© Heavenly Flower Publishing
Belfast’s Heavenly Flower Publishing has just made available a new anthology called White Witch’s Hat & Other Yuletide Ghost Stories, whose Amazon write-up describes it as “a collection of spooky seasonal stories by 21 authors just in time for the short days and long nights as the winter solstice draws ever nearer.” The write-up also contains a proviso. “Reader beware: this book will give you nightmares. If you’re looking for chilling short stories that are more Krampus than Christmas, full of supernatural scares and denizens of dark nights, Yule not be disappointed.” One of those spooky Christmas stories comes from my own pen and is entitled Southbound Traveller.
Although I usually write creepy fiction under the pseudonym Jim Mountfield, Southbound Traveller bears a different nom de plume, Steve Cashel. This is the one I commonly use for ‘non-scary, non-fantastical Scottish stuff’.
A long time ago, back in those naïve days when I didn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t become the literary equivalent of Alasdair Gray, William McIlvanney or James Kelman, I sent many Steve Cashel stories off to various Scottish mainstream-literature magazines. But I only got two of them placed: one in a publication called Gutter, the other in a publication called Groundswell. I will forever remember Groundswell, a modest journal based around Edinburgh University, because they replied to my submission with both a rejection letter and an acceptance letter – I didn’t know if they’d published my story or not until I found a copy of Groundswell in a shop and checked its contents.
Then I started to have more success with my horror and fantasy stories, written as Jim Mountfield and Rab Foster, and the Cashel pseudonym was shelved. From 2023, however, I tried rewriting and submitting again a few of my old Steve Cashell stories and this time they got into print. Thus, Mr Cashel had an unexpected resurrection.
Something weird and inexplicable happens in Southbound Traveller but, for the most part, it’s an un-supernatural Christmas story. It tries to paint as realistic a picture of Christmas Day as possible – at least, as I remember Christmas Day in Scotland in the early 1990s, with lots of TV, such as the Queen’s speech, the big afternoon film and the Christmas editions of the popular soaps, and also with too much booze being quaffed and family members getting on each other’s nerves. It felt more like a Steve Cashel story than a Jim Mountfield one, so I attributed it to the former.
I should add that Southbound Traveller owes something to Hans Christian Anderson’s 1845 fairy story, The Little Match Girl.
Edited by Leilanie Stewart and Joseph Robert, and available as both a paperback and a kindle edition, White Witch’s Hat & Other Yuletide Ghost Stories can be purchased at Amazon US here and Amazon UK here.