Tag: Rab Foster

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Rab Foster has another river to cross

 

© Crimson Quill Quarterly

 

My sword-and-sorcery story The Voice of the River is now available to read in Volume 9 of the magazine Crimson Quill Quarterly, which was published at the end of last month.  As with all my fantasy fiction, it’s attributed to the pseudonym Rab Foster.

 

Someone once observed – it might have been Stephen King in his forward to his 1978 collection Night Shift – that a writer’s mind is like the grating on a storm drain.  Just as water flows in through a real grating and the bigger debris it carries gets stuck there, so a writer’s mental grating gets clogged with ideas, impressions and images while his or her life-experiences seep through it – all things that can inspire or be incorporated into stories.  The gunk trapped in my grating, from which I fashioned The Voice of the River, contained some disparate things indeed.

 

When I was 11 or 12 years old, I watched a western on late-night TV called Barquero (1970).  I assumed at the time it was a spaghetti western, because Lee Van Cleef was in it, but since then I’ve discovered it was an American movie directed by the prolific Gordon Douglas, whose best-remembered film is probably the giant-ants-on-the-loose sci-fi / horror classic Them! (1954).  The cast also included Warren Oates, Forest Tucker and Kerwin Matthews, so I should have twigged onto Barquero’s American-ness sooner.  Anyway, as Van Cleef’s character was a river ferryman, who gets caught up in shenanigans with some bandits, and as I’d recently been reading Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories, I suddenly had an idea: Wow, what if Conan retired from being a barbarian and took up a supposedly easier job, running a barge that ferried people across a river?

 

The notion sank to the back of my head and remained dormant for several decades – until last year, in fact, when I read Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark (1968), which contains an episode set on a river ferry.  That reminded me of my long-ago idea about ‘Conan the Ferryman’ – though I realised an unruly, adventure-loving character like Conan would balk at such a job.  So I modified the premise to ‘a sword-and-sorcery story involving a river ferry’.

 

Other debris stuck in that mental grating, also from movies, gave me inspiration for the story’s characters.  I’ve long been interested in the late Northern Irish character actor John Hallam, who appeared as hard men and coppers in a string of 1970s British crime movies – Villain (1971), The Offence (1972), Hennessey (1975) – though he’s maybe best-known for playing Luro, Brian Blessed’s winged sidekick in Flash Gordon (1980).  I visualised The Voice of the River’s main character as being like the tall, gangly, craggy Hallam and took his name, Halym, from the actor’s surname.  Meanwhile, both the appearance and personality of another character in the story were inspired by Peter Cushing in the role of Gustav Weil, the fanatical anti-hero of one of my favourite Hammer horror movies, 1972’s Twins of Evil.

 

© BBC / London Films

 

Finally, The Voice of the River pays tribute, sort of, to a scene from a TV show that’s always haunted me.  It comes at the end of the final episode of I, Claudius (1976), the BBC’s acclaimed adaptation of Robert Graves’s novels I, Claudius (1934) and Claudius the God (1935), when Claudius (Derek Jacobi), on his deathbed, has a conversation with a supernatural entity – the oracle the Sybil (Freda Dowie), who’s come to usher him to the River Styx and the underworld.  I love how, though one is flesh-and-blood and the other is ethereal, they speak as equals and both have seen so much of the world that they’re weary of it.  (“It all sounds depressingly familiar,” Claudius sighs after the Sybil has told him what will happen to Rome after his death. “Yes,” she replies, “isn’t it?”)  I tried to replicate a little of that magic in this newly-published story.

 

So, The Voice of the River owes its genesis to a 1970 Lee Van Cleef western, Cormac McCarthy, a tough Northern Irish character actor, some Hammer horror villainy by Peter Cushing and I, Claudius.  Not bad for a simple sword-and-sorcery tale.

 

One thing about Crimson Quill Quarterly that impresses me is the time and effort its editors spend on the editing process – including consulting and reconsulting the writers of its stories about suggested improvements – to ensure that the fiction in its volumes is in its best possible form when they go on sale.  Containing seven stirring tales of fantasy, magic and derring-do, its ninth edition can be purchased here.

 

© United Artists

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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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Rab Foster takes a ride in the palanquin

 

© Swords & Sorcery Magazine

 

A good place for a writer to go to for ideas – writers of all types of fiction, I’d say, though especially historical fiction and also fantasy fiction, which I write under the penname of Rab Foster – is a museum.  Last year my partner and I were on holiday in the city of Yogyakarta in Java, Indonesia. There, we visited the Sonobudoyo Museum, which is devoted to Javanese history and culture.

