Tag: Jim Mountfield

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Jim Mountfield: less angelic, more demonic

 

© Cloaked Press

 

The independent publisher Cloaked Press has just brought out the latest instalment in its series of annual horror-story anthologies, Nightmare Fuel.  The 2026 anthology is called Angels & Demons and, as its title indicates, its contents are about supernatural entities either of the angelic or demonic varieties.  I’m pleased to say I have a story included in Nightmare Fuel 2026: Angels & Demons.  It’s entitled Asmodeus 86 and it’s attributed to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write macabre fiction.

 

My story is about a demon, not an angel – the ‘Asmodeus’ of the title is, according to his Wikipedia entry, ‘a king of demons in the legends of Solomon and the constructing of Solomon’s temple’ and ‘associated with lust’.  He’s mentioned in various holy texts in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as well as being referenced in the notorious 1486 treatise on witchcraft the Malleus Maleficarum (the Hammer of Witches in English) and supposedly involved in the famous possession of a convent of Ursuline nuns in Loudon in France in 1634.

 

Oddly, though, I first became aware of the name Asmodeus through something entirely different.  In Geoffrey Household’s 1939 thriller Rogue Male, the novel’s anonymous narrator and hero gives the name to a feral cat who befriends him while he’s literally holed up in the English countryside, hiding from the bad guys.  ‘Asmodeus’ is an appropriate moniker for the cat since he’s rather supernatural in appearance, being wholly black.  Also, the kinship the narrator feels with the cat whilst under extreme pressure – he spends ages concealed in a dark, filthy cubbyhole under a huge hedgerow in Dorset – becomes intense and spooky: “…there is, I believe, some slight thought transference between us…  back and forth between us go thoughts of fear and disconnected dreams of action.  I should call these dreams madness, did I not know they came from him and that his mind is, by our human standards, mad.”

 

So Asmodeus-the-demon is the exotic subject of my story in Nightmare Fuel 2026: Angels & Demons.  But Asmodeus 86’s setting is a mundane one.  It takes place in a state secondary school in the south of Scotland in the 1980s, just like the one I attended back then, Peebles High School.  The story concerns a group of school-pupils who resort to using black magic to achieve their ends and one hapless kid who unwittingly gets caught up in their shenanigans.  If you map the ages of the characters onto my high-school experiences, the events in the story would have happened in 1982, my final year, when I did my final exams there.

 

However, at that time in 1982, the news in Scotland, and the United Kingdom generally, was dominated by the war between Britain and Argentina over possession of the Falkland Islands.  So I shifted the setting forward to 1986, when the story’s characters would have less ‘background noise’ coming from the TV, newspapers and conversations around them.  (Not that big events weren’t happening in 1986.  The story namechecks a certain Mr. Gorbachev, a certain disaster at Chernobyl and… psychobilly music.)

 

Lastly, I titled the story Asmodeus 86 as a tribute to Artemis 81, the baffling, barmy and fascinating three-hour occult / mystery / fantasy / sci-fi TV play broadcast by the BBC in December 1981, written by David Rudkin, directed by Alastair Reid, and starring such thespians as Hywel Bennet, Dan O’Herlihy, Anthony Steel, Roland Curran, Ingrid Pitt, a very young Daniel Day-Lewis and, er, Sting as a gay angel.  Yes, I can safely say the days when the BBC would be so bold as to spend money on an audacious and willfully headache-inducing project like Artemis 81 are long past.

 

Containing 13 stories dedicated to the ‘divine and the damned, the celestial and the unholy’, the 285-page Nightmare Fuel 2026: Angels & Demons can be purchased on kindle here and as a paperback here.

 

From wikipedia.org / © BBC

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A Mayday from Jim Mountfield

 

© Schlock Webzine

 

Today is May 1st – May Day, halfway between the spring equinox and summer solstice and seen in ancient times as the beginning of summer.  It was – and, in some parts, still is – a day of celebration.  Bonfires would be lit and rituals conducted to ensure bountiful harvests and protect livestock being driven out to their summer pastures.  Flowers would be used to decorate the doors and windows of houses and byres.  Offerings would be made to the fairy folk.  Sacred wells would be visited, Beltane bannocks cooked, Jack-in-the-Greens and hobby horses paraded, May bushes assembled, Maypoles danced around and May Queens crowned.

 

And if you live on the Scottish island of Summerisle, I assume it’s still the day when you make sure any virginal and sanctimonious Free Presbyterian police officers have an appointment with the wicker man.

