Tag: Jim Mountfield

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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.

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Jim Mountfield gets activated

 

© Cloaked Press, LLC

 

Back in September 2020, I had a story called The Nuclei included in an anthology called Xenobiology: Stranger Creatures.  All its stories, in the words of one of the editors, Michele Dutcher, shared a theme of “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.”  Being about artificially-created biological creatures, The Nuclei was classifiable as science fiction, but it definitely lurked at the horror end of the sci-fi spectrum.  In fact, the creatures featured in The Nuclei were the result of me attempting to imagine the most revolting monsters possible.  For that reason, the story was credited to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I use for my macabre fiction.

 

The Nuclei was also a post-apocalyptic story, set in the ruins of Edinburgh – we definitely need more post-apocalyptic stories set in the capital of Scotland – after my revolting, artificially-created creatures had decimated humanity and brought human civilisation to an end.  The human characters, some ragged, malnourished survivors who belonged either to a loony religious cult or to an equally loony militia, referred to an event called ‘the Activation’ shortly before civilisation fell, when the artificially-created horrors were first unleashed on mankind.  That gave me the idea of writing a prequel to the story, detailing what happened at the Activation, i.e., on Day One of the nightmare.

 

I have now written that story, called The Activation, and have just had it published under the penname of Jim Mountfield too.  It features in Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024, the latest instalment in the annual Nightmare Fuel collections of scary fiction put out by Cloaked Press, LLC.  As its title indicates, the theme for this year’s collection was body horror, which Wikipedia defines as “a subgenre of horror fiction that intentionally showcases grotesque or psychologically disturbing violations of the human body or of another creature.”  Well, the modus operandi of the creatures in The Nuclei involved a lot of body horror, so this seemed a natural home for its prequel.

 

The setting and main character of The Activation were inspired by something that happened to me once and by somebody I used to know.  Firstly, the happening was a misadventure I had while travelling on the London Tube back in 2016, somewhere between King’s Cross and Liverpool Street Stations – I must have been on either the Circle, Metropolitan or Hammersmith and City lines.  A young woman had what is euphemistically described as an ‘episode’ and started screaming hysterically at her fellow passengers.  Unfortunately, among the things she screamed was the claim that she was carrying a bomb.  The train promptly stopped at the next station and remained there with its doors sealed for 20 or 25 minutes.  Nobody could get in or out.  Meanwhile, the woman kept shrieking gibberish at everyone.

 

At one point, a pair of British Transport Police officers walked down the train, but didn’t actually stop to deal with the unhinged woman when they reached her.  No, they just walked past her, to the train’s far end, and then walked back – again doing nothing when they passed her a second time.  Later, when I researched the protocol for occurrences like this, I found out that the Transport Police officers had done an ‘assessment of the incident scene’.  Satisfied that they knew where the problem was, and that it wasn’t a case of terrorism, and that there weren’t any other problems elsewhere, they then informed the local police and told them where to find the problem.  When those police arrived on the platform, the nearest set of doors were opened so that they could board the train and remove said problem.

 

Obviously, this took time.  And with those doors sealed until the local police came, it made me wonder what would have happened to the folk stuck on the train if there’d been a real terrorist present.  I guess we were considered ‘expendable’.

 

By the time the Transport Police did their assessment, it’d become clear to everybody that the young woman causing the trouble wasn’t a terrorist.  She was just some poor, mixed-up soul who’d probably forgotten to take her medication that day.  I realised this when, at one point during her ravings, she started listing ‘all the great prophets in history’.  These were Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed and… Zippy, the gimpy zip-mouthed puppet from the British kids’ TV show Rainbow (1972-92).

 

I had to put that detail into my story The Activation.  Although, because Nightmare Fuel: Body Horrors is an American publication, I changed Zippy from Rainbow to the better-known Cookie Monster from Sesame Street (1969-present).  Sorry about that, Zippy, but you just aren’t internationally famous enough.

