© 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.