 

Today is also the day that my latest short story – appropriately a folk-horror one attributed to the penname Jim Mountfield – sees publication in Volume 20, Issue 1 of Schlock Webzine.  Entitled Encapsulated and set in rural England during the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s about a father trying to help his daughter combat the boredom of lockdown by assembling and burying a time capsule.  He suffers disturbing visions after the burial of the capsule results in something else, something strange and mysterious, being unearthed.

 

Though it’s May Day, and two paragraphs ago I invoked Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973), the greatest folk-horror movie of all time, Encapsulated is actually closer in spirit to another classic British folk-horror movie of the early 1970s, Piers Haggard’s Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970).  In fact, though I don’t make any explicit connections with Blood on Satan’s Claw, I’d like to think Encapsulated inhabits the same universe as it.

 

For the next month, Encapsulated can be read here.  Meanwhile, the main page of Schlock Webzine, Volume 20, Issue 1, can be accessed here.

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Jim Mountfield downloads the app again

 

© The Stygian Lepus

 

I’m happy to announce that I’ve just had my first fiction published in 2026 – though it’s the second half of a story whose first instalment appeared in print at the end of last year.

 

Appopolis Now, Part Two is available to read in Issue 31 of the Stygian Lepus – a magazine whose prose and poetry, says its editorial, take place in “regions where the boundaries of thought dissolve, where shadows are not merely the absence of light but living participants in the stories that unfold.”  If you think that makes the contents of the Stygian Lepus sound macabre in nature, you’re right.  For that reason, Appopolis Now, a tale about a near-future society that’s outwardly utopian but where citizenship comes at a grim cost to the individual’s sense of physical and mental self, is attributed to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write scary stories.

 

Over the next month, to access the 31st edition of the Stygian Lepus and its 11 stories and five poems, please go to this webpage here.  And as a kind bonus from the Stygian Lepus team, the same webpage also gives access to a self-contained edition of Appopolis Now that presents the story in its entirety.

 

© The Stygian Lepus

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My 2025 writing round-up

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

All in all, 2025 was a horrible year: one in which an unholy alliance of authoritarians, kleptocrats, fascists, media tycoons, tech bros and oil barons worked hard at stripping freedoms from those of us living in societies that have, until now, retained some freedoms; at transferring another huge chunk of wealth from our dwindling coffers to their swelling coffers; and at burning and poisoning the planet we live on in their quest for profits whilst aggressively pushing the line that any science questioning this policy is a ‘hoax’.  But you’ve probably noticed that.  You don’t need me to tell you.

 

On a personal level, and regarding my writing career, 2025 for a time looked like it would be horrible too.  The previous year, 2024, had been my most successful one ever, with its twelve months seeing 17 of my short stories published.  However, in my writing round-up for 2024, I noted warily that “I will be hard-pressed to equal or better that record in 2025…  That’s because of the recent disappearances of certain magazines (like The Sirens Call) and publishers (like Midnight Street Press) who have published my stuff regularly in the past.”  Yes, those closures impacted on me this year.  But for a period of four of five months in the middle of 2025, I really felt that, submissions-wise, I couldn’t get myself arrested.  I sent story after story to publication after publication and, relentlessly, rejection after rejection came back.

 

For a while, my efforts at fiction seemed about as popular as a Cybertruck in a Tesla showroom in a district of Washington DC heavily populated by ex-government employees.

 

But…  “If at first you don’t succeed, Mr Kidd…”  “…Try, try again, Mr Wint.”

 

In keeping with the philosophy of Mr Kidd and Mr Wint, the two camp assassins in Diamonds are Forever (1971) who indefatigably persevere in their efforts to dispose of Sean Connery, I tried and tried again.  And unexpectedly, I had a breakthrough near the end of the year.  Half-a-dozen of my stories got into print in November and December.  Also surprising – since I’ve never considered myself a particularly Christmassy person – was the fact that three of these stories appeared in anthologies or magazine issues dedicated to the festive season.

 

Anyway, here’s a summary of the fiction I’ve had published in 2025.  It includes details of where they were published, which pseudonym they were published under and how they can be accessed today.