 

Among its many exhibits, a couple of items in the transport section caught my attention and piqued my curiosity.  These were palanquins, the conveyances the wealthy once employed to get around, which consisted of a chair, inside a box, with poles attached to it. The poles rested on the shoulders of servants or porters and their legs provided the palanquin and its rich passenger with locomotion.

 

 

What, I thought, if I set a fantasy story almost entirely inside a palanquin?  How would that work?  So I went off and thought about it, and made notes, and planned, and wrote, and the result a year-and-a-half later was a 7500-word short story entitled The Palanquin.  I even managed to incorporate into it a striking detail I’d seen on one of the Sonobudoyo Museum’s biggest palanquins, a carved snake (or naga) that adorned its roof.

 

 

I’m happy to say that editor Curtis Ellet has chosen The Palanquin for inclusion in Issue 167 of his monthly webzine Swords & Sorcery Magazine and that issue is now available to read.  Being fantasy, the story is attributed to the aforementioned Rab Foster.  For the next month, you can access the magazine’s main page here and The Palanquin itself here.

 

And that’s it from me for 2025.  Have a Happy New Year when it comes.

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Rab Foster resurfaces

 

© Cloaked Press Inc

 

The publishing house Cloaked Press, LLC has recently announced that its new anthology Fall into Fantasy 2025 can be purchased on Kindle.  Among the 15 stories contained in Fall into Fantasy 2025 is one entitled From Out the Boundless Deep, which I wrote under the name Rab Foster, the pseudonym I use for my fantasy fiction.

 

From Out the Boundless Deep has as its main character a woman called Kayra, who previously appeared in a story called The Trap Master, published way back in 2018 in the American webzine Aphelion.  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, she’s summoned to a beach in a remote bay to deal with something that has unexpectedly surfaced there.  I suppose the story is partly inspired by J.G. Ballard’s haunting tale of magical realism The Drowned Giant (1964).  Though, like a lot of my Rab Foster stories, it owes a lot to the films of the legendary stop-motion-animation wizard Ray Harryhausen too.

 

To access the Kindle edition of Fall into Fantasy 2025, visit here.

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Rab Foster gets moored up

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

Rab Foster, my fantasy-writing alter-ego, is on a roll this week.  Just two days ago, The Cats and the Crimson, a story I wrote under that pseudonym, was published in Issue 159 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine.  Today, another Foster-attributed fantasy story appears in the new edition – Volume 19, Issue 4 – of the monthly online publication Schlock! Webzine.  It’s called The Shrine on the Moor and chronicles another adventure in the life of my sword-and-sorcery character Drayak Shathsprey.  By my calculations, this is the sixth tale featuring Shathsprey to have made it into print.

 

In fact, The Shrine on the Moor is a direct sequel to a story called The Pit of the Orybadak, which featured in the magazine Savage Realms Monthly in January 2024.  Pit of the Orybadak was about Shathsprey’s experiences during a bloody battle and its equally bloody aftermath.  The events of The Shrine on the Moor, when he escapes onto the moor of the title, and encounters the shrine of the title, take place a few days later.  Has he really escaped the battle?  Is there nobody around who still wants to kill him?  Of course not…

 

I’d like to think The Shrine on the Moor has a flavour of the 1968 John Boorman movie Hell in the Pacific.  But, being a sword-and-sorcery story, it has ghosts and primordial gods mixed into it as well.

 

For the month of May 2025, The Shrine on the Moor can be read here.  And you can access the contents page of Schlock! Webzine Volume 19, Issue 4, with links to a dozen tales of fantasy, horror and science fiction, here.

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Rab Foster herds some cats

 

© Swords & Sorcery Magazine

 

The Cats and the Crimson is the name of a fantasy story I’ve just had published in the April 2025 edition, Issue 159, of the online publication Swords and Sorcery Magazine.  As always with my fantasy fiction, the story is attributed to the pseudonym Rab Foster.

 

One part of its title refers to its heroine, Cranna the Crimson, the formidable red-haired swordswoman who takes no shit from anyone, least of all from male chauvinists.  She’s previously featured in my published stories Vision of the Reaper (which appeared in the collection Fall into Fantasy 2023) and The Drakvur Challenge (which last year appeared in the third issue of the magazine Crimson Quill Quarterly).  The other part of the title refers to the cats that Cranna encounters when she enters a mysterious desert town in search of treasure – firstly, cats of the cute, domestic variety, but later, ones of a more sinister nature.

 

I don’t want to give away anything more about the story.  Though I will say it contains a rebuke to sentiments expressed by American vice-president and Trump-lackey J.D. Vance, who notoriously complained about women who are “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made” and who “want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”  I’m sure Cranna would react to those words by socking the contemptible, eyeliner-wearing creep in the jaw.

