Tag: Jim Mountfield

Posted on

Jim Mountfield goes guising

 

© The Sirens Call

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Posted on

Your last chance to see Jim Mountfield at Horrified

 

© Horrified Magazine

 

Some sad news I’ve heard recently is that Horrified Magazine, the ‘British horror website’, is closing down.  Dedicated to media – films, television, plays, novels, short stories, comic books, etc. – involving the macabre and produced in the United Kingdom, Horrified has been a prime source of entertaining reading and valuable information during the past few years.  A newly-appeared message on its main page informs readers that “From late October 2022, this website will no longer be updated with new content.  Feel free to browse until such a time as the website is taken down.”

 

Horrified contains a short-story section, in which I’ve had two items published under the pseudonym Jim Mountfield, the name I put on my scary fiction.  Both of these should still be accessible until the plug is finally pulled on the site.  Therefore, this is your last chance (at least for a while) to read the following…

 

© Horrified Magazine

 

Published in 2020, Don’t Hook Now is a story set in the near-future where advances in technology, especially in the field of virtual reality, make it possible for people to take part in scenes from movies – the technology simulates the scenes, interactively, around them.  For bona fide film fans, this would be magical.  Imagine being on that rooftop near the end of Blade Runner (1982), beside Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) when he delivers his heart-breaking ‘tears in rain’ monologue, or being at the airport for the climax of Casablanca (1942), when Rick (Humphrey Bogart) says goodbye to Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman).  However, human nature being what it is, I suspect such wondrous technology would end up being used for trivial, if not sordid, purposes.  Thus, Don’t Hook Now features an app that allows people to take part in simulations of sex scenes from certain movies, and is used by lowlifes, sociopaths and perverts in pursuit of their thrills.

 

Don’t Hook Now’s subject matter was such that Horrified decided to give it a trigger warning and recommend it only for ‘mature audiences’.   In my opinion, though, the main reason for recommending it to mature readers was because only people of a certain age would be familiar with the masterly 1970s British horror movie that gives the story its grim twist later on.

 

© Horrified Magazine

 

From 2021, meanwhile, is Where the Little Boy Drowned, which belongs to a sub-genre I like to think of as ‘constant jeopardy’.  This is where the main character or characters spend the whole story, or most of it, trapped in a dangerous situation where the odds are stacked against them getting out of it alive.  I won’t give too much away about Where the Little Boy Drowned, other than to say that its plot includes include a length of rope and a flooded river.  There’s also a supernatural element to it, with a faint nod to Japanese horror films – J-Horror – and particularly to Takashi Shimizu’s 2002 chiller Ju-On: The Grudge.

 

So, for a little while longer, Don’t Hook Now can be accessed here, and Where the Little Boy Drowned here.

 

And thank you to the staff at Horrified for all their hard work these last few years.

Posted on

A second homecoming for Jim Mountfield

 

© The Horror Zine

 

A collection of scary short fiction entitled The Best of the Horror Zine: The Middle Years has just gone on sale.  Its 31 short stories first appeared in the ezine The Horror Zine between 2013 and 2020 and were picked for this collection by its editor and assistant editor, Jeani Rector and Dean H. Wild.  The stories include Coming Home, something I wrote under my horror-writer pseudonym of Jim Mountfield and originally published in The Horror Zine in 2014.

 

Coming Home is basically an old-fashioned haunted house story, but with a dash of extra flavour in that it deals with parallel universes too.  The story was inspired by an irrational fear I sometimes experienced when I was 11 or 12 years old.  My family had just moved from Northern Ireland to Scotland, and we were living in a new – well, new for us, though technically the building was old – house that wasn’t yet fully renovated or furnished.  Compared to our former house in Northern Ireland, for a while at least, it just didn’t feel homely.  That’s ‘homely’ in the British sense of the word, meaning ‘cosy and comfortable’, not the American sense, meaning ‘unattractive in appearance’.

 

Meanwhile, my parents, no doubt feeling slightly dislocated and lonely, managed to track down a few other Northern Irish families who’d moved to Scotland over the years and were living within driving distance of us.  It was customary to invite these folk to lunch, or to be invited to their houses for lunch, on Sundays.  Northern Irish protocols of hospitality being what they are (think Mrs Doyle in Father Ted), and the Northern Irish propensity for blethering being what it is, these ‘lunches’ would invariably extend to tea in the late afternoon, and to dinner in the evening.  If you were an adult and not the designated driver, a fair bit of whisky was consumed too.  It was usually late when the visitors headed home and, if we were being entertained in somebody else’s house, we frequently didn’t get back until after midnight.