 

As Jim Mountfield:

  • Jim Mountfield, the penname under which I write horror stories, had his first 2025 success with a story that appeared in Issue 22 of the Stygian Lepus magazine.  It was entitled Beach Bodies, was set in Bali, and was about an older man coming into conflict with an extreme manifestation of the foreign backpacker and influencer culture that overruns the island’s tourist spots.  Issue 22 of the Stygian Lepus can be purchased here.
  • In July, a Mountfield story called Slot Boy was featured in Volume 19, Issue 6 of Schlock! Webzine.  At the time I described Slot Boy, which was set in Scotland and not wholly serious in tone, as having a “Scottish backdrop of parochial wee towns, middle-aged neds, cranky auld wifies, mobility scooters, and terrible football.”  You can buy that particular issue of Schlock! Webzine here.

 

© Spiral Tower Press

 

  • My next two Mountfield stories were also set in Scotland. Halloween 2025 saw the release of Issue 5 of Witch House Magazine, whose contents included The Bustle in the Hedgerow.  This story drew on a number of inspirations: a historian who once visited my family’s farm while hunting for the remains of a Roman fort; a hedge my father once planted on the farm after receiving an environmental grant; and the supposedly true story of two ancient Celtic stone heads, known as the Hexham Heads, which caused terrifying paranormal activity to assail anyone who came into ownership of them.  The Hexham Heads traumatized a generation of kids in the UK in the 1970s when the BBC current-affairs show Nationwide broadcast a report about them.  Issue 5 of Witch House can be downloaded here.
  • Early in December, a Mountfield story called The Dark Crooked One appeared in a seasonal anthology from Black Hare Press, Eerie Christmas 4. This combined a legend about Scottish bogeyman who supposedly appears during the shortest days of the year, including December 25th, with the real-life tensions that can arise at Christmas – namely, when you stick a not-particularly-happy family together in a room all day, make them eat and drink too much, and pressurise them into acting like they’re having a good time when, in fact, they’re not.  Go here to buy a copy of Eerie Christmas 4.
  • And later in December, Jim Mountfield was responsible for the first part of a science-fictional horror story, entitled Appopolis Now and set in an imaginary Asian country in the near-future, that turned up in Issue 30 of the Stygian Lepus.  Appopolis Now is currently available to read here.  Its second and final part should appear in the 31st issue of the Stygian Lepus next month.

 

As Rab Foster:

  • Meanwhile, my fantasy-writing alter-ego Rab Foster had his first 2025 story published in April when one called The Cats and the Crimson was accepted for Issue 159 of the monthly webzine Swords and Sorcery Magazine. The first half of the title reflects the fact that the story contains cats – both domestic cats and some ghoulish, demonic variations on the feline species.  The second half of it indicates the presence in its cast of Cranna the Crimson, a fearless and rather incorrigible swordswoman who’s already been a character in two of my earlier published stories.  You can read the story in Swords and Sorcery Magazine’s archive, here.
  • The next month, a Foster story called The Shrine on the Moor appeared in Volume 19, Issue 4 of Schlock! Webzine. This featured another recurring character of mine, the mercenary Drayak Shathsprey, and was a sequel to a story called Pit of the Orybadak, which had been published in the magazine Savage Realms Monthly at the start of the previous year.  Volume 19, Issue 4 can be purchased here.

 

© Cloaked Press, LLC

 

  • September saw the publication of another instalment in the yearly Fall into Fantasy anthology series published by Cloaked Press.  Fall into Fantasy 2025’s line-up of stories included a Rab Foster one called From Out the Boundless Deep.  Its main character, Kayra, had previously featured in a story called The Trap Master, published in the webzine Aphelion in 2018.  As I wrote on this blog: “The premise of both stories is that Kayra inhabits a world where all the creatures of myth and legend – griffins, hydras, harpies, kelpies, minotaurs, etc. – are real and she makes a living by hunting and trapping them.”  In From Out the Boundless Deep, Karya gets summoned to a remote beach where something large and mysterious has just been washed up.  Fall into Fantasy 2025 is on sale here.
  • The year ended with Rab Foster getting another story placed in Swords and Sorcery Magazine, this time one entitled The Palanquin. It’s an attempt to tell a fantasy story set within the confines of a very limited space – the interior of the conveyance of the title.  It features yet another recurring character in the Foster universe, the swordswoman and mercenary Keeshan, who appears sometimes as a partner to Drayak Shathsprey and sometimes as a lone agent.  Shathsprey has a role in The Palanquin too, but it’s a minor one.  Currently, the story can be read here.

