Tag: Rab Foster

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More gibbering, and gibbeting, from Rab Foster

 

© Swords and Sorcery Magazine

 

Rab Foster, the pseudonym I use when I write fantasy fiction, has just had a second short story published in 2023.  As with the previous Foster story, The Pyre of Larros, which appeared in print five months ago, this one is featured in Swords and Sorcery Magazine and has as its main character the swordsman Drayak Shathsprey, who seems doomed to get into serious trouble wherever he goes.  In The Gibbeting of Azmyre, now available to read in issue 138 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine, that trouble involves being hired by a shady character to retrieve an insalubrious item – the corpse of an executed criminal, currently hanging on display in a city’s main street.

 

The idea for The Gibbeting of Azmyre came to me a while back when I started reading the 1951 novel My Cousin Rachel by one of my literary heroines, Daphne du Maurier.  This begins with an account of how the narrator, Philip, is brought by his cousin and guardian Ambrose to view the gibbeted body of a murderer.  “I can remember as a little lad seeing a fellow hang in chains where the four roads meet.  His face and body were blackened with tar for preservation.  He hung there for five weeks before they cut him down, and it was the fourth week that I saw him.”

 

Meanwhile, the windswept and snow-scoured city street where the action in The Gibbeting of Azmyre takes place – “its floor a band of flagstones and cobbles carpeted with snow, its walls two towering rows of facades and edifices, spires and turrets, five and six-storeyed townhouses” – was inspired by the Royal Mile in Edinburgh.  (Yes, it’s appropriate that I had the Scottish capital in mind while I wrote a story about bodysnatching, although strictly speaking Edinburgh’s two most famous bodysnatchers – Burke and Hare – didn’t actually snatch bodies.  They murdered people, and then flogged off their victims’ remains to Dr Robert Knox for vivisection during his anatomy lectures.)  The Royal Mile doesn’t experience many snowstorms in these globally-warmed times, but it’s still a challenge to walk along when there’s a stark east wind flaying in from the nearby North Sea.

 

For the next month, The Gibbeting of Azmyre can be read here, while the main page for issue 138 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine is accessible here.

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Rab Foster gets fired up

 

© Swords and Sorcery Magazine

 

I’ve just had my first fiction published in 2023 under the name of Rab Foster – which is the pseudonym I usually attach to works in the fantasy genre.  A Rab Foster story with the combustible title of The Pyre of Larros is now available to read in the current, 133rd issue of Swords and Sorcery Magazine.  It’s the latest in a series of tales featuring Drayak Shathsprey, a wandering swordsman / mercenary / vagabond with a knack for getting himself into serious trouble.  He’s previously appeared in the stories The Tower and the Stars (published in the October 2022 edition of Aphelion) and Crows of the Mynchmoor (which Swords and Sorcery Magazine published back in January 2022).

 

The story’s setting – a small, crumbling town perched on the edge of a high escarpment – was inspired by a real place I’ve visited, the settlement of Ankober in Ethiopia.  This sits nearly 2,500 metres up on the lip of the eastern escarpment of the Ethiopian Highlands and is about 25 miles east of the larger town of Debre Birhan, where I lived from 1999 to 2001.  At one time a capital of Shewa, a kingdom within the Ethiopian Empire, Ankober looked pretty dilapidated when I arrived there one weekend.  I’d been hired to do some research about it by the editors of a forthcoming edition of the Footprint East Africa Handbook.  I came on an early-morning bus from Debre Birhan, which spent hours navigating a torturously narrow and rocky road, and found the place shrouded in a dense, eerie fog.  The people were friendly enough, though, and when the fog lifted I saw how beautifully positioned their town was.  Also, there were some fascinating Ethiopian Orthodox churches on the neighbouring hillsides.  Wikipedia informs me that since 2009 Ankober has had a new road linking it with Debre Birhan – built, I suspect, with Chinese help.

 

Meanwhile, the idea for the mural that appears early in the story, bearing a very flattering depiction of the King Larros of the title, came from things I’ve seen in two other countries: Libya (when the visage of the late Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was ubiquitous) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (ditto for the late Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il).

 

 

As for the basic scenario in The Pyre of Larros, which propels the plot towards its fiery denouement…  Well, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t at least partly inspired by a major event in the United Kingdom in the latter half of last year.

