Horror Stories from Horrified (Volume 1): Christmas

May 1, 2023May 13, 2023

Jim Mountfield gets something woolly for his 50th

© The Sirens Call Publications

Jim Mountfield, the pen-name under which I write horror fiction, has today had a new story published in the spring 2023 edition of the short-story and poetry ezine The Sirens Call. Entitled Wool, it’s set in rural Scotland in the near future and envisions a time when science has made agriculture – at least, agriculture where animals are reared for meat and wool – truly grotesque and nightmarish. The Sirens Call’s spring edition can be downloaded here.

According to my calculations, Wool is the 50^th story I’ve had published as Jim Mountfield. I came up with the name a dozen years ago, when I realised I had some good ideas for horror stories and wanted to put them down on paper, but was painfully aware that my real name ‘Ian Smith’ was hardly a memorable one for an author of scary fiction – or any sort of fiction, for that matter. While I was trying to think of a pseudonym, I noticed that I had playing in the background an album by the rock band Primal Scream. And Primal Scream’s bass player at the time was the affable Gary ‘Mani’ Mountfield, who’d earlier played for – and would later play for again – the legendary ‘Madchester’ band the Stone Roses. “Mountfield,” I thought, “what a cool surname!” Meanwhile, the ‘Jim’ part of ‘Jim Mountfield’ came easily, as ‘James’ is my middle name.

Looking back over the 50 stories that have appeared in print bearing Jim Mountfield’s name, I think the following ten are my favourites.

Laughing Dragon, which appeared in the now-defunct ezine Flashes in the Dark in 2011, was a piece of flash fiction that featured a stained-glass window depicting a dragon and a man paranoid about the fact that his girlfriend was much younger than he was. Despite the story’s 1000-word length, I managed to fit in some brazenly scatological humour too. Laughing Dragon shouldn’t have worked, but I think it did, somehow.

© Midnight Street Press

The Next Bus appeared in issue 4 of the magazine Hellfire Crossroads in 2014. I had a lot of fun writing this story, which combines the misery of waiting for a bus that doesn’t seem to want to come with the terror of dealing with a knife-wielding psychopath at the bus-stop. I also really liked The Groove, which appeared in the subsequent issue of Hellfire Crossroads, because it wasn’t just about horror but about something else close to my heart, music. The story’s villainess was a scheming widow whose “CD collection consisted of just six titles: The Essential Mariah Carey, Phil Collins’ Hits, Robbie Williams’ Greatest Hits, Whitney Houston’s Ultimate Collection, Bryan Adams’ Best of Me and the musical soundtrack for Titanic.” Her evilness was such that she had her music-loving husband’s funeral defiled by the playing of Robbie Williams’ Angels (1997). Both issues of Hellfire Crossroads can be purchased here.

Ae Fond Kiss, also the title of a Robert Burns song, was about a circus, an automaton designed by Henri Maillardet and some teenagers holidaying on the coast of south-western Scotland. I didn’t include the next words of the song – “And then we sever…” – in the title, as that would have given away the ending. The story appears in the summer 2018 print edition of The Horror Zine, which can be bought here.

© The Horror Zine

The same summer saw the publication of In Hog Heaven in Aphelion. This story feels special to me because it was the first time I tried setting a supernatural story in Northern Ireland, the place where I’d spent my childhood. In Hog Heaven can be read here. In July the following year, Aphelion published my story They Draw You In, about a teacher doing some groundwork for a school trip in a small, dingy, provincial art gallery that displays some unusual paintings by an artist who was known too for his Aleister Crowley-type proclivities. Again, They Draw You In was one of those stories where the disparate elements seemed to work together nicely. It’s accessible here.

The webzine Horrified was under threat of closure last year but, happily, it’s still on the go. In November 2020, my story First Footers appeared in its collection Christmas – Horror Stories from Horrified: Volume 1. Not quite set at Christmas, First Footers had a pair of lads in the Scottish Highlands attempting to revive the old Scottish tradition of first-footing on New Year’s Eve and having a series of increasingly bizarre experiences. Like a lot of the stories in my top ten, I valued this one because it contained a fair amount of humour. I can’t find a link to the collection now, unfortunately, but my story Where the Little Boy Drowned, published on Horrified’s fiction page in January 2021, can be read here. The story of a man trapped in a hellish physical predicament, with the possibility that a vengeful ghost is lurking close by, Where the Little Boy Drowned received some good feedback from its readers.

© Horrified Magazine

March 2022 saw the publication of Never Tell Tales Out of School in Schlock! Webzine. This one felt close to my heart because it revisited my memories of school in the 1970s, which was ‘rough and tumble’ to say the least. Its plot had a troubled author returning to his old school, which is now ultra-child-safety-conscious, ultra-inclusive and ultra-politically-correct, hoping that they’ll stock his new book in their library, and then being tormented by visions of bullying he suffered there 45 years earlier. This edition of Schock! Webzine is available here.