 

As Steve Cashel:

  • I usually write non-horror and non-fantasy fiction that’s set in Scotland under the pseudonym Steve Cashel. This year, atypically, he had a story turn up in another anthology of supernatural Christmas tales, White Witch’s Hat and Other Yuletide Ghost Stories from Heavenly Flower Publishing.  The reason for this was because the story in question, Southbound Traveller, was set in a Scottish household on Christmas Day in the early 1990s and for most of its length was realistic in tone.  Only near the end does something strange happen – and it’s more a ‘paranormal incident’ than a manifestation by a ghost or other supernatural entity.  (An inspiration for the story was actually Hans Christian Anderson’s 1845 fairy tale The Little Match Girl.)  It seemed more like a Steve Cashel story than a Jim Mountfield one, so Cashel got the credit.  To purchase a copy of White Witch’s Hat and Other Yuletide Ghost Stories, please click here.

 

© Heavenly Flower Publishing

 

As Paul McAllister

  • Finally, I managed to get two short stories published in December 2025 under the penname of Paul McAllister, which I use for non-scary, non-fantastical fiction set in Ireland.  This felt like scoring two goals in injury time at the end of a football match.  The first of the stories was called That Time and was based on a memory of a brief but harrowing incident that happened to me when I was about eight years old and living in Northern Ireland.  That Time was included in Issue 2 of the digital magazine Still Here, whose title and theme was Ghosts of our Pasts.  A pdf of Issue 2 can be downloaded here.
  • And the team behind Still Here also decided to put out a mini-issue to coincide with Christmas Day, entitled A Light in December.  I managed to get a Paul McAllister story selected for that as well.  Called The Recovery, it’s another one that takes place in Northern Ireland.  It involves a funeral, during the run-up to Christmas, and a case of mistaken identity.  Again, you can download a pdf of the mini-issue here.

 

In the end, despite my pessimistic predictions, I managed to get twelve short stories published during 2025.  Prior to the bumper year of 2024, a dozen published stories was my average total each year.  So, I didn’t fare so badly after all.  From this experience, I would give budding writers two pieces of advice: (1) never give up (which is the advice all writers give aspiring writers); and (2) have lots of Christmas stories ready in your arsenal for the next round of seasonal anthologies.  I’ve already started writing a couple for Christmas 2026.

 

Meanwhile… A Happy New Year to you all.

 

© Stygian Lepus

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Jim Mountfield downloads the app

 

© The Stygian Lepus

 

The first part of my science-fictional horror story Appopolis Now has recently been published in Edition 30 of the Stygian Lepus, a magazine where, to quote the current blurb on its website, “the shadows don’t fall – they think, watching you from the edges of perception.”  As with all my stories that are dark and fantastical in tone, the story is attributed to the penname Jim Mountfield.

 

Appopolis Now is set in the future and imagines a society that’s slightly more high-tech than the one we will live in at the moment.  It’s also a society that’s…  Well, perhaps not dystopian, but definitely Cronenbergian.  (Wow, I have just typed ‘Cronenbergian’ and the Spelling & Grammar checker hasn’t put a red line under it.  That must mean it’s a recognised English adjective now, like ‘Orwellian’, ‘Kafkaesque’ and ‘Ballardian’.)  If you’re familiar with the works of Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, that should give you some idea about what to expect.

 

Edition 30 of the Stygian Lepus contains 14 pieces of macabre, disturbing and unorthodox short fiction and, for the next month, can be accessed here.

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Christmas comes early for Jim Mountfield too

 

© Black Hare Press

 

I’ve never thought of myself as a Christmassy person, but the festive season of 2025 has allowed me to get a couple of Christmas-set short stories into print.  So maybe I’m less of a Scrooge or a Grinch than I’d believed.

 

A month ago, my story Southbound Traveller appeared in the collection White Witch’s Hat & Other Yuletide Ghost Stories from Belfast’s Heavenly Flower Publishing.  The story was set in 1990s Scotland and tried mostly for a realistic tone.  Rather than ghosts, it featured an example of what’s best described as a ‘paranormal incident’ near its end.  For that reason, Southbound Traveller appeared under the penname Steve Cashel, which I use for my less fantastical Scottish fiction.