 

For the next month, The Cats and the Crimson can be read here, while the April 2025 homepage of Swords and Sorcery Magazine, with three further stories and a book review, is accessible here.

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Liar wolves, not dire wolves

 

From unsplash.com / © Reyk Odinson

 

Donald Trump has recently rampaged through the world’s global trade system with the delicacy of Godzilla taking a stomp around downtown Tokyo.  That would be Godzilla after he’d been on a week-long cocaine binge.  So, in the current climate of gloom, dread and despondency, perhaps it’s unsurprising that the world’s news outlets have latched desperately and uncritically onto a story that looks like good, even uplifting, news.  Those news outlets have made much of the claim by an American biotechnology and genetic engineering company called Colossal Biosciences that it’s created the first dire wolves to have graced Planet Earth in about ten millennia.

 

The dire wolf, according to Wikipedia, is “an extinct species of canine which was native to the Americas during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene epochs (125,000-10,000 years ago).”  It was generally bigger than most modern wolves.  Research suggests “the average dire wolf to be similar in size to the largest modern grey wolf.”  Dire wolves also pop up in George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones books (1991-2011), but more about that in a minute.

 

The headlines have come fast and furious: DIRE WOLF REPORTEDLY BROUGHT BACK FROM EXTINCTION; NO LONGER EXTINCT: DIRE WOLVES HOWL AGAIN AFTER 12,000 YEARS; LONG EXTINCT, DIRE WOLVES ARE BACK, AND NOT JUST IN GAME OF THRONES; SCIENTISTS PERFORM WORLD’S FIRST DE-EXTINCTION TO REVIVE THE DIRE WOLF THAT VANISHED 12,000 YEARS AGO.  Time Magazine stuck a picture of one of three dire wolves supposedly created by Colossal Biosciences on a recent cover, below the word ‘extinct’ with a line scored through it and the inspiring message: “This is Remus.  He’s a dire wolf.  The first to exist in over 10,000 years.  Endangered species could be changed forever.”

 

So hey, this is great news, yeah?  Extinction is bad, so ‘de-extinction’ must be good, right?  And since much extinction in the last couple of millennia had been caused by humanity, isn’t it gratifying to see good old human know-how being put to work reversing the process and bringing one – hopefully the first of many – extinct species back?

 

Except, of course, that it’s a load of bollocks.  The New Scientist has responded to the company’s claims with an article whose lead-in puts it succinctly: “Colossal Biosciences claims three pups born recently are dire wolves, but they are actually grey wolves with genetic edits intended to make them resemble the lost species.”  Although some genuine dire-wolf DNA was used in the project, the genome was merely analysed to determine what a dire wolf’s key traits would be.  The DNA itself was way too aged and decayed to be spliced into anything, Jurassic Park-style.  The Colossal Biosciences team then made edits to modern-day grey-wolf DNA to replicate those dire-wolf traits.  Finally, three modified wolf-pups were produced using domestic-dog surrogate mothers and caesarean sections.  So what you’ve got aren’t dire wolves.  You’ve got three grey-wolf pups that’ve been tinkered with genetically to give them characteristics the team think dire wolves might have had.

 

The analogy here isn’t the Steven Spielberg movie Jurassic Park (1993).  No, it’s Irwin Allen’s terrible 1960 adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) starring Claude Rains, Michael Rennie, David Hedison and Jill St John.  In that film, the dinosaur special effects were achieved by taking modern reptiles like iguanas, monitor lizards and crocodiles and glueing horns, frills and fins onto them to make look ‘dinosaur-ish’.   Which is what’s been done with these young grey wolves in a fancy, high-tech way.

 

The Irish-American palaeontologist and writer Caitlin R. Kiernan summed it up bluntly in her online journal the other day: “…there’s this bullshit about a company named Colossal Biosciences claiming to have resurrected dire wolves.  They haven’t.  Not even close.  It’s a hoax that would make P.T. Barnum proud.”

 

From wikipedia.org / © American Museum of Natural History

 

Also, it’s not merely nonsense, but dangerous nonsense.  It makes extinction sound like something that’s solvable through scientific jiggery-pokery, an error that can be fixed without the arduous, inconvenient lengths that human beings need to go to to prevent extinctions happening, which is to stop killing life-forms through hunting, habitat-destruction, economic consumption and general greed, cruelty and ignorance.