 

And as a kid, after we finally arrived home on those dark Sunday nights, I felt distinctly uneasy.  My parents would unlock the front door and we’d enter a black, silent house that we hadn’t yet got accustomed to living in.  Amid the darkness and silence, just before someone found the switches and the lights came on, I’d hear an internal voice telling me: “This is not our house!”

 

And if it wasn’t our house, whose was it?  Who – or what – was already living there?  That’s a childhood fear that, nearly 40 years later, I tried to explore in Coming Home.

 

The Best of the Horror Zine: The Middle Years can be obtained on kindle or as a paperback here.

Posted on

A selfie of Jim Mountfield

 

© The Sirens Call 

 

A few years ago, my partner and I were on holiday in Thailand.  One evening we were having dinner in a restaurant in the historical town of Ayutthaya, which is about 50 miles north of Bangkok.  Come to think of it, this was one of our very last trips abroad, before the Covid-19 pandemic put the brakes on international travel.  The restaurant was called the Old Place and it overlooked Ayutthaya’s River Pasak so that, in the darkness, chains of big, cargo-laden barges were drifting past the terrace where we were eating.

 

It came to our notice that amid the restaurant’s waiters and its (mainly tourist) customers, a young Asian woman was wandering around with a smartphone.  Every half-minute she’d stop somewhere, pose for and take a selfie, then wander off in search of another suitable selfie-spot.  She did this all through our meal: wander about, pause, take a selfie, go somewhere else, pause, take a selfie, ad infinitum.  Presumably the waiters were too busy to approach this strange, restless, selfie-loving lady and demand why she wasn’t sitting down and ordering food like everyone else.

 

And I thought: This could be the start of a story…

 

Well, I’m pleased to say that the story has now been written.  It’s also just been published in the Summer 2022 issue of the dark fiction and poetry magazine The Sirens Call.  It’s entitled Selfless and is attributed to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write horror stories.  This new edition of The Sirens Call clocks in at a whopping 239 pages and can be downloaded – for free! – here.

Posted on

Jim Mountfield serves up some meat

 

© Sirens Call Publications

 

March 2022 is proving to be a purple patch for Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write horror fiction.  Already this month he’s had a short story, Never Tell Lies Out of School, featured in Volume 16, Issue 26 of the online publication Schlock! Webzine, and another short story, Mermaid Fair, included in the new anthology Fearful Fun.  Now a third Mountfield short story, Liver, is served up in the pages of the spring 2022 edition of the fiction and poetry ezine The Sirens Call.

 

Like much of my fiction, Liver takes as its starting point an incident that happened to me in real life, but then develops things in a different direction – a wildly different direction – from how they actually developed.

 

The incident that inspired Liver happened about 15 years ago while I was living with my dad, on his farm in Scotland, and I was earning a little money by working in a supermarket in a nearby town – in the story it’s Tesco, back then it was Sainsbury.  One evening I arrived home from work and, in the farmhouse’s kitchen, discovered a huge, red, glistening thing heaped on a platter in the middle of the table.  This, it transpired, was the liver of a cow that’d just died in an accident.  The local butcher had promptly chopped up the carcass as a favour to my dad…  Well, why let all that meat go to waste?  Obviously, as Liver is a horror story, I’m glad the events that subsequently befall its main character didn’t happen to me in reality.

 

The spring 2022 edition of The Sirens Call is proof that the best things in life are free.  It consists of 198 pages and contains 143 pieces of short fiction, flash fiction, micro-fiction and poetry, and yet costs nothing to download.  You can get a copy of it, as well as copies of its back issues, here.

Posted on

Mountfield, mermaids and mindless violence

 

© Thurston Howl Publications

 

Mermaid Fair, a short story I wrote under the pseudonym Jim Mountfield, is featured in the recent anthology Fearful Fun from Thurston Howl Publications.  The stories in Fearful Fun are all set in fairgrounds, carnivals, amusement parks, circuses, Halloween haunted-house attractions and the like but, as the word ‘fearful’ in the anthology’s title implies, their protagonists encounter dark and macabre goings-on at these supposedly ‘fun’ places.  In fact, ‘creepy fairground’ stories have constituted a popular sub-genre of horror fiction and cinema.  Its most famous examples include the 1932 Tod Browning movie Freaks, the 1962 Herk Harvey movie Carnival of Souls and, published the same year that Carnival was released, the Ray Bradbury novel Something Wicked This Way Comes.