 

Now, my story The Dark Crooked One has just been published in the book Eerie Christmas 4 from Melbourne’s Black Hare Press, which its blurb describes as a “collection of yuletide tales where the holly is sharp, the snow hides secrets, and something ancient stirs beneath the carols.”  It contains “haunted traditions that refuse to die, gifts that demand a terrible price, winter spirits hungry for warmth, and wishes that should never have been whispered at all.”  The Dark Crooked One is much more of a full-throttle horror tale, featuring a seasonal bogeyman – and indeed, Stephen King’s 1973 short story The Bogeyman gets namechecked in it – so it’s attributed to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I use for my scary fiction.

 

Though most of the horror in The Dark Crooked One is supernatural in character, there’s a little real-life horror present too.  This is the stress and pain that comes when family-members, who don’t necessarily get along very well, are cooped up together in a couple of rooms during December 25th, one of the shortest and wintriest days of the year, and are forced to eat too much and drink too much whilst making it look like they’re enjoying themselves.  And have to listen to the King’s Speech (or the Queen’s Speech, as it was at the time the story is set).

 

Black Hare Press have done an excellent job in packaging Eerie Christmas 4.  Not only have they been thorough in editing and proofing the text, but they’ve added decorative embellishments to its pages – marginalia, chapter ornamentations and dinkuses – which are both festive and spooky.  This anthology is strongly recommended.

 

Containing 40 tales of Yuletide terror, Eerie Christmas 4 can be ordered in different formats from different vendors via this webpage here.

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We’ve lost the other Mr. Mountfield

 

From wikipedia.org / © Katherine Barton and Gaz Davidson

 

I was shocked and saddened to hear about the death on November 20th of Gary ‘Mani’ Mountfield, bass player with the Stone Roses from 1987 to 1996 and 2011 to 2017 and with Primal Scream for the 15 years between his spells in the Roses.

 

Shocked because Mani seemed such an exuberant figure (in keeping with his exuberant bass sound) that he was the very last rock-and-roll-related personage I’d expect to die at the relatively young age of 63.  I’ve seen plenty of other rock-and-roll figures on stage who did look ready to kick the bucket because of their frailty, ravaged-ness and general air of vulnerability.  But not Mani, who was always ebullient.   In fact, just days before his passing, he’d announced dates for a speaking tour of the United Kingdom planned for next year, which doesn’t sound like someone on their last legs.

 

Hailing – of course – from Manchester, Mani first played in two bands that were prototypes for the Stone Roses, the Fireside Chaps (with future Roses guitarist John Squire) and the Waterfront (with future Roses singer Ian Brown joining in 1983).  The Roses’ definite line-up finally coalesced in 1987 with him, Brown, Squire and drummer Alan ‘Reni’ Wren.  During the 1980s he also found time to play in a band called the Mill alongside Clint Boon, who’d later furnish humble but durable ‘Madchester’ band the Inspiral Carpets with their quirky keyboard sound.

 

Along with the Happy Mondays – and, okay, the Inspiral Carpets – the Stone Roses were the leading lights of the late 1980s / early 1990s Madchester movement, which irresistibly grafted the riffs of rock music onto the grooves of dance music and promoted a cheery, unpretentiously hedonistic vibe far removed from the posing and self-consciousness that’d plagued British popular music earlier in the 1980s.  It also paved away for the more internationally successful, but aesthetically less interesting, Britpop explosion of the mid-1990s.  Mani’s bass was an essential part of the formula.  For instance, it’s the first instrument you hear on I Want to be Adored, the opening track on the Stone Roses’ eponymous and massively acclaimed album of 1989.

 

Sadly, legal wrangles and musical procrastination meant it was a long time before a second Stone Roses album appeared.  Second Coming finally saw the light of day in 1994, five-and-a-half years later.  Inevitably, after the wait and all the attendant anticipation, it was deemed a disappointment by the critics.  I have to say I think Second Coming is sorely underrated.  I fully understand why Simon Pegg, in Shaun of the Dead (2004), refuses to throw it along with the rest of his record collection at two advancing zombies.  “I like it,” he affirms.

 

I saw the Stone Roses for the first and last time during the tour they did on the back of Second Coming.  In 1995 they played a gig in the Japanese city of Sapporo, where I was living at the time.  It was not a happy experience.  Ian Brown was in a foul mood and gave the impression of wanting to be somewhere else – anywhere else.  To be fair, a trio of Australian bodybuilders had beaten Brown up in a club in Tokyo a few days earlier, which gave him a credible reason for his lack of enthusiasm.  Mani and the rest of the band played perfectly well.