 

In the last few days alone, I’ve seen stories on the Guardian’s environment page about a report on New Zealand’s environment, which warns that “76% of freshwater fish, 68% of freshwater birds, 78% of terrestrial birds, 93% of frogs, and 94% of reptiles” are “threatened with extinction or at risk of becoming threatened”; and a warning by 32 charity organisations that proposals under the British government’s new planning bill “could push species towards extinction and lead to irreversible loss”; and the grim likelihood that Donald Trump’s decimation of USAID will wreck conservation projects leading to increased poaching and habitat encroachment and serious threats to such animals as lemurs, white rhinos, gorillas, orangutans and elephants.

 

The uncritical coverage given to the dire-wolf story is harmful because it encourages the idea that animal extinction is not so serious now because science can resurrect those animals later.  Which would be bad enough if the idea was based on proper science.  But it’s not – it’s based on the spin coming out of Colossal Biosciences.

 

As I said, direwolves (spelt not as two but as one word) turn up in the Game of Thrones books: “Direwolves once roamed the north in large packs…   According to Theon Greyjoy, direwolves have not been sighted south of the Wall for two hundred years.  Rangers of the Night’s Watch hear direwolves beyond the Wall.”  I’m quoting a Game of Thrones wiki here, as I’ve never read the books.  I haven’t watched the 2011-2019 TV show based on them either, having always intended to read the books first.

 

I find it a bit disappointing that Games of Thrones author George R.R. Martin seems to have swallowed the Colossal Biosciences hype hook, line and sinker.  In a recent blogpost, he said in February he’d been to visit the secret installation where the three supposed direwolves are being kept.  Obviously in a state of giddy excitement, he declared: “I have to say the rebirth of the direwolf has stirred me as no scientific news has since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon…  And Colossal is just beginning.   Still to come, the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, and… yes… the dodo…  I can’t wait.” The post also has an undeniably cute picture of him holding one of the genetically-edited beasties.

 

To be fair to Martin, I suppose it must be flattering to have a biotech company pay you the compliment of (allegedly) creating some animals that nowadays most people only know as fantasy-creatures in your novels.  So flattering that it’s befuddled his critical faculties.  Of course, it’s likely that Colossal Biosciences chose to work on dire wolves because the creatures are currently famous due to the Game of Thrones phenomenon – making it an excellent PR stunt that’s earned them lots of headlines.

 

And I suppose, as someone who writes fantasy fiction under the penname Rab Foster, I’d be flattered too if a biotech company offered to create some fabulous animals or monsters that’d appeared in my stories.  Not that there’s much chance of that happening – last year, as Rab Foster, I earned about 75 pounds, which I suspect is a wee bit less than George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones royalties for 2024.  If any biotech outfit was up for it, though, I’d like them to have a go at creating the sinister miniature-harpy things in my 2022 short story Crows of the Mynchmoor, which were basically crows’ bodies with shrunken copies of a witch’s head grafted onto then.  I’d like a flock of those to keep in my garden.  I bet they’d really creep out folk passing by on the street.

 

© 20th Century Fox

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My 2024 writing round-up

 

© The Sirens Call Publications

 

“Well, 2024 was an excellent year!”  No future historians will say, ever.  Come to think of it, because of events in 2024, there might not be any future historians.  Not any future, full-stop.

 

However, on a personal level, 2024 saw some improvements in my situation.  Firstly, in March, my partner and I, and our cat, moved apartments in our current city (and country) of abode, Singapore.  We’d been in an expensive condo, inhabited mostly by rich Western and Chinese expatriates, in a modern part of the city-state.  We moved into a cheaper and more modest condo in an older and more traditional district where our neighbours are nearly all Singaporean.  It’s so much nicer.  For one thing there are no spoilt, bratty kids running riot outside our front door because the unfortunate Filippino / Indonesian / Burmese girls hired by their expat parents as ‘maids’ or ‘helpers’ and made to look after them are afraid or unwilling to discipline them.  Also, our new neighbourhood is handier for getting to our work and has several notable Hawkers’ Centres and eateries offering a range of good but modestly-priced foods.  Singapore is generally expensive and its Hawkers’ Centres are one of its saving graces.

 

Secondly, I had a successful year with regard to my writing.  Indeed, in terms of short stories published, 2024 even topped 2023, when 15 of my stories made it into my print.  This has been my best writing year to date.

 

So, here’s a round-up of my stories published in 2024.  Details are provided about who published them, what pseudonym they were published under and, when possible, how they can be accessed today.