 

In part, Mermaid Fair was inspired by a practice in the 19th century whereby carnival-sideshow operators would graft together pieces of stuffed fish and stuffed apes and pass them off to gullible punters as ‘mermaids’.  Obviously, these looked nothing like the mermaids of folklore and popular culture, the luscious, long-haired, bare-breasted young ladies with fishes’ tail who’d sit alluringly on remote ocean rocks.  Fake though they are, I’ve always found pictures of the sideshow mermaids creepy and grotesque – especially now that the passage of time has left the things more than slightly decayed.

 

From emilyjessicaturner.com

© The Trustees of the British Museum

 

A rather different source of inspiration for Mermaid Fair was ‘the Shows’, a motley assortment of fairground rides, stalls and amusement arcades that would come – and still do come, as far as I know – to my Scottish hometown of Peebles every June while it was staging its annual Beltane Festival.  When I was a kid, the Shows were great fun, surely the highlight of my Peebles year.  By the early 1980s, however, when I was a bit older and in my mid-to-late teens, I was more trepidant when I ventured into the Shows.  This was because they’d become an arena where gangs of youths from Peebles, and from neighbouring country towns like Biggar and Galashiels, would try to batter the crap out of each other, and I didn’t want to get caught in the crossfire.  Yes, lots of hormonally-charged young men lived in the region’s small towns, which admittedly didn’t have a great deal to offer them socially.  Desperate for ways to banish their boredom, vent their frustrations and release their energies, they adopted the custom of battling each other at popular public gatherings such as the Shows.

 

I have to say, 40 years on, I find it amusing when I see Peebles blokes of a certain age complaining on Internet forums about anti-social behaviour by young people.  Hold on, I think.  Don’t you remember what you were getting up to at 17 or 18?

 

Thus, Mermaid Fair has gangs of young men, from rival towns, descending on a travelling fair to stage a good old-fashioned barney, and also has a fairground exhibit featuring some alleged mermaids.  I hope the two plot-strands come together convincingly at the story’s end.  Rather than set it in the south of Scotland, where Peebles is, I set it in the East Anglia region of England, another part of the world I know well.  Indeed, it references a well-known piece of East Anglian folklore, the Wild Man of Orford – which, despite the name, isn’t about a ‘wild man’ but about a mer-creature. 

 

Mermaid Fair, incidentally, is a reprint, not a story I wrote originally for Fearful Fun.  Previously, in 2010, it’d appeared in an edition of the now-defunct webzine Death Head’s Grin.  But I’d written it several years before that, in 2005, and back then I’d submitted it to the editors of another anthology that was going to feature stories about fairgrounds, carnivals and the like.  The anthology’s editors not only rejected the story, but returned it to me with five paragraphs of brutal comments.  They dissed the opening (“…too long, convoluted, difficult to understand… I ALMOST stopped reading there…”), the general prose (“…lost its flavour…”), the ending (“…didn’t have much punch and didn’t answer the big question…”) and the amount of violence (“What’s the term they use nowadays?  Gratuitous violence?  Gratuitous…”).  I felt so deflated that I set aside Mermaid Fair and almost never looked at it again, convinced it was terrible.

 

I don’t know why I dusted it down for Death’s Head Grin, but I’m glad that I did.  And to be fair to the editors of that 2005 anthology, I did try to amend a few things in the story that they’d objected to, before submitting it again.  This included toning down the violence, which I suppose had been somewhat over-the-top in the original version.  Nonetheless, I didn’t appreciate their tone…

 

Anyway, in 2022, Mermaid Fair has been published again and – hurrah! – this time I’ve been paid for it.  I guess the story’s history holds two lessons for aspiring writers.  When you receive a rejection message from an editor with some comments included, you should: (1) yes, pay attention to the editor’s opinions about what could or should be improved; but (2) if he or she’s been snarky or condescending, no, don’t let it get to you.

 

Copies of Fearful Fun can be ordered here.

Posted on

Jim Mountfield’s playground of horrors

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

Jim Mountfield, the penname under which I write horror fiction, has just had his first short story published in 2022.  Entitled Never Tell Tales Out of School, it’s the tale of a middle-aged man who returns to the school where, during his childhood, he suffered horrific bullying – and discovers that, even 45 years later, his ordeal isn’t yet over. The story appears in the latest issue of Schlock! Webzine.