 

© Geffen Records

 

Also slightly unhappy was the next occasion I saw Mani perform, which was after he’d joined Scottish band Primal Scream, another outfit intent on exploring the overlap between rock music and dance music.  The band were on the bill of a one-day event on Glasgow Green that I attended in 2000.  While they were limbering up to play the song Sick City from their new album XTRMNTR, Mani cheerfully barked into a microphone, “This is dedicated to Glasgow because it really is… a sick city!”  For a large portion of the Glaswegian crowd, this comment went down like a cup of – appropriately – cold sick.  (By the way, this was before ‘sick’ acquired its modern, slang meaning of ‘really good’.)   Later, Mani felt obliged to announce that he was only joking  and, really, “Glasgow isn’t a sick city at all!”  It’d been some banter that folk took the wrong way, but it impressed me that he was man enough to apologise for it.

 

I saw the Mani-era Primal Scream on two further occasions: at London’s Brixton Academy in 2003, when I thought they were pretty good; and at Norwich’s University of East Anglia in 2009, when they were on blistering form.  In fact, I’d include their 2009 Norwich show in my personal ‘Top Ten Gigs of All Time’.  With his jolly, everyman demeanour, Mani provided some balance to Primal Scream’s frontman Bobby Gillespie, whom I always found a bit too-cool-for-school when they played live.

 

Before joining the reformed Stone Roses in 2011, Mani found time to participate in another band, a ‘supergroup’ called Freebass whose gimmick was that it had three – three! – famous bass players, all from the Manchester area.  Its line-up also included Andy Rourke, former bassist with the Smiths, and Peter Hook, former bassist with Joy Division and New Order.  The project ended ignominiously, with Mani taking exception to what he saw as Hook unjustly exploiting the legacy of Joy Division and his late Joy Division bandmate Ian Curtis – Hook had also formed an outfit called Peter Hook and the Light that performed old Joy Division songs.  Hook’s wallet, Mani claimed on social media, was visible from space because it was ‘stuffed with Ian Curtis’s blood money.’  Needless to say, the two fell out, though later – again – Mani apologised and he and Hook made up.

 

Indeed, Hook has been one of the many musicians who’ve paid tribute to Mani since his death was announced a few days ago.  Other condolences have come from members of the Stone Roses, Primal Scream, the Happy Mondays, New Order, the Smiths, the Charlatans, the Verve, Echo and the Bunnymen, Elbow, the Courteneers, the Farm, Ocean Colour Scene, Kasabian, Shed Seven, Badly Drawn Boy…  I’m not a big fan of Oasis, but I thought it touching that, at their concert in Brazil the other night, Liam and Noel Gallagher projected Mani’s face onto the giant screen behind the stage whilst performing Live Forever (1994).  You get the impression you could go around everybody involved in the British music scene in the 1980s and 1990s and not find anyone with a bad word to say about the guy.

 

Finally, I owe Mani some gratitude.  Years ago – around 2010, I think – I was trying to think of a pseudonym to put on a horror short story I was about to submit to a magazine.  ‘Ian Smith’ seemed too dull a name to attach to a piece of short fiction that was meant to chill the blood.  At the time, I had a Primal Scream album playing in the background and I suddenly thought, “They’ve really had a second wind since Mani joined them.”  Then it occurred to me: Mani’s real name was Gary Mountfield.  ‘Mountfield’ sounded about right for a pseudonym – it wasn’t too exotic, but not too common either.  (Mountfield was also the name of a village in Country Tyrone, Northern Ireland, where I used to live, so it had a personal connection with me too.)  Thus, the penname Jim Mountfield was born.  It’s adorned nearly 70 published short stories since then.

 

So, thank you for the inspiration, Mani.

 

From wikipedia.org / © livepict.com

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Jim Mountfield hedges his bets

 

© Spiral Tower Press

 

I’m pleased to say that at the end of last month – appropriately in time for Halloween – I had a new short story published in Issue 5 of Witch House Magazine.  Witch House is devoted to “the pulp fiction tradition of a modern gothic literature called ‘cosmic horror.’  Writers in this tradition include (but are not limited to) the following: Edgar Allan Poe, M.R. James, Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, and many more.  ‘Cosmic horror’ emphasizes helpless protagonists, unexplainable monstrous menaces, and fictional occult themes such as forbidden lore and evil conspiracy.”  My story is entitled The Bustle in the Hedgerow and, because it’s macabre in tone, it’s attributed to Jim Mountfield, the penname I use for such fiction.