 

Just now, the main page of the 133rd issue of Swords and Sorcery Magazine is available here and The Pyre of Larros itself can be read here.

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My 2022 writing round-up

 

© The Horror Zine

 

If years were cars, then the one that’s just concluded, 2022, would definitely not be a sleek, shiny Aston Martin DB6 driven by Sean Connery in Goldfinger (1964).  No, 2022 would more likely be an ugly, black-smoke-spewing, rolling-coal diesel pick-up truck driven by some Trump-loving, climate-change-denying, QAnon-believing, anti-vaxxer moron in Texas.

 

Thanks to wars, economic crises, environmental disasters and ongoing pestilence, I can’t imagine anyone claiming that 2022 was a vintage year.  Well, maybe except for the Right Honourable Baroness Michelle Mone OBE, who at this moment is possibly raising a glass of bubbly and toasting the sight of Britain receding in the rear-view mirror of her luxury yacht, cruising at full speed towards some far-off, sun-kissed tax haven where she can enjoy the 29 million pounds that’s allegedly turned up in her and her children’s bank accounts.  This windfall may have something to do with Michelle cannily using her position and influence to lobby the British government a while back, during the pandemic, and persuade them to hand over 200 million pounds of taxpayers’ money to the mysterious company PPE Medpro in return for it supplying the NHS with personal, protective equipment – equipment that, it transpired, “’did not comply with the specification in the contract’ and could not be used”.

 

Anyway, on a personal level, 2022 was a hectic one for me.  It involved moving from Sri Lanka – not the result of the political and economic turmoil that erupted there earlier in the year, since I’d been planning to leave for some time before that – and coming to Singapore to start a new job.  The stress of the move may have affected me in a few ways.  For example, two things I normally love doing are reading books and watching films, yet in 2022 I’ve rarely had the concentration or been in the mood to do either.  However, one area of my life that seems to have survived unscathed is my writing.  I got a reasonable number of short stories published during the year, under the pseudonyms Jim Mountfield (used for my horror fiction) and Rab Foster (used for my fantasy fiction).

 

Here’s a round-up of those stories, who’s published them, and where you can find them.

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

As Jim Mountfield:

  • In March 2022, my story Never Tell Tales out of School, which drew on unhappy memories of playground bullying during the rough-and-tumble 1970s, and was inspired by the work of the masterly Liverpudlian horror writer Ramsey Campbell, was published in Volume 16, Issue 26 of Schlock! Webzine. The issue can currently be purchased as a paperback or Kindle edition here.
  • Mermaid Fair – a story that involved both mermaids and, yes, a fair – was originally published in the now-defunct webzine Death Head Grin back in 2010. In March 2022, it was reprinted in the anthology Fearful Fun, from Thurston Howl Publications, which can be purchased here.
  • March was also when I had the first of several stories published in 2022 in the magazine The Sirens Call. Liver, set on a farm and featuring a dysfunctional father-son relationship, plus much eating of red meat, appeared in Issue 57 of The Sirens Call, which can be downloaded here.
  • And in July, it was the following issue of The Sirens Call that provided a home for my next story to appear in 2022. The magazine’s summer 2022 edition featured stories with a holiday theme. Thus, my story Selfless was about a holidaying couple in Thailand who come into possession of a strange smartphone that requires its owner to take lots of selfies.  Endless selfies… The issue can be downloaded here.

 

© Thurston Howl Publications

 

  • My haunted-house story Coming Home originally appeared in the webzine The Horror Zine back in 2014. In September 2022, I was delighted when it was selected for the commemorative anthology The Best of the Horror Zine: The Middle Years, which showcased the webzine’s strongest stories published between 2013 and 2020.  The collection can be purchased on Kindle or as a paperback here.
  • In October, I made it into the pages of another anthology. Published by Cloaked Press LLC, Nightmare Fuel 2022: Objects of Horror featured stories where “what lurks in plain sight… is the true horror” and where the scares emanate from “such seemingly mundane items as an antique desk, a television, or a cute little stuffed elephant…” My story was about a set of haunted wind chimes and, unsurprisingly, was called The Chimes.  Nightmare Fuel 2022: Objects of Horror can be obtained in Kindle or paperback versions here.
  • October was also the month of Halloween, and I managed to get a story into Issue 59, the Halloween edition, of The Sirens Call. This was entitled Guising and took a nostalgic look at the custom of guising – the Scottish version of trick-or-treating – as kids practised it in the 1970s.  Being a Jim Mountfield story, there was of course a gruesome ending.  A copy of the Halloween edition can be downloaded here.
  • Just before Christmas, my story Upstairs, inspired by the crumbling old French-Colonial-era apartment building that I lived in during my years in Tunisia, appeared in the December 2022 edition of ParABnormal Magazine, which can be purchased here.
  • And at the end of the year, my story The Faire Chlaidh – which translates from Scottish Gaelic as ‘the graveyard watch’ and is about the old belief that one of the souls of the folk buried in a graveyard has to remain there and guard the place – appeared in Issue 60 of The Sirens Call. It can be obtained here.