 

One thing I realised whilst researching and planning the story was just how many techniques existed during my schooldays – the 1970s – if you were a sadist and wanted to inflict pain on a fellow pupil.  There was a wide range of physical torture methods that were deployed in playgrounds the length and breadth of the United Kingdom, making your schooldays not ‘the happiest days of your life’, as some people have claimed, but a theatre of utter cruelty.  These were as varied and horrible as the ones mentioned in Edgar Allan Poe’s 1842 story The Pit and the Pendulum.  Here are some of the torture techniques I remember from back then – a few of which get referenced in Never Tell Tales Out of School.

 

Dead leg – The act of sneaking up behind somebody and smashing your knee into the back of one of their legs, behind their knee. This invariably caused the person’s leg, then the person him or herself, to buckle and collapse. If you did this in a particular place, for example, at the top of a steep flight of steps or at the edge of a pond, the results could be spectacular.  The upper-limb equivalent of the dead leg was the dead arm, which merely involved smashing your fist into someone’s upper arm.  This was commonly used against kids who’d just received their BCG (Bacillus Calmette-Guérin) vaccination for tuberculosis.  A dead-arm blow against the spot that the vaccination needle had recently penetrated was agony.

 

Chinese burn – Someone would seize your arm just above the wrist with both hands.  Then one hand twisted the skin and tissue in one direction and the other hand twisted them in the opposite direction.  I don’t know what was particularly Chinese about this but, my God, for a few minutes afterwards, it did burn.

 

Monkey scrub / Noogie – A hideous cranial torture in which someone gripped you in a headlock and, continually, rubbed their knuckles up and down against the top of your skull.  I’ve also experienced a variation of this whereby somebody held me by the arms and another person rubbed their knuckles up and down, neverendingly, against my sternum – creating the impression that my ribs were being tickled with a red-hot poker.

 

Camel bite – According to the Urban Dictionary, this was: “When one person squeezes another person’s thigh region hard, resembling the bite of an actual camel.”  Ouch!

 

Spamming – Slapping someone very hard on the forehead.  Sometimes the simplest techniques are the best… or the worst.

 

Bog wash – Oof.  This was the 1970s school equivalent of water-boarding.  Basically, someone would shove your head down into a toilet-bowl in the school loos and pull the lever or chain to flush it. At best, your head and hair got drenched while you briefly suffered terrifying claustrophobia.  At worst, your head became stuck in that funnel of porcelain and, well, you were in danger of drowning.

 

Knockout / The wall of death – And here’s another one that, on occasion, must have been life-threatening.  Someone would ram you back against a wall and drive their shoulder hard into your chest. You remained wedged there, between the unstoppable force of the shoulder and the immovable object of the wall, until you stopped breathing, passed out and collapsed.  Then, out of interest, a count would be made to determine how long it was before you regained consciousness.  If you regained consciousness…

 

Hardy knuckles – A test of endurance done with a deck of cards, brand new cards that were still stiff and unbending.  You held forward a clenched fist and someone slammed the edge of the deck down against your knuckles and, below them, the lower parts of your fingers. This was repeated, the edges of the cards scraping mercilessly downwards, until your knuckles and fingers were seriously lacking in skin.

 

There were other horrors I don’t remember the names of.  The one I constantly fell victim to stemmed from the fact that I was a both a big daydreamer and a big tea drinker.  I’d often be sitting in the school canteen daydreaming about such things as, say, how I was going to become rich and famous before I turned 20 by writing an epic fantasy trilogy that was even more popular than J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954-55).  Meanwhile, a cup of tea would be resting on the table in front of me, the end of a metal teaspoon sticking out of it, propped against the cup’s rim.  Invariably, some c*nt would creep up behind me.  They’d snatch the teaspoon, whose metal was now heated to the temperature of the surrounding, boiling-hot tea, out of the cup and press it against my face.  This could have been called spoon branding.

 

The March 2022 edition – volume 16, issue 26 – of Schlock! Webzine can be accessed here, and Never Tell Tales Out of School itself can be accessed here.

Posted on

My 2021 writing round-up

 

© Midnight Street Press

 

On this blog one year ago, I remember writing a post that bid an unfond adieu to the outgoing hellhole plague-year of 2020.  However, the post also welcomed 2021 with some expressions of mild optimism.  After all, vaccines were being developed against Covid-19, the main reason for 2020’s hideousness.  And that man-slug of evil, Donald Trump, had just been defeated in the US presidential election.

