Tag: Rab Foster

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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.  There were 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’.  And then 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 an anagram of ‘Har Par’, which is my tribute to Har Par Villa, the most extraordinary museum in Singapore.  Har 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 Har 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.

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Rab Foster makes a straw man argument

 

© Swords & Sorcery Magazine

 

The Scarecrow of Terryk Head is the name of a short story I’ve just had published using the pseudonym Rab Foster.  I always attribute any fantasy fiction I write to Rab Foster and, accordingly, this story is about an elderly witch who tries to enjoy a peaceful retirement in a remote farming valley, only to have her solitude disturbed by the local farmers, who beg her to use her magical powers to combat a fearsome and malignant totem that’s suddenly appeared at the top of the valley – the titular scarecrow at the titular Terryk Head.  The story appears in Issue 151 of the online Swords & Sorcery Magazine.

 

It wasn’t so long ago that I commented on this blog that I felt scarecrows had been overdone in fantasy fiction.  Well, I still believe that, but I thought the idea behind The Scarecrow of Terryk Head was good enough to justify the presence of a tattie-bogle (as we call the things in Scotland).  I have to admit the story was influenced, slightly, by scarecrows that appeared in the Thomas Ligotti tale The Shadow at the Bottom of the World, which was published in his 1991 collection Grimscribe: His Lives and Works; and in a story featured in the 2010 collection The Mirror of Paradise by the Sri Lankan writer Asgar Hussein.  Unfortunately, I can’t remember what Hussein’s scarecrow story was called, and I haven’t been able to find its title online.  But I enjoyed it a lot.

 

Other influences on The Scarecrow of Terryk Head include, curiously enough, Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970) and, yes, the Bronte sisters.  And, writing it, I had fun paying homage to a scene from the 1961 film Murder, She Said.  This was a cinematic adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple novel 4.50 from Paddington (1957) and starred two of my all-time favourite performers, Margaret Rutherford and James Robertson Justice.  What, you may wonder, does a fantasy story about witches and scarecrows have to do with an old black-and-white Miss Marple movie?  Well, read the darned thing and find out.

 

For the next month, The Scarecrow of Terryk Head can be accessed here; while the main-page of the 151st edition of Swords & Sorcery Magazine, which contains two other stories and an essay, can be reached here.

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Rab Foster makes it 100

 

© Crimson Quill Quarterly

 

The Drakvur Challenge is a sword-and-sorcery story of mine that’s just been published in Volume 3 of the magazine Crimson Quill Quarterly.  Like all the fantasy fiction I write, it appears under the penname Rab Foster.

 

As its main character, The Drakvur Challenge features the swordswoman Cranna the Crimson, someone who takes no shit from anyone – male chauvinists least of all.  She previously appeared in my tale Vision of the Reaper, published last year in the anthology Fall into Fantasy 2023.

 

This new story was inspired by the Tirta Gangga Royal Water Garden in Bali, Indonesia, which my partner and I visited a year ago.  The Water Garden made a big impression on me with its beautiful ponds, its colourful fish, its networks of stepping stones, its towering and gorgeous fountains… and its statues, some of which were startlingly monstrous-looking.  The setting of The Drakvur Challenge has similar things as details, though because it’s a fantasy story, they’re exaggerated and made much more dramatic and dangerous.

 

And if I say that the story was also – like a lot of my fantasy fiction – inspired by the movies of Ray Harryhausen, you can probably guess what happens regarding the statues.

 

The Drakvur Challenge is a writing milestone for me because, according to my calculations, it’s the 100th story I’ve had published.  If I was a gloomy, miserable bastard, I’d remark that I’m delighted to have reached treble figures just before AI technology renders all human writers redundant.  But I’m not, so I won’t.

 

Volume 3 of Crimson Quill Quarterly, which also contains six other sterling sword-and-sorcery stories besides The Drakvur Challenge, can now be purchased at Amazon as a paperback here and on kindle here.

 

© Morningside Productions / Columbia Pictures

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Some fleeting success for Rab Foster

 

© Swords and Sorcery Magazine

 

The January 2024 edition – Issue 144 – of Swords and Sorcery Magazine is now available online and it contains a new story by Rab Foster entitled The Fleet of Lamvula.  Rab Foster is the alias by which I write fantasy fiction and, by my calculations, The Fleet of Lamvula is the 20th piece of fiction I’ve had published under that name.

 

The first Rab Foster story to get into print was one called The Water Garden, which appeared in the now-defunct ezine Sorcerous Signals in 2010.  Back then, I thought fantasy – and particularly the sub-genre of it I enjoyed most, sword and sorcery – was something I might experiment with once or twice, but no more than that.  I certainly didn’t expect it to develop into a major strand of my writing, which it is today.  One thing that’s helped is the fact that there are a lot more outlets publishing sword and sorcery in 2024.  There seemed to be hardly any back then.  Let’s hope this happy situation continues.