 

© Teddington Studios / Thames Television

© Sesame Workshop / BBC / From X

 

Secondly, the main character in The Activation was inspired by a former colleague, a PE teacher, who was employed by an English private school I worked at in 2002.  He was an ex-soldier.  One evening, the two of us were having a pint in the neighbourhood pub when he told me – with a preliminary request not to say anything about it to the school’s headmistress – that when he went to the school to be interviewed for the PE-teacher position, he’d been homeless.  At the time he was sleeping inside some giant concrete pipes at the side of a road that were soon to be popped in the ground for a sewage or drainage project.  Homelessness among former members of the Armed Forces is something that’s tragically common.

 

Anyway, for The Activation, I thought the hero would be somebody with experiences similar to my old colleague – a former soldier, homeless, desperately trying to turn his life around.  And then he gets caught up in the hideous events of the story and is put through hell.  Yes, I know.  I’m a sadist.

 

Containing 14 tales of grisly, gruelling terror, Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024 can now be purchased on Kindle here and as a paperback here.

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Jim Mountfield goes to the pub

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

Jim Mountfield, the nom de plume I use when writing fiction of a scary nature, has a new short story featured in the October 2024 edition of the online publication Schlock! Webzine.  It’s entitled The Hole in the Wall and it chronicles the spooky events that befall a real-ale enthusiast while he’s researching a pair of English pubs.  Writing The Hole in the Wall allowed me to poke a little gentle fun at the organisation the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) and its members, though here the main character belongs to an outfit called ABRA, “the association for Action on Bars and Real Ale”.

 

Now I whole-heartedly believe CAMRA does sterling work in Britain promoting decent-tasting beer and fighting for the preservation of pubs, and I have absolutely nothing against its members.  Indeed, in my youth, I was in CAMRA myself.  But a few CAMRA-ites I knew could be somewhat intense and zealous.  I recall doing a work-experience stint as a trainee journalist with the magazine Camping and Caravanning in 1992.  To keep me busy, the editor suggested I write a feature about cider – the next issue was to focus on camping and caravanning in Somerset and Devon, a region famously home to much of England’s cider.  A mate in CAMRA put me in touch with the organisation’s cider authority, whom I interviewed for the feature over the phone.  More than an hour later, I could not get the interview to end.  The guy would not stop talking about cider.  At  one point he started singing wassailing songs down the phone-line at me.  Such enthusiasm for his favourite beverage was impressive, if frightening.

 

Of the pubs featured in The Hole in the Wall, one is a dive and is called the Year and a Day Tavern, which was based on now-closed hostelry on Norwich’s Magdalen Street, the Cat and Fiddle.  I visited it once or twice when I lived in the city in 2008-9 and I have to agree with an acerbic reviewer of the bar who advised online: “…don’t go to the toilet in any circumstances unless you’re wearing a full nuclear biological and chemical protection suit and gas mask.”  The other pub in the story, a smart one called the Cache, was based on a couple of places I used to imbibe in, including the Bodega on Newcastle-upon-Tyne’s Westgate Road and the Fat Cat on Norwich’s West End Street, though the hanging ‘artefacts’ on view inside it were inspired by the décor in the Nutshell in Bury St Edmunds, which claims to be the smallest pub in Britain.

 

For the next month, The Hole in the Wall is available to read for free here, while the contents page of Schlock! Webzine’s October 2024 issue can be accessed here.  So, please pull up a stool, pour yourself a pint and enjoy.

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Jim Mountfield visits the colonies

 

© The Sirens Call

 

The Colony, a short horror story I wrote under the pseudonym of Jim Mountfield, has just been published in Issue 66, the summer 2024 edition, of the fiction and poetry magazine The Sirens Call.

 

For Issue 66, the Sirens Call’s editors suggested that contributors write something on the theme of ‘heat’.  I thought I would write a sci-fi / horror story set in the globally-warmed future.  Come to think of it, you can no longer describe global warming as ‘science fiction’.  We’re living in a globally-warmed world now.  This year, for example, my current place of residence Singapore has been stricken with extreme temperatures.  It was headline news here in March when thermometers recorded highs of 36 degrees.  And the local taxi drivers’ main – only? – topic of conversation in recent months is how they can’t remember the city-state being as swelteringly hot as this before.

