, we’ve had the BBC’s Clive Myrie dismiss the energy-bill calamity as ‘insignificant’ compared to the royal news.

Personally, I won’t be grieving over the Queen’s departure, though I feel slightly sad to see her go. That’s mainly because I liked the fact that she’d been a living link with so much history. She was the last surviving world leader to have served (admittedly tenuously) during World War II – she’d been a member of the women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS). She’d met 13 out of the 14 past US presidents, kicking off with Harry Truman, missing out on Lyndon B. Johnson for some reason, and surviving her encounter with the hideous, ignorant, orange-skinned one. She came face to face with Marilyn Monroe when, coincidentally, both of them were 30.

She also had to deal with 15 UK prime ministers, firstly Winston Churchill and finally Liz Truss, which doesn’t suggest there’s been any progress in intellect and ability in British politics during the last 70 years. Quite the reverse. By the way, I’m glad she managed to outlast Boris Johnson’s premiership by a couple of days. Perhaps it was her wish not to have that bloviating narcissist hogging the limelight as PM during her mourning and funeral that kept her going until September 8^th.

I should add that I feel that same sense of historical loss whenever someone very old passes away. When I was a kid in Northern Ireland, I knew an elderly lady who could recall the days when Victoria had been on the throne, and being around her when she reminisced was like being in the presence of a human time machine. (Despite being a Northern Irish Protestant, she’d hated ‘the Widow at Windsor‘.)

I saw Queen Elizabeth II in the flesh once, back in 1999, when she attended the opening of the new Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. I was among the crowds along the sides of the Royal Mile when she and Prince Philip scooted past in an open carriage with horsemen riding behind and in front of them. The crowd went, “Hurrah!” Then one of the horses discharged several big dollops of dung onto the street’s surface. While the royal cortege receded, two workers from the city council, a man and woman who looked near retirement-age, hurried onto the street and used brushes and shovels to scoop up the dung and put it in a binbag. The crowd promptly saluted the council workers by shouting “Hurrah!” again. Delighted, the workers accepted this with a gracious wave of their shovels.

Looking between those two humble council workers and the procession making its way up the Royal Mile, I knew where my sympathies lay.

From twitter.com/dalrymplewill

September 30, 2020

Jim Mountfield gets apocalyptic

A 7000-word story of mine called The Nuclei has just appeared in a new collection called Xenobiology: Stranger Creatures. Its subtitle describes it as ‘an anthology of international sci-fi, steampunk and urban fantasy short stories.’

The contents of the anthology are explained in more detail in its introduction by one of its editors, Michele Dutcher: “Since Xenobiology is not a study of naturally occurring organisms, the stories in this anthology deal with 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. Those new organisms can be intriguing when thrown into the mind of an imaginative author.”

The Nuclei is classifiable as science fiction but definitely lurks at the horror end of the sci-fi spectrum. Therefore, in Xenobiology: Stranger Creatures, it’s credited to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I use for my macabre fiction. Basically, it’s a body-horror story set in Edinburgh after an apocalypse. Now there’s a sentence you don’t get to write too often.

Writing a story with a post-apocalyptic setting was an opportunity for me to address some of the misconceptions people have about what would happen after civilisation collapsed, thanks to watching many Hollywood movies on the theme.

Firstly, and I say this with regret because I’m a big fan of George Miller’s Mad Max franchise, petrol would soon degrade and become unusable. Thus, within a few years, no survivors would be able to drive around in motorised vehicles – not even in the giant armoured battle-trucks that featured in 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road. So in The Nuclei I have the human protagonists riding about on horses or on bicycles. The bicycles possess solid wheels made of micro closed-cell polymer resin that allow them to be rode over the debris-strewn, weed-sprouting streets of post-apocalyptic Edinburgh without the risk of incurring punctures. Also, importantly, when the bicycles aren’t on the road, they’re ‘connected to motors and chargers and used to repower the batteries for essentials like the field radio.’

The story also makes references to a few things that seem too mundane to appear in the average post-apocalyptic movie but that would surely be a big thing for survivors of a real-life global meltdown. For example, scurvy would manifest itself among those survivors if they were suddenly denied access to fruit and vegetables in their diets. And the danger posed by cuts and infections would be immense after whatever supplies of antibiotics had survived the apocalypse ran out.

One crucial point that the story tries to make is that post-apocalypse the remaining humans wouldn’t immediately degenerate into bands of savages hellbent on killing each other. This departs from the anarchic scenarios depicted in Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road and or in just about every zombie-holocaust movie ever made (the latter suggesting that, when it comes down to it, human beings are even worse than any zombies they’re trying to fight off).

Actually – as reports from the aftermath of any earthquake, tsunami or other natural disaster will testify – human beings are genetically programmed to cooperate and help one another out. This is not for any uplifting moral reason but simply because cooperation increases their chances of survival. Hence, in The Nuclei, you get the members of a loopy post-apocalyptic religious cult joining forces with a militia dedicated to the protection of medical science in order to defeat, or at least diminish, a common foe.

And what is that foe? Well, it’s one of the ‘stranger creatures’ of the collection’s title, the result of genetic tampering. It’s also the result of me sitting down and attempting to imagine the most revolting monster possible.

Xenobiology: Stranger Creatures is currently available from Amazon here.