 

The Fleet of Lamvula, to quote Swords and Sorcery Magazine’s new editorial, “is the tale of a band of mercenaries exploring a pirate fleet stranded on the bottom of a dried-up sea.”  The original idea for the story was an image of some explorers on camel-back crossing a psychedelically-coloured desert – the ‘dried-up sea’ angle hadn’t occurred to me yet – under a psychedelically-starry sky.  This image came to me one day while I was listening to the trippiest song of all time, 1970’s Planet Caravan by Black Sabbath.

 

Also shaping the story was the fact that I’m a sucker for ‘graveyards of lost ships’ stories.  Ships’ graveyards exist in real life, of course, but I find fantastical, fictional examples of them irresistible.  For instance, when I was 11 or 12, I thought the 1968 Hammer movie The Lost Continent, wherein a tramp steamer full of British character actors wanders into a Sargasso Sea ridden with marooned ships, monster crabs, monster octopi, carnivorous seaweed and the murderous descendants of Spanish Conquistadores, was the best thing ever.  The dreamy, Hammond-organ-heavy theme song by the Peddlers has a certain charm too.  I also love an outer-space variation on this trope, the episode Dragon’s Domain from the Gerry Anderson sci-fi TV series Space: 1999 (1975-77).  This had the crew of Moonbase Alpha stumbling across a sinister graveyard of lost spaceships, with a tentacled monstrosity lurking inside it.  Even when I was a kid, I knew Space: 1999 was a deeply silly show, but that episode still scared the crap out of me.

 

© Hammer Films / Seven Arts Productions

 

And one other source of inspiration for The Fleet of Lamvula was the film-work of one of my heroes, Ray Harryhausen…

 

For the next month, The Fleet of Lamvula can be read here, while the main page of Swords and Sorcery Magazine, Issue 144, is accessible here.

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It’s the pits for Rab Foster

 

© Literary Rebel, LLC

 

Rab Foster, the pseudonym under which I write fantasy fiction, has just had a story published in the magazine Savage Realms Monthly.  It’s entitled Pit of the Orybadak and is perhaps the bleakest, most violent and most despairing thing I’ve written as Rab Foster.  There’s a high body-count and although the hero Drayak Shathsprey (who’s appeared in several other of my published tales) makes it out alive, I put him through hell in this story.  No doubt the dark tone reflects the mood I was in when I wrote it, when I felt particularly fed up by events happening in the world and was losing my faith in humanity.

 

However, a kind reviewer on goodreads.com has described Pit of the Orybadak as “a harrowing tale of loss, survival, and monsters in the dark… a classic dark fantasy story.”  So, thank you for that, kind reviewer.

 

Pit of the Orybadak appears in Issue 25 of Savage Realms Monthly, which is the December 2023 edition and explains the image of the jovial barbarian wearing a Santa hat and brandishing a tankard of ale on its cover.  A slight delay in the publishing schedule meant that it didn’t become available until very recently.  You can purchase the paperback and kindle editions here.

 

And by the way, the issue also contains an interview with me, as Rab Foster, in which I identify my favourite sword-and-sorcery story ever.

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Rab Foster gets rebooted

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

The second and final part of my short story The Boots of the Cat, which like all the fantasy fiction I write bears the penname of Rab Foster, can now be read in Volume 18, Issue 3 of the monthly ezine Schlock! Webzine.  The Boots of the Cat describes the adventures, or misadventures, of four mercenaries who decide to execute a ‘heist’ after their fighting force, the Legion of Beasts, is sequestered in a wet, unwelcoming and snootily bourgeoisie city.

 

Its first instalment, which appeared last month, finished with the trope known as ‘the Bolivian Army ending’, which according to tvtropes.org “occurs when the main characters face insurmountable odds which, for once, they actually seem unable to surmount.  The trope is named for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – based on both the end of the movie, and the title characters’ real-life ending.  This trope usually leaves out the actual demise of the protagonists, ending just as they face the fire…”  For other examples of the Bolivian Army ending, see the final episode of Blake’s 7 (1978-81), the final episode of Blackadder Goes Forth (1989), and the fourth-last episode of Breaking Bad (2008-13) when Hank (Dean Norris) and Gomie (Steven Michael Quezada) find themselves facing Uncle Jack (Michael Bowen) and his army of gun-toting neo-Nazis.

 

Let’s hope, then, that readers tuning in for the second instalment of The Boots of the Cat aren’t disappointed.

 

During January 2024, Part 2 of The Boots of the Cat can be read here.  The main page of Schock! Webzine, Volume 18, Issue 3, bearing the image of Caravaggio’s Medusa (1596-97), is accessible here.