 

As Jim Mountfield:

  • Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I stick on my horror fiction, was first published in 2024 at the end of January when the story Underneath the Arches was included in the quarterly fiction-and-poetry magazine The Sirens Call.  Heavily inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, Underneath the Arches was written by me at a young age – and I think it shows in the florid writing style.  However, I was grateful to The Sirens Call for giving the story (which’d languished on my computer hard-drive for decades) a home at last.  Alas, The Sirens Call ceased publication late in the year and I can no longer provide a link for downloading its past issues.
  • In April, Issue 11 of The Stygian Lepus featured my ‘cosmic-horror’ story The Followers, which was set in the English city I lived in from 2002 to 2005, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.  Specifically, it was set in two parts of it, Grainger Market and Chinatown on Stowell Street.  Issue 11 can be read here if you become a member of The Stygian Lepus’s Back Catalogue; or purchased here.

 

© The Stygian Lepus

 

  • April was also when my Northern-Ireland-set short story The Crawler, which involved a devious policeman and a collection of sinister dolls, appeared in 2024’s second issue of The Sirens Call.
  • And in July the next – and unfortunately, the last ever – issue of The Sirens Call contained my sci-fi / horror story The Colony.  This was set in East Anglia after manmade climate change has hoicked up temperatures and sea levels.  Its premise was that scientists had created, through genetic engineering, millions of giant jellyfish-like organisms and tethered them offshore in order to hold back storm surges and reduce coastal erosion.  Obviously, nothing could go wrong with this scheme.  Nothing at all…
  • The Hole in the Wall was a ‘folk-horror’ story about a member of an organisation modelled on Britain’s Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) who’s researching a couple of pubs.  First, he visits a horrible dump of a pub; then he stumbles across a pub that’s so classy it seems too good to be true.  And yes, the second one is too good to be true because it has a mysterious, malevolent something lurking in its walls.  The Hole in the Wall appeared in Volume 18, Issue 12 – the October 2024 edition – of Schlock! Webzine, which can be purchased here.
  • Also in October, my story The Activation was the opening number in the anthology Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024, the annual volume of scary fiction published by Cloaked Press.  As the collection’s title suggests, its theme this year was body horror, described by Wikipedia as “a subgenre of horror fiction that intentionally showcases grotesque or psychologically disturbing violations of the human body or of another creature…” including “aberrant sex, mutations, mutilation, zombification, gratuitous violence, disease, or unnatural movements of the body.”  The Activation contained about five of those things, so I think it fitted the bill.  It was also a prequel to my story The Nuclei, which appeared in the 2020 collection Xenobiology – Stranger Creatures.  Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024 can be purchased on Kindle here and as a paperback here.

 

© Cloaked Press

 

  • In November, a Jim Mountfield story appeared in the collection Monster: Underdog Anthology 2024 from Leg Iron Books.  A monster of a book indeed, this featured 39 spooky stories, including my Halloween-set effort Bag of Tricks.  The story was inspired by a memory I had of riding on Bangkok’s Skytrain one October 31st when some Thai kids entered the carriage wearing fancy dress, presumably on their way to a Halloween party; but most of Bag of Tricks actually takes place in Scotland.  Monster: Underdog Anthology 2024 can be bought on Kindle here and as a paperback here.
  • The Tears of the Pontianak, which appeared in the Samhain 2024 edition of the magazine The Hungur Chronicles, published in November too, was a first for me.  This was my first published story where the setting is my current home, Singapore.  As you can tell from the title, it’s mainly about a Pontianak, a blood-drinking demon of Malaysian, Singaporean and Indonesian folklore.  But the idea for the story actually came to me one afternoon when I was exploring Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum and encountered some beautiful pieces of local, antique furniture.  The Hungur Chronicles’ Samhain 2024 issue can be purchased directly from Hiraeth Publishing here or from Barnes & Noble here.
  • Coming from a farming background, quite a few of my stories are set on farms.  However, I only had one ‘farm-horror’ story published in 2024.  This was in Issue 19 – the December 2024 edition – of The Stygian Lepus and its title was Rack and Ruin.  It owed something to the legendary American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, although the Lovecraftian elements were mixed with the mud, muck and rain of a hill farm in autumnal southern Scotland.  Again, Issue 19 can be read here if you’re a member of The Stygian Lepus’s Back Catalogue; or simply bought here.
  • The influence of H.P. Lovecraft could also be seen in The House of Glass, the final Jim Mountfield story I had published in 2024.  As its title implies, most of the action takes place inside a house made almost entirely of glass.  The house stands in the mountains of Sri Lanka, the country where I lived in real life from 2014 to 2022.  The House of Glass appears in the anthology Swan Song: The Final Anthology, which, sadly, is the last volume to come from Trevor Denyer’s Midnight Street Press – from now on, Midnight Street Press will exist only to sell what’s on its back catalogue, not to produce anything new.  It can be purchased from Amazon UK here and from Amazon US here.