 

Yes, the title was inspired by a lyric (“If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now”) in Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven (1971), a song that a very long time ago I thought was great but now, having heard it a million times, I’m heartily sick of.  Other songs that fall into this unfortunate category include the Beatles’ Hey Jude (1968), Derek and the Dominos’ Layla (1970) and the Eagles’ Hotel California (1977).  But that’s the only Zeppelin-esque influence on the story.  The Bustle in the Hedgerow owes its existence to three different ideas I had at three different times, which I duly recorded in my ideas notebook.  All published writers and aspiring writers of an elderly disposition, like me, carry a notebook into which they scribble the ideas that occur to them.  Though I suppose these days younger writers may record their ideas using a notes app on their smartphones.

 

The story’s main character was based on the historian, writer and poet Walter Elliot, who’s written extensively about the Scottish Borders, especially the lovely Ettrick and Yarrow part of it.  My family own a small farm near the Borders town of Peebles.  One day Walter showed up on our doorstep, asking if he could take a look around one of our fields in the cause of historical and archaeological research.  My dad happily told him to go ahead and, as a thank you, Walter presented him with free copies of couple of his books.  “A historian doing research in a remote farm field,” I thought.  “That’d make a good premise for a story.”  I wrote the idea down.

 

I should say that Walter Elliot is still on the go.  His work was acknowledged and lauded in the Scottish Parliament in 2021.  So please, don’t anyone tell him I’ve turned him into a character in a horror story.

 

© Deerpark Press

 

The second idea came when my dad got a grant from the European Union – oh, how long ago that seems now – to improve the natural environment of the farm and planted half-a-mile of hedgerow along the side of its biggest field.  One of the reasons why the hedge got approval was because it’d act as a ‘wildlife corridor’, allowing wild animals to move from habitat to habitat without having to cross roads or cultivated land.  Because the hedge started at a site where the local burn widened into a pool, and it ended at a shelterbelt of trees adjacent to our farmstead, I had a typically horror-writer-ish thought: “Hey, if something nasty lived in that pool, it could now use the hedge, the wildlife corridor, as a way of getting access to our house!”   And another idea was scribbled down.

 

Thirdly, I’d made notes about, and always wanted to write a story connected with, the Hexham Heads.  These were two little stone heads, alleged by some to be Celtic in origin, discovered in the northeast English town of Hexham in 1971.  They reputedly caused unwelcome and frightening paranormal activity in the homes of whoever had custody of them.  Infamously, Nationwide (1969-83) – a normally easy-going, family-friendly TV current-affairs programme that the BBC aired every weekday evening around six o’clock – featured a report on the story in 1976.  For some reason, the makers of the report saw fit to throw in images of severed human heads on tree-branches, screams and an unexpected jump-cut of Oliver Reed from 1961’s Curse of the Werewolf amid the creepy interviews, traumatising every young kid who happened to be watching.  It certainly scared the shit out of me.  (Long believed lost, footage of that legendary 1976 report has now been discovered and restored.  See here and here.)

 

From wikipedia.org / © Archaeology Data Service / Dr Anne Ross

 

I don’t normally dispense advice to other writers.  For me, personally, this has always felt a bit pompous.  But based on my experiences here, I’d recommend them to (1) make notes of their ideas before they forget them, and (2) avoid regarding each idea as having a linear correlation with a story.  Rather than thinking ‘one idea equals one story’, they should keep studying all their ideas, however random, and keep looking for ways that two, three or more ideas could be combined in a single work.  This cross-fertilisation allowed me to come up with The Bustle in the Hedgerow.

 

Containing eleven pieces of fiction and five poems, Issue 5 of Witch House Magazine can be downloaded here.

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Jim Mountfield gets slotted in

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

Jim Mountfield is the pseudonym I attach to fiction I write that’s dark and macabre in nature, and I’m delighted to report that a new Mountfield short story has just appeared in Volume 19 Issue 6, the July 2025 edition, of Schlock! Webzine.  It’s entitled Slot Boy and it takes place in Scotland, against an appropriately Scottish backdrop of parochial wee towns, middle-aged neds, cranky auld wifies, mobility scooters, and terrible football.