 

Well, I’m not making that mistake again.  I’m not expressing even faint optimism about 2022, seeing as 2021 was nearly as dire as its predecessor.

 

While the vaccines arrived – and having been double-jabbed and boosted courtesy of Sri Lanka’s healthcare system, I’m feeling a lot safer personally – it’s depressing that much of the world’s population remains unvaccinated.  Economics and politics have denied many people access to vaccines in the Global South.  Gordon Brown isn’t someone I normally agree with, but he’s absolutely right when he argues that the estimated 23.4 billion dollars it’d cost to roll out vaccines to everyone would be a wise investment for the world’s rich countries.  (It’s also a fraction of what’s been spent on certain recent wars.)   Meanwhile, anti-vaxxers continue to boggle the mind with their stupidity.  It takes unfathomable levels of dumbness to believe that getting a vaccine means having Bill Gates seed your body with micro-transmitters.  As a result, for years to come, unvaccinated humans will provide a giant petri dish for new Covid variants to mutate and develop.

 

As for the USA, it looks increasingly likely that the Republican Party, with Trump quite possibly at its head again, will be back in control of the White House in 2024.  They won’t win the popular vote, but the voter suppression, voting-law changes and replacement of election officials they’re currently enacting by stealth in the crucial ‘swing’ states will get them over the line.  At which point, the world’s most powerful nation will become a totalitarian state.

 

Anyway, enough of the gloom.  For me, 2021 wasn’t a disappointment in one respect, at least.  During the year I got a fair number of stories published, under the pseudonyms Jim Mountfield (used for my horror fiction) and Rab Foster (used for my fantasy fiction).  There follows a round-up of those stories, with information about where you can find them.

 

© DBND Publishing

 

As Jim Mountfield:

  • In January 2021, my story Where the Little Boy Drowned was published in Horrified Magazine. A ghost story (with a smidgeon of J-Horror), it was about a flooded river, a forgotten childhood tragedy and – appropriately for January – a New Year resolution that goes wrong. It can be read here.
  • February saw The Stables – another ghost story, this time about three girls on holiday in the countryside who enter a seemingly deserted farmstead searching for a riding school – appear in Volume 16, Issue 13 of Schlock! Webzine. Kindle and paperback versions of the issue are available here.
  • Later in February, When the Land Gets Hold of You, another story set on a farm, was featured in an anthology from DBND Publishing called The Cryptid Chronicles. As its title suggests, the stories in this collection concerned cryptids, that pseudoscientific category of animals that some people claim to exist but nobody has ever conclusively proven to exist, such as Chupacabra, the Jersey Devil and Nessie.  The cryptids in my story were based on redcaps, the malevolent fairies that legends say inhabit the peel towers of Scotland’s Borders region.  The Cryptid Chronicles can be bought here.
  • Shotgun Honey, a webzine devoted to the ‘crime, hardboiled and noir genres’, published my story Karaoke in March 2021. The story is about – surprise! – karaoke and it can be read here.
  • In July, I was pleased to have my story Ballyshannon Junction included in the collection Railroad Tales, from Midnight Street Press. The stories in Railroad Tales involved both ‘railroads, trains, stations, junctions and crossings’ and the ‘horrific, supernatural or extraordinary’.  Ballyshannon Junction met this brief by being set in an abandoned railway station in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and featuring a main character who’s plagued by possibly supernatural visions.  It also allowed me to use as inspiration the real-life Bundoran Junction station-house and grounds in County Tyrone, where my grandparents lived when I was a kid.  Railroad Tales can be purchased from Amazon UK here and amazon.com here.
  • A story inspired by a very different period in my life – when I worked in Libya – appeared in Volume 16, Issue 21 of Schlock! Webzine in October. The story was called The Encroaching Sand and the issue is available in kindle and paperback forms here.
  • Also in October, my story Bottled Up was included in the anthology Horror Stories from Horrified (Volume 2): Folk Horror, published by Horrified Magazine. Folk horror is defined by Wikipedia as “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.”  Accordingly, Bottled Up was set in that rural and folkloric part of England, East Anglia, and featured the remnants of a cult that worship a pagan sea deity.  The anthology can be purchased here.
  • Finally, my story Problem Family – about, unsurprisingly, a problem family, but also with a dash of H.P. Lovecraft – appeared in Horla in December. Currently, it can be read here.