 

Major inspiration for The Colony came from an article I read last year in the web magazine Atlas Obscura about the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Lab in Oregon where, among other things, scientists have been experimenting with an item called a ‘chungus’.  This combats coastal erosion by “dampening the waves, robbing them of some of their energy before they crash onto the… shore.”  A chungus is a ‘five-foot-wide, lumpy brown blob floating in the water, encased in webbing and studded with… floaties.  Long plastic tentacles trail from its underside like vinyl seaweed.”  The lab’s researchers suggest that “future versions… would be connected in a vast network, their plump bodies seeded with marsh grasses and seaweed.  Eventually, they would form floating gardens surrounding coastal cities like fluffy green tutus, potentially saving them from disaster… a network of them could dampen a real-world storm surge.”

 

Of course, my warped mind quickly got wondering…  What if these floating blobs of tentacles and vegetation weren’t inanimate objects but sentient creatures designed, then cloned, in genetic research laboratories, and tethered offshore in their millions to stop coastal erosion and storm surges caused by global warming and rising sea-levels?  And what if, in the tradition of sci-fi horror stories, The Science Goes Wrong?

 

Meanwhile, it was a no-brainer where to set the story.  I spent a couple of years living in East Anglia, one of England’s most scenic areas but also its flattest and lowest.  It’s severely prone to coastal erosion – something whose effects are in plain view if you visit places along the East Anglian coast like Dunwich, Happisburgh and Orford.

 

 

As ever, Issue 66 of The Sirens Call is an absolute bargain, being free and having some 280 pages stuffed with stories and poems.   It can be downloaded here.

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Jim Mountfield does some crawling

 

© Sirens Call Publications

 

The Crawler, a short story I wrote under the penname Jim Mountfield, is now available to read in the latest edition, Issue 65, of the magazine The Sirens Call.

 

As usual with the stuff I write as Jim Mountfield, The Crawler is a dark, scary tale.  It’s set in Northern Ireland and part of the inspiration for it came from my memory of how, when I was a kid, there seemed to be lots of old women living alone in my neighbourhood.  Occasionally, they stayed in big houses – but often their homes were small and impoverished.  I recall one elderly lady, Rachel, who lived up the road from us in a little cottage that didn’t even have running water.  Each day she had to collect buckets of water from a spring in the nearby fields.  Those memories date back to the early 1970s, and those women were at least in their seventies, so I wonder if their lives had been impacted by World War I.  They were deemed to be of ‘marriageable age’ during a period when many young men were being slaughtered on the battlefields of Belgium and France.  Afterwards, there weren’t enough young men left to go round, which doomed them to a lifetime’s spinsterhood.  Anyway, The Crawler’s setting came from that melancholy memory.

 

I also had a blunter reason for setting the story in Northern Ireland.  For plot reasons, the main character needed to have access to a gun.  Thanks to strict gun-ownership laws, most people in the British and Irish islands don’t have access to guns – which, incidentally, is something I strongly approve of – but that wouldn’t be problem in Northern Ireland if your main character was a policeman during or just after the Troubles that blighted the province from the 1960s to the 1990s.

 

Issue 65, the spring 2024 edition, of The Sirens Call can be downloaded here for free.  As always, it’s an absolute bargain, being 283 pages long and home to some 200 stories and poems.

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Jim Mountfield gets some followers

 

© Stygian Lepus

 

Issue 11 of the webzine The Stygian Lepus has just appeared online and its contents include a short story by Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write horror fiction.  Entitled The Followers, it’s the tale of some creative-writing-course students being sent out onto the streets to do a research assignment – never suspecting that, gradually, they’re being drawn into a scenario best described as one of cosmic horror.

 

Like the previous story I had published by The Stygian Lepus, A Man about a Dog, which appeared in their eighth issue last November, The Followers is set in a northern-English city inspired by Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where I lived from 2002 to 2005.  In fact, its two settings are based on Stowell Street, home to Newcastle’s tiny Chinatown, where I used to work; and on its majestic covered market-hall, Grainger Market, where I used to do much of my shopping.

 

For the next while, The Followers can be directly accessed here, while the main page of The Stygian Lepus, Issue 11, can be reached here.

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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 20th 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.