 

© Swords and Sorcery Magazine

 

As Rab Foster:

  • Rab Foster, the pseudonym I use when writing fantasy fiction – usually the unruly sub-genre of fantasy called ‘sword and sorcery’ – hit the ground running in 2024.  On January 1st, the second and final part of my story The Boots of the Cat appeared in Volume 18 Issue 3 of Schlock! Webzine.  This was about a group of mercenaries who, while sequestered in an unwelcoming city, find themselves in a strange scenario inspired by a famous fairy tale.  And no, despite the title, that fairy tale isn’t Puss in Boots.  The issue can be purchased here.
  • Because of a publishing delay, the December 2023 edition of the fiction magazine Savage Realms Monthly didn’t appear until January 2024.  It contained my story Pit of the Orybadak, which combined fantasy elements – slimy flesh-eating monsters slithering around in a giant bog – with the pertinent real-life theme of how soldiers are treated (or mistreated) when they become prisoners of war.  This issue of Savage Realms Monthly can be bought here.
  • The Fleet of Lamvula, a heady story inspired by my love of ‘lost graveyards of ships’ stories, and the movies of Ray Harryhausen, and the trippiest song ever recorded, Black Sabbath’s Planet Caravan, appeared in late January in Issue 144 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine. The story can now be read in Swords and Sorcery Magazine’s archive, here.
  • In July, my Rab Foster story The Drakvur Challenge made it into the pages of Issue 3 of Crimson Quill Quarterly.  This was a milestone for me, being (by my calculations) the 100th short story I’ve had published.  The Drakvur Challenge was inspired by a visit I made to Tirta Gangga Royal Water Garden in Bali, Indonesia – a place I found fascinating because of its beautiful ponds, fish, fountains and networks of stepping stones… while, stowed away in a compound at the back, it also had some surprisingly monstrous-looking statues.  However, like much of my fantasy fiction, The Drakvur Challenge owed a big debt to the cinematic marvel that was Ray Harryhausen too.  Issue 3 of Crimson Quill Quarterly can be obtained as a paperback here and on Kindle here.

 

© Crimson Quill Quarterly

 

  • August saw the appearance of my story The Scarecrow of Terryk Head in Issue 151 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine.  In it, one of my recurring fantasy-fiction characters, Gudroon the Witch, had to deal with not only the evil scarecrow of the title but with three doltish farmers – and with three even-more-doltish farmers’ sons.  Again, The Scarecrow of Terryk Head is now available to read in the magazine’s archive, here.
  • In November, Rab Foster strayed into the controversial sub-genre of fantasy known as ‘grimdark’ and served up a tale of violence and gore, nihilism and despair, entitled The Mechanisms of Raphar.  (What, I wonder, inspired this?  What event in the real world in November 2024 could have induced nihilism and despair in me?)  Owing something to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum (1842) and also something to the ’10 Courts of Hell’ display at Singapore’s most remarkable museum, Haw Par Villa, The Mechanisms of Raphar appeared in Volume 18, Issue 13 of Schlock! Webzine, now purchasable at Amazon here.

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

As Steve Cashel:

  • Steve Cashel, the penname I put on non-horrific, non-fantastical and often crime-tinged stories set in Scotland, had one piece published in 2024.  In fact, it appeared only yesterday, on December 31st, the final day of the year.  It’s called Malkied and appears on the short-fiction page of the website for the crime-and-mystery publisher Close to the Bone.  It’s accessible here.

 

And finally…

  • This is cheating.  Self-publishing doesn’t count.  But on September 18th, 2024 – the tenth anniversary of Scotland’s referendum on independence – I took the opportunity to post on this blog a short story entitled Mither, which I’d written in 2014 soon after I’d heard the referendum’s result.  A mixture of Scottish politics and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), it was too weird to ever get properly published.  (Still, even if I say so myself, I think Norman Bates and his mom are a good metaphor for Scotland and the divisions between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ voters that supposedly materialised at the time.)  Anyway, if you’re interested, you can read it here.

 

So, I had 17 short stories published in 2024, which makes it my most successful year as a writer ever.  I suspect I will be hard-pressed to equal or better that record in 2025, however.  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.

 

Meanwhile, 2025 looks like it’s going to be garbage, largely due to Donald Trump regaining the American presidency, which will embolden fascists, climate-change deniers, anti-vaxxers and conspiracy-fantasist nutjobs around the world.  I suspect even somewhere as famously stable as Singapore will be affected, negatively, by the USA turning into a mafia state / an oligarchy / the political equivalent of a meth lab.  And there’ll be extra, unwelcome input from Elon Musk…  Oh well.  My strategy for surviving 2025 with my sanity intact will be to keep my head down and keep writing.