 

© Horrified Magazine

 

As Rab Foster:

  • In May, Perspectives of the Scorvyrn was published in Volume 16, Issue 16 of Schlock! Webzine. This tale attempted to subvert the more macho, musclebound, boneheaded conventions of that sweaty sub-genre of fantasy fiction, the sword-and-sorcery story.  For one thing, it was told from multiple viewpoints and, for another, it was written in the present tense.  Conan the Barbarian would not have approved.  Kindle and paperback versions of the issue can be obtained here.
  • In July, my 13,000-word story The Theatregoers appeared in the Long Fiction section of Aphelion. It can be accessed here.
  • October saw The Orchestra of Syrak, a story inspired by the phantasmagorical (if overly verbose) work of pulp writer Clark Ashton Smith, appear in the 116th issue of Swords and Sorcery Magazine.  You can read it here.
  • And in November, Parallel Universe Publications unveiled a collection entitled Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3, which included my story The Foliage.  An extremely handsome volume (thanks to its illustrations by the talented artist Jim Pitts), kindle and paperback copies of it can be ordered from Amazon UK here and amazon.com here.

 

© Aphelion

 

And that’s that – proof that 2021 wasn’t so bad for me writing-wise, even though it sucked on most other levels.

 

I shan’t tempt fate by making any optimistic predictions about 2022, but let’s just hope it turns out to be better than its two predecessors.  And yes – I’m touching a large wooden surface as I write this – a Happy New Year, everyone!

Posted on

Jim Mountfield keeps it in the family

 

© Horla Magazine

 

A new short story of mine, Problem Family, is now available to read online at Horla Magazine.  As it’s a horror story, it’s attributed to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write macabre fiction.

 

The main inspiration for Problem Family was a real-life incident that happened to me in Colombo a couple of years ago, when I was living in a different apartment building from the one I live in today.  An extremely noisy family lived in an apartment on the floor below mine.  For some reason – the building’s acoustics, the way the stairwell was positioned – the noise they generated seemed to flow straight up to my front door.  Indeed, it sometimes seemed like the loud melodramas they were enacting were taking place right on the other side of my door.   One evening, I heard adult male and female voices screaming at each other and became convinced that, if this went on for much longer, the woman was going to be assaulted.  So, reluctantly, I ventured downstairs, ostensibly to tell them to shut up, but really to find out if I needed to report something to the police.  Thankfully, the situation proved to be non-violent – and at my appearance, the pair of them did shut up.

 

© SpectreVision / RLJE Films

 

Also, in part and completely differently, Problem Family was inspired by the famous 1927 sci-fi / horror story The Colour Out of Space by H.P. Lovecraft.  This is an account what happens after a meteorite strikes a remote area of Massachusetts.  A nearby farming family begin to succumb to what initially seems to be a weird, creeping, expanding poison but is actually a grotesque alien lifeform exuding an indescribable colour – it was ‘only by analogy that they called it a colour at all’.  The Colour Out of Space has been filmed several times, starting with a rather duff version starring Boris Karloff and directed by Daniel Haller in 1965, and most recently in 2019 with a phantasmagorical version courtesy of director Richard Stanley.  The 2019 film is slightly too reminiscent of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), but benefits from a striking colour palette – it’s difficult to depict unknown alien colours on celluloid, so Stanley settles for making everything a garish purple – and from Nicholas Cage in the lead role, doing the sort of acting things that only Nicholas Cage is capable of doing.

 

You can also hear The Colour Out of Space being read aloud on this video from the BBC’s ‘interactive culture magazine’ Collective.  Brilliantly, the reader is none other than the late, great Mark E. Smith, vocalist with and guiding light of abrasive post-punk / alternative rock band the Fall.  The sound of Smith’s thick Mancunian accent and the Massachusetts accents of Lovecraft’s characters battling for supremacy is something else.  I have to say, though, that the bit at the beginning where Smith sticks out and wiggles his tongue is as terrifying as anything in the story itself.

 

Fittingly for a magazine that takes its name from The Horla, the classic 1887 story by Guy De Maupassant, Horla describes itself as ‘the home of intelligent horror’.  Its main page, which gives access to a bevy of cracking stories, can be reached here.  Meanwhile, Problem Family itself can, for now, be read here.

 

© Librairie Ollendorff

Posted on

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 40th 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.