Also partly set in the 1970s was my story Guising, which was printed in the Halloween 2022 issue of The Sirens Call. An account of some kids participating in the Scottish variation of trick-or-treating, back in the days when they could just go up to and knock on strangers’ front doors unaccompanied by an adult, I enjoyed writing this because I could tell the story through the kids themselves – whose grasp of what is going on is somewhat less-than-complete. Like the current issue of The Sirens Call, the Halloween 2022 issue is downloadable here.

Finally, I’m delighted that Jim Mountfield should be celebrating the publication of his 50^th story on May 1^st, May Day, an auspicious date in the horror-genre calendar. The climax of the greatest horror movie of all time, Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973), took place on this day, which is important in pagan, pre-Christian cultures because it falls halfway between the spring equinox and summer solstice and marks the beginning of summer. Come to think of it, 2023 marks the fiftieth anniversary of The Wicker Man’s release. There’s that number again, 50…

© British Lion Films

October 5, 2021

Jim Mountfield’s folky fortieth

© Horrified Magazine

My horror-writing alter-ego Jim Mountfield has just had a short story published in the new anthology Horror Stories from Horrified (Volume 2): Folk Horror.

‘Horrified’ refers to Horrified Magazine, a webzine devoted to British films, television and literature in the horror genre. The magazine’s current literary editor William J. Brown, its former literary editor John Clewarth and its editor-in-chief Jae Prowse have put this collection together. Meanwhile ‘Folk Horror’ refers – quoting its entry in Wikipedia – to “a subgenre of horror… which uses elements of folklore to invoke fear in its audience. Typical elements include a rural setting and themes of isolation, religion, the power of nature, and the potential darkness of rural landscapes.” Or as Jae Prowse puts it more poetically in his introduction to the collection, it’s macabre storytelling with evocations “of briar and bramble, of the quiet eeriness of rurality, of secrets buried in the earth, and of the fiend in the furrows.”

According to my calculations, my story in Folk Horror is the 40^th one I’ve had published under the pseudonym Jim Mountfield. Entitled Bottled Up, it’s set in East Anglia, a place where I lived in 1998, again in 2002, and then again in 2008-2009, and a place that ranks as perhaps my favourite part of England. While a lot of examples of folk horror have strange rural communities welcoming hapless outsiders into their ranks, for nefarious reasons – see Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973) or Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) – Bottled Up is about an ancient sect that’s just fearful of outsiders and exists to keep them at bay, something that might resonate in the 2021 Britain of Brexit and Covid-19.

Horror Stories from Horrified (Volume 2): Folk Horror is now available at the Horrified Magazine shop and can be ordered here. Incidentally, the magazine’s previous collection, Horror Stories from Horrified (Volume 1): Christmas is still available, contains another Jim Mountfield story called First Footers, and might be a timely purchase as Christmas 2021 approaches.

January 1, 2021January 10, 2021

My 2020 writing round-up

© Schlock Webzine

I’m sure few people will be sad to see the back of 2020, although towards its end it did provide two glimmers of hope for the future. These were the development of vaccines against Covid-19, the main reason for the year’s horribleness, and the defeat in the US presidential election of Donald Trump, the Clown-Master General who’s supervised a four-year circus of corruption, cronyism, disinformation, racism, culture wars, environmental destruction, denial of science and pandering to right-wing terrorism in the world’s most powerful nation.

On a personal note, 2020 wasn’t so bad for me in one way. I did get a number of stories published. These appeared under the pseudonyms Jim Mountfield (which I use for my horror fiction) and Rab Foster (for my fantasy fiction) and, a couple of times, under my real and boring name Ian Smith. Here’s a round-up of those stories and details of where you can find them.

Firstly, as Jim Mountfield:

Back in January, The Path, a cosmic horror story inspired by some rainy season trekking I’d done in Sri Lanka’s Knuckles Mountains, appeared in Issue 30, Volume 15 of Schlock! Webzine. The issue can be accessed here.
Witch Hazel, a folk-horror story playing on one of humanity’s most basic fears – there’s something following you! – was published in the February 2020 edition of The Horror Zine and can still be accessed here. It also appears in the Spring 2020 hard-copy edition of The Horror Zine, which can be purchased here.
March saw a story inspired by the many frustrations of working in an office, The Away Day, appear in Issue 2, Volume 16 of Schlock! Webzine, a kindle edition of which can be downloaded here. Come to think of it, The Away Day is probably already dated. Will there be such a thing as an office culture once the Covid-19 pandemic has passed and companies realise it’s cheaper and more practical to have their employees working at home?
In spring 2020, just as most countries were waking up to the seriousness of the pandemic, my violent sci-fi story New Town Tours was included in the aptly dystopian collection Midnight Street Anthology 4: Strange Days, published by Midnight Street Press. It can be purchased from Amazon UK here and Amazon US here. Also, you can find a clip of me (as Jim Mountfield) talking about the story and reading an excerpt from it here. I know, the clip looks and sounds like it was filmed by John Logie Baird in 1926, but I was subject to a Covid-19-inspired curfew at the time, didn’t have access to proper video equipment and had to record it in a dark room at the back of an apartment building.
In June, my story The Four-Legged Friend, set in Bangkok, inspired by a visit I once made to a Thai surgical museum and tapping into the same fear as Witch Hazel, appeared in Issue 5, Volume 16 of Schlock! Webzine. A kindle edition of it can be downloaded here.
Having had cosmic horror and folk horror published in 2020, I was pleased to get some body horror published in it too. In September, my story The Nuclei was included in a new collection called Xenobiology: Stranger Creatures. It’s a sci-fi body-horror story set in Edinburgh after an apocalypse. Now that’s a sentence you don’t get to write very often. Xenobiology can be purchased here.
Don’t Hook Now, a nasty sci-fi story I wrote about perverts using future virtual-reality technology to interact with saucy scenes from old movies, was published by Horrified Magazine in October 2020 and can be accessed here.
My ghost story First Footers, set as its title suggests in Scotland on New Year’s Eve, has been included in a recent collection of spooky tales entitled Horror Stories from Horrified (Volume 1): Christmas, again courtesy of Horrified Magazine. Available as a digital eBook, it can be purchased here.