 

© The Sirens Call Publications

Posted on

Jim Mountfield joins the swan song

 

© Midnight Street Press

 

Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write horror stories, has just had another work published in an anthology.  This comes soon after two other Mountfield short stories were included in the anthologies Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024 (in October) and Monster: Underdog Anthology 2024 (in November).  The new story appears in Swan Song: The Final Anthology, just published by Trevor Denyer’s Midnight Street Press.  Though I’m pleased about this, the experience is also bittersweet because Swan Song is the final book or magazine to come from Midnight Street Press and marks Trevor’s last work as a publisher, though I’m sure he’ll continue as a writer and poet.

 

Trevor started publishing in 1998 with Immediate Direction Publications, the original incarnation of Midnight Street Press, and the first thing he produced was the magazine Roadworks.  In summer 2001, my story Hound Dog Blues turned up in Issue 12 of Roadworks.  It was inspired by a 1995 court-case in my southern-Scottish hometown of Peebles involving a mate of mine, which ended up overturning the United Kingdom’s ‘Dangerous Dogs’ legislation of 1991, in Scotland at least.  A judge couldn’t determine whether or not my mate’s dog, a mongrel called ‘Slitz’, qualified as being a dangerous breed, as some had claimed, and declared the legislation not fit for purpose.  Anyway, the resulting Hound Dog Blues could best be described as ‘Irvine Welsh meets Stephen King’s Cujo (1981)’.

 

A year later, when Immediate Directions Publications also put out a fantasy magazine called Legend, I managed to place a story, Her Web, in it too.   Her Web was a milestone for me because it was my first-ever fantasy story to get into print.  In recent years, I’ve had quite a few fantasy stories published under the pseudonym Rab Foster, so the appearance in Legend set the ball rolling there.

 

© Midnight Street Press

 

I’m grateful to Trevor Denyer for publishing those two stories when he did because it gave me a break when my morale really needed it.  The early 2000s was a period when, as a writer, I often felt I couldn’t get myself arrested, let alone published.  I remember staring almost disbelievingly at his acceptance letters.  (At that time, it was still a thing to post physical manuscripts to publishers, making sure you’d included the all-important stamped, self-addressed envelope in which an editor would send a reply saying ‘yay’ or ‘nay’.)

 

That was also back when my nom de plume wasn’t Jim Mountfield or Rab Foster, but Eoin Henderson.  I’m superstitious, and when I was having little luck getting stuff published under that pseudonym, I changed to others.  Since then, I’ve had reasonable runs of luck with Jim Mountfield and Rab Foster, so I expect to remain being them for a while longer.

 

Later, after Immediate Direction Publications had changed into Midnight Street Press, further stories of mine saw print in Trevor’s yearly magazine Hellfire Crossroads and in his anthologies Strange Days (2020) and Railroad Tales (2021).   These include two stories that are among my favourites of what I’ve written.  The Next Bus appeared in Issue 4 of Hellfire Crossroads in 2014 and was about a tourist who finds himself stuck at a remote bus-stop with a homicidal maniac wanting to make a life-or-death wager on when the titular next bus will arrive.  I don’t drive and depend on public transport to get around, so the story expressed my frustration at spending much of my life waiting at bus stops, wondering when the bloody bus is going to come.

 

I also really liked The Groove, which appeared in the subsequent issue of Hellfire Crossroads, as it wasn’t only about horror but about another topic close to my heart, music.   It had a lover and connoisseur of music getting his revenge from beyond the grave on his widow – her musical tastes begin and end with Mariah Carey, Phil Collins, Whitney Houston, Bryan Adams, Robbie Williams and Celine Dion, so you know she’s evil – when she schemes to enrich herself by rewriting his will, getting her hands on his massive record collection and selling it off on eBay.  Not only that, but she befouls her husband’s memory by playing Robbie Williams’ Angels (1997) at his funeral.

 

Earlier this year, Trevor brought out a new magazine called Roads Less Travelled, but that didn’t do as well as expected and led to his decision to close Midnight Street Press as a publishing concern (though not as a retailer – its past publications can still be purchased from its website).  Swan Song: The Final Anthology contains the stories he’d planned to publish in future issues of Roads Less Travelled, had the magazine been a success.  These stories include a horror / science-fiction number by myself, as Jim Mountfield, entitled The House of Glass, which owes something to the work of H.P. Lovecraft.  However, it’s set among the non-Lovecraftian landscapes of Sri Lanka, the country where I lived from 2014 to 2022.

 

Containing 20 stories of horror, dark fantasy, science fiction and slipstream, Swan Song is available at Amazon UK here and Amazon US here.  And to browse Midnight Street Press’s voluminous back catalogue, visit its website here.

