Tag: Guising

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Jim Mountfield goes guising again

 

© Legiron Books

 

Two years ago, under my horror-fiction nom de plume Jim Mountfield, I had a short story called Guising published in an issue of the magazine The Sirens Call.  As its title indicates, this story centred on the Scottish Halloween custom of guising, which in the opening paragraphs I described thus:

 

“Scottish people will tell you that guising isn’t the same as trick-or-treating, though it involves children dressed as ghosts, witches and monsters going to front doors and receiving confectionary or small sums of cash from householders.  The Scottish custom is transactional.  The children have to earn their rewards.  This means putting on a show for whoever they’re visiting.  A brief show, admittedly, like telling a story or singing a song.  Guising has its roots in the activities long ago of mummers who’d turn up at houses and taverns on special days such as Christmas, Easter, Plough Monday and All Souls’ Day, stage short plays, and afterwards collect money from their audiences…”

 

Unfortunately, Sirens Call Publications recently ceased business, so I can no longer provide a link to the issue in question.

 

Well, I’ve just had another Halloween-themed short story published, again as Jim Mountfield and again (mostly) set in Scotland.  And there’s more guising in it.  This one is called Bag of Tricks and it appears in the collection Monster: Underdog Anthology 24 from Legiron Books.  All the stories in Monster involve Halloween and the anthology should have gone on sale a fortnight ago to coincide with October 31st.  However, a last-minute glitch with Amazon meant its appearance was delayed into November.

 

While the guising in Guising took place in the working-class streets of a small mill-town during the 1970s, the guising in Bag of Tricks is more suburban and up-to-date.  It happens in 2023, smartphones are present, and the brattiest kid is dressed as a character from the Saw (2005-23) franchise.  The setting is a smart, edge-of-town estate and the guising party is accompanied by adults – in the feral 1970s, kids were allowed to roam free at night, but in the more child-safety-conscious 21st century, they’re supervised.  Those adults have “decided that, because some houses belonged to older folk who remembered how Halloween had been in Scotland before it got Americanised, the children wouldn’t just chant, ‘Trick or treat!’ and expect to receive sweeties. No, they had to be traditional Scottish guisers and perform – delivering a joke, a story, a song – so that they earned the confectionary.”

 

Obviously, this being a horror story, those guisers get more than they bargained for as the evening progresses.

 

A bumper beast of a book containing 416 pages and 39 stories from 37 authors, Monster: Underdog Anthology 24 can be purchased as a paperback here, and in its Kindle edition here.

Posted on

Jim Mountfield goes guising

 

© The Sirens Call

 

Halloween is nearly upon us and, currently, I’m indulging in one of my traditional Halloween activities.  That activity is getting cranky at British, or more accurately, English journalists, columnists and commentators who are doing their usual thing at this time of year and complaining about British people being too enthusiastic about Halloween.  This shouldn’t be happening, say those journos, because Halloween isn’t a ‘British’ festival.  Rather, it’s something that’s been ‘imported’ from America during the past couple of decades.

 

That’s right.  Supposedly, there was no Halloween in Britain, ever, until British kids saw Hollywood movies like Steven Spielberg’s E.T. (1982) and decided that American trick-or-treating looked such good fun that they wanted to try it too.  Here’s the latest of these ‘Halloween-is-American-not-British!’ moan-a-thons, published the other day in the Guardian.

 

Complete piffle, of course.  Maybe the south of England, where Britain’s mainstream media and its scribblers are based, didn’t pay much attention to Halloween until recently, but it was always a thing elsewhere in Britain.  After all, the concept of Halloween was originally brought to the USA by Scottish and Irish immigrants.  All right, Ireland is not part of Britain, but technically Northern Ireland is part of the ‘United Kingdom’.

 

Way, way back in the 1970s, when I was a kid in Northern Ireland, I remember doing such Halloween-y things on October 31st as dunking for apples, trying to take bites out of other apples hanging on strings, and carving Halloween lanterns out of turnips.  (I don’t think I laid eyes on a pumpkin until the late 1980s.)  Also, I recall the local Young Farmers club using Halloween as an excuse to run amok – seemingly appropriating the customs of Mischief Night, which in many places had traditionally taken place the previous evening, on October 30th – uprooting signposts, stealing people’s gates and generally making arseholes of themselves.

 

And a little later, my family moved to Scotland, where…

 

But here I have to change the topic slightly.  Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write horror stories, has just had a short story published in issue 59 – the Halloween 2022 edition – of a dark fiction and poetry magazine called The Sirens Call.  The story is entitled Guising and is set at Halloween in Scotland in the early 1970s.  Here’s what the story has to say about the venerable Scottish custom of guising:

 

“Scottish people will tell you that guising isn’t the same as trick-or-treating, though it involves children dressed as ghosts, witches and monsters going to front doors and receiving confectionary or small sums of cash from householders. The Scottish custom is transactional. The children have to earn their rewards. This means putting on a show for whoever they’re visiting. A brief show, admittedly, like telling a story or singing a song. Guising has its roots in the activities long ago of mummers who’d turn up at houses and taverns on special days such as Christmas, Easter, Plough Monday and All Souls’ Day, stage short plays, and afterwards collect money from their audiences…”

 

Obviously, because Guising is a horror story, the kids who go out guising in it get rather more than they bargained for.

 

287 pages along, crammed with macabre goodies, and free to download, issue 59 of The Siren’s Call  is available here.