 

Despite its Scottish setting, Slot Boy – like many of my stories – owes a lot to the works of Stephen King.  Although the inspiration for this particular story comes from something I suspect King isn’t in a hurry to trumpet as one of his finest hours, the anthology movie Creepshow 2 (1987), which was a sequel to the rather better Creepshow (1982).  One of the three segments in Creepshow 2, The Raft, was based on a short story included in King’s 1985 collection Skeleton Crew, but the other two segments, Old Chief Wood’nhead and The Hitchhiker, were apparently stories he devised especially for the film.  He wrote an outline that was then polished into a script by legendary horror filmmaker director George A. Romero, though the final movie was directed by Michael Gornick.

 

Weirdly, it was Old Chief Wood’nhead that inspired Slot Boy.

 

The Raft and The Hitchhiker both have their moments, but Old Chief Wood’nhead is rightly regarded as the worst of Creepshow 2’s stories.  That’s despite it featuring the stalwart character actor George Kennedy (a man I always associated with crashing airplanes – he was in 1965’s Flight of the Phoenix and all four of the 1970s’ Airport movies) and Dorothy Lamour, star of the Bob Hope / Bing Crosby Road to… movies (1940-62).  Kennedy and Lamour play an elderly couple who own a shop with a hulking, timber cigar store Indian, the titular Old Chief Wood’nhead, standing outside it.  Predictably, bad things happen to them. Then, magically, seeking revenge, Old Chief Wood’nhead comes to… Well, you can guess the rest.

 

Native American culture is a rich source of stories and myths – see the works of Stephen Graham Jones – but Old Chief Wood’nhead operates at the level of a crass old Hollywood western, with a caricatured ‘injun’ shooting arrows, removing scalps and wielding a tomahawk.  Of course, the horror in the story, or in any horror story, is nothing compared to the real-life horrors that North America’s native American population had to endure during history.  Estimates suggest that population stood at about eight million in the whole continent in 1492; but in the USA, by 1890, it’d been reduced to a quarter of a million.  Though no doubt Trump will soon rewrite all that and have it taught in schools that life was peachy for Native Americans after European settlers arrived.

 

If Old Chief Wood’nhead was a bit asinine, why on earth did I think of it again after so many years, let alone get an idea for a story from it?  Well, for the first two years that I lived in Singapore, I regularly ate and drank in an establishment on Singapore’s Mountbatten Road that, bizarrely, had this standing on the edge of its premises:

 

 

I don’t think I ever saw a cigar store Indian during my time in Scotland, but shops there used to have other figurines standing outside their doors, usually for charity purposes.  One of those figurines features in Slot Boy and plays a role in the story similar to that played by Old Chief Wood’nhead in Creepshow 2.  I just hope the result is scarier – and funnier – than the movie segment.

 

During July 2025, you can read Slot Boy here, while the main page of Schlock! Webzine, Volume 19 Issue 6, can be accessed here.

 

© Laurel Entertainment / New World Pictures

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Jim Mountfield gets beached

 

© Stygian Lepus 

 

Jim Mountfield, the penname I use when I write scary stories, has just had his first fiction published in 2025.  This is a short story entitled Beach Bodies, which appears in Issue 22 of the Stygian Lepus, a magazine where “readers explore the depths of imagination, where fear and fascination entwine.”

 

As its title suggests, Beach Bodies was inspired by a visit I made to a beach: Nyang Nyang Beach in the Uluwata area of Bali, Indonesia.  I’d walked a fair bit along the beach, away from its touristy part, to a stretch of it where there was hardly another human being in sight, when suddenly I came across a huge, long slab of rock embedded in the sand.  It was flat but its surface was covered in ruts and runnels that, each time a wave crashed against the shore and breakers came hissing up the beach, filled with white foam and formed strange, drizzling patterns.  There was something weird – something a bit, well, alien – about that rock formation.  And that’s how my story got its basic idea.

 

Meanwhile, most of the Western tourists I saw on the beach seemed to be busy filming themselves with their smartphones, recording clips of their hopefully-glamorous, hopefully-exotic holiday-adventures that would then be uploaded to their social media accounts.  I even noticed a Balinese guy on the shore, operating a film camera pointed at a group of surfers out amid the waves.  He’d been hired to film their surfing exploits, the footage of which would no doubt be posted online.  This influencer-style narcissism made me immensely grumpy…  That grumpiness also features in the story.

 

For the next few weeks, Beach Bodies can be read online here, while the contents page of the Stygian Lepus, Issue 22, is accessible here.  And go to this link if you’d like to sample the issue as an eBook.