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My 2023 writing round-up

 

© Aphelion

 

2023 was not a great year for me personally or professionally.  And for the sake of my sanity, I’d prefer not to think of what went on in the wider world during the past year.  Mind you, with Lord Sauron’s orange twin looking likely to retake the White House in November and all that could ensue from that – the USA plunging into authoritarianism, civil disorder and even civil war, the emboldening of other fascists around the world, Ukraine being handed over to Trump’s buddy and idol Vladimir Putin, the end of humanity’s chances to do anything to alleviate the unfolding climate catastrophe – I have a feeling 2023 might retrospectively seem a nice year compared to the one that’s coming.

 

But on the other hand, 2023 was a successful one in terms of my writing.  In fact, it was my best-ever year and I managed to have 15 short stories published.  Usually, in a year, about a dozen of my pieces of fiction make it into print.

 

Here’s a round-up of my stories that were published in 2023, with details of who published them, which pseudonym they were published under, and where you can find them.

 

As Jim Mountfield:

  • Jim Mountfield, the penname under which I write macabre fiction, made his first 2023 appearance at the start of January.  Temple Street, a cosmic-horror story involving strangely-animate shadows in the northern Sri Lankan city of Jaffna, was published in Schlock! Webzine Volume 17, Issue 6.  The issue can be purchased here.
  • March saw the publication of my story Wool – the first of three I had published in 2023 that were set on a farm in southern Scotland and informed by my experiences of living on one in my youth – in Issue 61 of The Sirens Call. This one had a futuristic setting and explored what livestock-farming might be like a few years from now.  Possibly better for ‘real’ animals.  Not good for the genetically-engineered, supposedly-mindless ones that take their place in the production of meat, wool and other animal products.  And fatal for human beings if those genetically-engineered surrogates decide to rebel one day.  Issue 61 can be downloaded here.
  • I wasn’t sure if my story The Lost Stones would ever see the light of day, as its ingredients could best be described as ‘eclectic’.  At worst, they could be described as ‘barmy’.  It featured a Rolling Stones cover band, the Lost Stones of the title.  It also incorporated some folklore from the Rif Mountains of Morocco.  And it was set in the northern Japanese city of Sapporo during its snowbound wintertime.  However, in May, The Lost Stones was accepted for the Long Fiction section of Aphelion.  Furthermore, the story was one of the Long Fiction editor’s best-of-the-year picks of 2023 and is featured again in the current December 2023 / January 2024 issue of Aphelion.  For the next month, it can be read here.

 

© The Sirens Call

 

  • Issue 63 of The Sirens Call, published in June, had a special theme – cryptids, which the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines as “an animal (such as Sasquatch or the Loch Ness Monster) that has been claimed to exist but never proven to exist.” I penned a short story about cryptids entitled The Watchers in the Forest, which made the cut.  Issue 63 can be downloaded here.
  • October 2023 was a bumper month for Jim Mountfield, as his name appeared on three short stories published in the run-up to Halloween. Actually, Halloween figured heavily in the first of these, The Turnip Thieves, about a Scottish hill farmer who takes umbrage at what he believes are kids from the local town stealing his ‘neeps’ (turnips) to make Halloween lanterns.  This being a scary story, the thieves aren’t really kids.  The Turnip Thieves was among the contents of Volume 17, Issue 15 of Schlock! Webzine, which can be purchased here.
  • Later that month, my story One for the Books was included in the anthology Nightmare Fuel: Mind Terrors 2023 from the publisher Cloaked Press.  One for the Books was a tale of madness set in a second-hand bookshop, the inspiration for which came from the real-life Armchair Books at 72-74 West Port in Edinburgh, which I remember as a place of wonderful clutter, chaos, nooks and crannies, and vertiginously-high shelves.  Nightmare Fuel: Mind Terrors 2023 can be obtained here.