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My 2023 writing round-up

 

© Aphelion

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

As Jim Mountfield:

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

 

© The Sirens Call

 

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

 

© Cloaked Press

 

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

 

As Rab Foster:

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

 

© Cloaked Press

 

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

 

As Steve Cashel:

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

 

As Paul McAllister:

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

 

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

 

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

 

© Schlock! Webzine

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Rab Foster does some ghostwriting

 

© Spiral Tower Press

 

Rab Foster, the pseudonym under which I write fantasy – and usually the sweaty sub-genre of fantasy known as sword-and-sorcery – fiction, has just had a second short story published this month.  Entitled The Ghost Village, it appears in issue 8 of the magazine Whetstone from Spiral Tower Press.

 

Described by editor Jason Ray Carney as straddling ‘the line between folk horror and sword and sorcery’, The Ghost Village was inspired by Thailand’s San Phra Phum or, as they’re known in English, Thai spirit houses.  These are the miniature buildings you see outside nearly every Thai home and business, held aloft like bird-tables on wooden pillars, fragranced by smouldering incense sticks and often garlanded with flowers.  Their raison d’être is to provide accommodation for the spirits residing on the premises and to keep those spirits contented, so that they don’t move into the human building and cause ghostly high-jinks there.

 

Once, when I was in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai, I was passing a construction site.  An old building had just been demolished and a new one was about to be built there.  Nearly everything in the area had been flattened and a digger was prowling around, removing the last of the rubble.  But remaining untouched and intact in the middle of the site were a pair of spirit houses.  Apparently, it’s a bad idea to destroy spirit houses and render their inhabitants homeless.  So even Thai developers who wouldn’t think twice about bulldozering an old human property need to exercise caution in how they treat the miniature dwelling next door to it.

 

 

I had long wanted to write a creepy story about Thai spirit houses, but was wary of penning something that used Thai people’s religious beliefs and cultural practices for a cheap scare.  As someone who’s lived long-term in Asia and Africa, I find stories that have Westerners blundering into ‘exotic’ – shorthand for ‘less civilised’ – countries where they run foul of some local deity, myth or piece of folklore extremely patronising.  Basically, they steal a bit of someone else’s culture to use as a monster or some other source of horror.  So, it made sense to me to take the basic concept of spirit houses – flesh-and-blood people maintaining a second house where beings from the incorporeal world can reside – and put it in a fantasy context instead. Then I could build up my own mythology around it.  What I ended up with was Rab Foster’s latest published story, The Ghost Village. 

 

For more information about Whetstone magazine, click here.  And issue 8, which contains my story and a dozen other works of short fiction and poetry, can be downloaded here for free.

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Rab Foster puts his boots on

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

The horror, science-fiction and fantasy fiction ezine Schlock! Webzine has just made its December 2023 edition available.  This contains the first instalment of a two-part story written by Rab Foster, the pseudonym I use when I pen fantasy fiction.

 

Entitled The Boots of the Cat, the story is about the adventures – or misadventures – that befall a handful of mercenaries attached to a military outfit called the Legion of Beasts.  Their legion has been sequestered in the middle of a city that’s less than welcoming to them, both climatically (because it’s raining incessantly) and attitudinally (because the place is bourgeoisie and snooty), and inevitably conflict arises between them and the locals.

 

As the story progresses, the influence of a certain, popular fairy tale becomes more and more apparent.  And no, despite the title The Boots of the Cat, that fairy tale isn’t Puss in Boots.

 

For the next month, the first part of The Boots of the Cat can be read here, while Schlock! Webzine’s home page can be accessed here.

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Rab Foster does fear the reaper

 

© Cloaked Press LLC

 

Vision of the Reaper, a short story by Rab Foster, the pseudonym under which I write fiction of a usually sword-and-sorcerous hue, is one of the tales in a new collection called Fall into Fantasy 2023 from the publisher Cloaked Press.  The story takes place in a giant wheatfield and has among its ingredients not only the titular, fearsome Reaper but also windmills, crop circles, corn dollies and pretty-much everything connected with the culture of crops and harvesting that I regard as cool.  (Not scarecrows, though – I think scarecrows are overused in the fantasy genre.)

 

The story also introduces a character called Cranna the Crimson, about whom I hope to write more fiction in the future.  She’s a swordswoman who, in addition to having to deal with the usual sword-and-sorcery fixtures of evil magicians, monstrous creatures and so on, has to deal with medieval-style male chauvinists as well.  Cranna is well-equipped for this, being the sort who takes no shit from anyone.

 

Offering 16 stories and 343 pages of fantasy-related goodness, Fall into Fantasy 2023 is available on kindle and as a paperback here.

 

And of course, this gives me an excuse to link you to one of the greatest songs in American rock-music history.  Guess which song.