 

© Midnight Street Press

Posted on

Rab Foster gets grim

 

 © Schlock! Webzine

 

Rab Foster, my penname when I write fantasy fiction, has just had a new story published.  It’s called The Mechanisms of Raphar and it appears in the November 2024 – Volume 18, Issue 13 – edition of Schlock! Webzine.

 

Once upon a time, I believed fantasy fiction came in two varieties only.  One type consisted of 1000-page-long, telephone-directory-sized epics whose narratives involved quests, wizards, kings and queens, elves, hobbits and orcs and the first thing you saw when you opened the books was a lavishly detailed map of the fantasy-land in question.  This J.R.R. Tolkien-esque variety was known as ‘high fantasy’.  Alternatively, there were short stories where Conan the Barbarian, armed with only a broadsword and a leather jockstrap, cut a bloody swathe through enemy warriors, slew the occasional giant snake and earned himself the adoration of the occasional busty maiden.  These were examples of the more down-and-dirty ‘sword and sorcery’ variety, of which Robert E. Howard was the leading practitioner.

 

But not anymore.  Nowadays, if I type the question, “What are the different types of fantasy fiction?” into Google, it gives me 24 sub-genres.  These include all sorts of nice, cheery-sounding things such as ‘hopepunk’ (“about characters fighting for positive change, radical kindness, and communal responses to challenges”), ‘romantasy’ (which are “typically set in fantastical worlds, with fairies, dragons, magic, but also feature classic romance plotlines – enemies-to-lovers, soulmates, love triangles”) and ‘cosy fantasy’ (“works that contain or portray a comforting healing ambience to the story… centre on slice of life moments… and are often gentle in their narratives”).  A well-known example of that last sub-genre is Travis Baldree’s 2023 novel Legends & Lattes, in which an orc and a succubus join forces to… open a coffee shop.  Now I’m not going to slag off Legends & Lattes because it’s wrong to diss a book I haven’t read.  Let me merely say it doesn’t sound like my cup of tea.  Or indeed, cup of coffee.

 

Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the niceness spectrum from hopepunk, romantasy and cosy fantasy is… grimdark.  This is the nihilistic, blood-soaked, everyone’s-a-bastard variety of fantasy most famously essayed in George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones books (1996-2011) and TV series (2011-19).  The science-fiction author Adam Roberts has described grimdark as fantasy stories where “nobody is honourable and might is right”, and which “turn their backs on the more uplifting Pre-Raphaelite visions of idealised medievaliana, and instead stress how nasty, brutish, short and, er, dark life back then really was.”

 

I’m not that big a fan of grimdark.  I sometimes find its ‘everything sucks’ attitude rather adolescent.  But The Mechanisms of Raphar is pretty grim, and pretty dark, so I guess it qualifies as a story of this type.  I’ve experienced a few lows recently, especially in my professional life, and I can hardly say I’m enchanted with the state of the world in 2024, so perhaps the story is a manifestation of my current discontent.

 

The Mechanisms of Raphar was vaguely inspired by the Edgar Allan Poe story The Pit and the Pendulum.  Unlike the famous 1961 movie version directed by Roger Corman, which was about Vincent Price mourning his dead wife in a castle that coincidentally happened to have a few torture instruments stowed in its cellar, Poe’s original tale is about a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition who tries to withstand the various devices of torture they use against him.  In The Mechanisms of Raphar, the villains are an insane, sado-masochistic religious cult who worship a god of pain, have a giant temple that’s packed full of torture-machines, and make their services available – for a fee – to people who want other people to suffer horribly, such as despots and their prisoners or other religions and their heretics.  I’m from Northern Ireland, so I don’t have a high opinion of organised religion.  I think this shows in the story.

 

Incidentally, the name ‘Raphar’ is nearly an anagram of ‘Haw Par’, which is my tribute to Haw Par Villa, the most extraordinary museum in Singapore.  Haw Par Villa’s most famous – or notorious – attraction is a graphic representation of the Ten Courts of Hell where you can see the souls of sinners being horrifically tortured and punished for the crimes they committed while they were alive.  Indeed, the ‘Tree of Blades’ that features in the story is inspired by the ‘Tree of Knives’, festooned with bloodied bodies, on display in Haw Par Villa’s depiction of hell.

 

 

Until the end of November, The Mechanisms of Raphar can be read here, while you can access the contents page of Volume 18, Issue 13 of Schlock! Webzine here.

 

And now that I’ve hopefully worked that bloodlust out of my system, maybe I will write a cosy fantasy next…  Maybe my next Rab Foster story will be one where a kelpie and a balrog join forces to open a tea-room in Goblin-land.