 

© Cloaked Press

 

  • And another ‘farm-horror’ story, The Shelterbelt, made it to publication just before Halloween. As the title suggests, the story was about a belt of trees, adjacent to a farmstead, designed to protect it against the elements… and containing a dark secret.  The Shelterbelt was included in Issue 3 of Witch House, which can be downloaded here.
  • Finally on the Jim Mountfield front in 2023, November was when my story A Man about a Dog appeared in Issue 8 of The Stygian Lepus.  Superficially about a person with some inexplicable healing powers, it was really about how people mistreat dogs and, indeed, about how people mistreat other people.  Issue 8 can be accessed in the magazine’s back-catalogue section, here.

 

As Rab Foster:

  • In 2023, Rab Foster, the pseudonym I use when I write fantasy – and usually the sweaty, rowdy sub-genre of fantasy known as sword and sorcery – first surfaced in March.  This was when The Pyre of Larros, a tale inspired in part by the death of Queen Elizabeth II the previous year (and by how Britain reacted to her death), appeared in Issue 133 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine.  The story can now be read in the magazine’s archive, here.
  • And it was in Issue 138 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine, in July, that the next Rab Foster story was published.  The Gibbeting of Azmyre not only appeared in the same magazine as The Pyre of Larros but it featured the same main character – the mercenary swordsman Drayak Shathsprey, who this time gets involved in a plot to steal the corpse of an executed criminal from its gibbet in a snowy city-square.  The setting was inspired by the old-town area of Edinburgh, which at one time was a hub for the nefarious practice of bodysnatching.  Again, The Gibbeting of Azmyre is now in Sword and Sorcery Magazine’s archive.  You can read it here.
  • A different Rab Foster character, Cranna the Crimson, was featured in the story Vision of the Reaper. This was among the items selected for the Cloaked Press anthology Fall into Fantasy 2023, which appeared in September.  It pitted Cranna against some supernatural and sorcerous skulduggery happening in a giant wheatfield.  A copy of Fall into Fantasy 2023 can be obtained here.

 

© Cloaked Press

 

  • The first instalment of my two-part opus The Boots of the Cat appeared in Volume 18, Issue 2 of Schlock! Webzine at the beginning of December.  Describing the events set in motion by a vain mercenary, nicknamed the Cat, trying to retrieve his lost boots, this story was inspired by a famous fairy tale – but not, as you might expect, Puss in Boots.  To read this issue of Schlock! Webzine, buy it here.
  • And mid-December saw the arrival of Issue 8 of the magazine Whetstone, which contained my story The Ghost Village – described by the editor as straddling ‘the line between folk horror and sword and sorcery’, and owing a little of its premise to the Thai tradition of spirit houses. The issue can be downloaded here.

 

As Steve Cashel:

  • Steve Cashel, a pseudonym I’d last used in 2011, was resurrected in 2023.  His name appeared at the top of The Folkie, a violent story about some young, would-be gangsters and a mysterious old folk-musician whom they encounter in a dingy, central-Edinburgh pub.  The Folkie was published in November in Close 2 the Bone, an ezine devoted largely to crime fiction, and can be accessed here.

 

As Paul McAllister:

  • Meanwhile, Paul McAllister was a penname I really hadn’t used for a long time.  He’d last appeared in the mid-1990s and I’d never expected to exhume him.  However, when my story The Magician’s Assistant, based on some experiences I’d had as a kid in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, was included in the collection Winter Wonderland 2023: Bindweed Anthology in December, it seemed right to attribute it to Paul McAllister.  This was the sort of fiction I’d written under his name in the past.   To buy your copy of Winter Wonderland 2023: Bindweed Anthology, go to Amazon UK here or Amazon US here.

 

So, to recap.  2023 was a vintage year for my writing, even though the year sucked in all other respects.  Indeed, it seems the more successful my writing career gets, the more the world turns to shit.  Could these two things be causally related?

 

If that’s the case…  Well, sorry folks.  I’m going to keep on writing.  You’ll have to keep on suffering.

 

© Schlock! Webzine

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Jim Mountfield goes to the dogs

 

© The Stygian Lepus

 

My short story A Man about a Dog is featured in the new, eighth issue of The Stygian Lepus Magazine, a short-fiction and poetry publication that ‘leans to the dark side’.  And as usual with my writing that leans that way – dark-wards – it appears under the penname of Jim Mountfield.