As Ian Smith:

In March, my slightly Roald Dahl-esque story The Yellow Brick Road was published in Volume 2, Issue 2 of the Sri Lankan literary magazine Write. The last time I looked, copies of this issue of Write were still on sale in the Barefoot Shop at 704 Galle Road, Colombo.
To keep its contributors motivated during the March-May curfew that the Sri Lankan government imposed in response to Covid-19, Write started putting up stories on its social media platforms. These included my flash-fiction story Ferg’s Bike, which can be accessed here.

As Rab Foster:

October saw my fantasy-horror story No Man’s Land, inspired by the works of Ambrose Bierce, published in Issue 9, Volume 16 of Schlock! Webzine. Its kindle edition is available here.
Finally, my quaintly named story Pockets of the Janostovore is featured in the December 2020-January 2021 edition of Aphelion. It can be read here. Gratifyingly, it’s been listed as one of Aphelion‘s picks of 2020 for long fiction.

So 2020 has been a productive year for me in terms of my writing even if, in most other respects, it’s been as shit for me as it’s been for everybody else. Let’s hope 2021 sees me retain that productivity, while generally offering a better experience for all of us.

Anyway, with fingers crossed, I bid you… Happy new year!

November 22, 2020November 22, 2020

Jim Mountfield goes first footing

I’m pleased to report that my horror-writing alter ego Jim Mountfield has a short story featured in a new collection of spooky tales entitled Horror Stories from Horrified (Volume 1): Christmas. The collection has been published by the online magazine Horrified and, as its title suggests, its contents are not only concerned with the supernatural and macabre, but mostly take during the festive season. My contribution is actually a New Year story rather than a Christmas one, set on the night of December 31^st / January 1^st. It’s called First Footers.

I spent much of my early life in Scotland, where celebrating New Year, or Hogmanay as the Scots called it, was a big thing. (Cue the hoary old joke: “What do you get if you cross a Scotsman with an Iranian? The Ayatollah Hogmanay!”) In recent years, Scottish cities, especially Edinburgh, have cashed in on this tradition by holding huge street parties with firework displays and live music on December 31^st, although anyone I know who made it to the Edinburgh Street Party usually whinged afterwards that it was largely ‘attended by Aussie and Kiwi backpackers’.

Away from the commercialism and razzmatazz, a lot of Scottish people still claim that the customary thing to do on Hogmanay is go first-footing, i.e., trudge around your neighbours’ houses after midnight and toast the New Year in each house with glasses of whisky. But to be honest, I think this is an extinct tradition. I don’t know anybody who’s gone first-footing since the 1980s – which was certainly the last time I attempted it. Perhaps in the past, when Scottish pubs had very limited opening hours and Scottish society as a whole was much more buttoned-up, going on the razzle after midnight on January 1^st with a bottle of whisky might have seemed exciting, but it hardly seems so nowadays when you’re at liberty to party and drink yourself stupid 24/7 if you want. Or at least, you were before Covid-19 arrived…

Plus, does anyone in his or her right mind want to tramp from one neighbour’s house to another through the sort of dire, dreich weather you’re likely to get in Scotland, at night, at the very start of the year? (If there is a Hogmanay custom in modern Scotland, I suspect it’s for folk to make an appearance in a nice, warm pub in the afternoon or early evening of January 1^st and have a few celebratory drinks then, which seems far more sensible.)

Anyway, I got the idea for First Footers when it struck me that, in rural Scotland at least, going first-footing on a pitch-black night wasn’t just a physically uncomfortable experience, but possibly a creepy, even scary one too. This inspired me to write a tale about two young guys who decide to revive the old custom of first-footing one New Year’s Eve and get more than they bargained for.

Available as a digital ebook, and priced just £3.99, Horror Stories from Horrified (Volume 1): Christmas can be purchased here. Meanwhile, the main page for Horrified magazine can be accessed here.