 

A parable about how human beings treat and mistreat dogs and, indeed, how human beings treat and mistreat each other, A Man about a Dog is set in an anonymous north-of-England city during the grim, austerity-stricken years of the 2010s.  Well, the setting was inspired by the three years I spent living in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which strictly speaking isn’t a north-of-England city but a northeast-of-England one.  I lived there from 2002 to 2005, when the place had a buzz and sense of optimism about it, largely due to new developments like the Quayside, the Millennium Bridge, the Baltic Gallery, the Sage (now known as the Glasshouse) Music Centre and Antony Gormley’s striking Angel of the North statue.  Okay, most of those things are actually in Gateshead, which has its own council, independent of the Newcastle one.  So, I’m really talking about ‘Newcastle-Gateshead’ here.

 

From all accounts, though, the place took a battering during the 2010s, when the just-installed Conservative government imposed an austerity programme on Britain.  300 million pounds had been cut from Newcastle’s council budget by 2019 and the decade saw the closure of local libraries, youth clubs, children’s centres and other amenities.  Between 2013 and 2018 there was even an 89% reduction in the number of its lollipop men and women, leaving just seven of them to shepherd the city’s schoolkids safely across the roads.  By an evil coincidence, the week A Man About a Dog was published also saw the return to public office of the smug, oleaginous and stuck-up architect of austerity, former British prime minister David Cameron – Rishi Sunak has ennobled him as ‘Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton’ and made him the country’s Foreign Secretary.

 

An American publication, The Stygian Lepus requests its contributors to submit their work in American English.  I slipped up slightly and made a few references to ‘wheelie-bins’ in my submitted story.  When I saw the version of A Man about a Dog that appears in the magazine, it amused me that the wheelie-bins had been changed to ‘dumpsters’.  So, it’s just as well I kept the city in the story anonymous and didn’t identify it as Newcastle.  You don’t hear many Geordies talking about dumpsters.

 

For the next while, A Man About a Dog is accessible to read here, while the main page for The Stygian Lepus, Issue 8, can be reached here.

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Jim Mountfield takes to the trees

 

© Spiral Tower Press

 

Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write horror stories, has been on a roll this month – which, appropriately enough, is October, the month of Halloween.  Already in October 2023 he’s had short stories appear in the online publication Schlock! Webzine and in the collection Nightmare Fuel: Mind Terrors 2023.  Now he’s just had a third story, entitled The Shelterbelt, published in Issue 3 of the magazine Witch House.

 

As its title implies, The Shelterbelt concerns a plantation of trees grown next to a property to shield it against the elements.  In the story, the property is a farm in a remote part of southern Scotland.  I didn’t have to look far for inspiration for The Shelterbelt.  In 1977, my parents sold our farm in Northern Ireland and purchased and moved to a new farm in southern Scotland, near the town of Peebles.  But the steading we found ourselves living in was hardly ‘new’ – it was a dilapidated and bleak-looking place at the time, with scarcely a tree anywhere, which was unfortunate because the steading was in a north-south-running valley and in the pathway of any bad weather borne by the north wind.  Several times during our first few winters there, we had to dig our way out from our front door, so heavily had snow been piled against it.  How long ago that seems now in these globally-warmed times…

 

My Dad immediately decided to create a shelterbelt on the northern side of the steading.  I still remember the day when he, my Mum and a good friend from Northern Ireland, Hugh Buchanon, planted the saplings.  Maybe I remember it because I discovered then how seriously my Dad – who was normally relaxed and easy-going – took his work.  He was very exacting.  He was very particular about how far apart those saplings were placed – not too close, not too distant.  After an hour of listening to him, my Mum and Hugh looked ready to plant him along with the trees.

 

Meanwhile, a literary influence for The Shelterbelt is the 1914 short story Ancient Lights by the author, broadcaster and occultist Algernon Blackwood.  And I’d be lying if I said a certain 1973 movie, about an uptight, virginal, Free Presbyterian policeman investigating a possible case of human sacrifice on a remote Scottish island, didn’t provide a little inspiration too.

 

For more information about Witch House magazine, click here.  And Issue 3, containing my story and a dozen others, can be downloaded here for free.