 

© The Sirens Call

 

As Rab Foster:

  • In January 2022, my fantasy story Crows of the Mynchmoor appeared in the ezine Swords and Sorcery Magazine. Not only about crows, but also about witches, sheep, scarecrows and, yes, turnips (beat that, George R.R. Martin), the story can now be read in the ezine’s archive section, here.
  • And it was in Swords and Sorcery Magazine that my second Rab Foster story of the year appeared, in August. The Library of Vadargarn was about forbidden books, religious zealots and demons covered in bronze scales and, again, is available for reading in the ezine’s archives, here.
  • Drayak Shathsprey, the hero of Crows of the Mynchmoor, made a second appearance in 2022. This was in the story The Tower and the Stars, published in the ezine Aphelion in October.  The Tower and the Stars also featured another Rab Foster character, the witch Gudroon, who’d originally appeared in the anthology Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3, published in November 2021.  The story is now available to read in Aphelion’s archive, here.

 

And that’s everything.  A very Happy New Year to you all.

 

Let’s hope that – if years were cars – 2023 is more like that Aston Martin DB5 and less like a brazenly-polluting, smoke-belching pick-up truck that Andrew Tate would approve of.  (Tate… Ha ha.)  Oh, and let’s hope too that Michelle Mone’s luxury yacht hits an iceberg.

 

© Aphelion

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Rab Foster gets starstruck

 

© Aphelion Webzine

 

I’m pleased to report that Rab Foster, the penname I attach to my fantasy fiction, has got a new story included in the November 2022 edition of the webzine Aphelion.  The story is entitled The Tower and the Stars and is a sword-and-sorcery tale involving a bloodthirsty cult of star-worshippers, who are based in an ancient tower in the middle of a vast and desolate marsh.  It’s also influenced by the celebrated American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, at least with regards to the entities that the cult is trying to invoke.  The horrors in Lovecraft’s stories were famously ‘nameless’ and ‘unspeakable’ and generally so horrible as to be beyond description, which is very handy for a writer.  If your villains are indescribable, you don’t have to spend time and effort describing them.

 

The story’s main characters are a benevolent witch called Gudroon, who previously appeared in a story of mine entitled The Foliage, which was included in last year’s collection Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3; and a swordsman called Drayak Shathsprey, who was featured in a story entitled Crows of the Mynchmoor that I had published at the start of 2022 in the online Swords and Sorcery Magazine.  So, The Tower and the Stars is what in modern parlance is known as a ‘team-up’.  Watch out, Marvel Comics Universe – here comes the Rab Foster Universe.

 

For the next month, The Tower and the Stars can be accessed here, while the contents page of the November 2022 issue of Aphelion can be accessed here.

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Rab Foster gets a book deal

 

© Swords and Sorcery Magazine

 

Rab Foster, the pseudonym under which I write fantasy fiction, has just had a new short story published in the ezine Swords and Sorcery Magazine.  It’s entitled The Library of Vadargarn and is about a tough, unscrupulous swordsman – is there any other type in sword-and-sorcery stories? – who agrees to transport a strange book in a city where books, reading and libraries are banned.

 

I should say I’ve always been fascinated by stories involving imaginary, fantastical and / or sinister books, such as The Grasshopper Lies Heavy in Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle (1962); The Book of Sand in Jorge Luis Borges’ 1975 short story of the same name; The King in Yellow in Robert W. Chambers’ 1895 short-story collection of the same name (okay, actually an imaginary play rather than an imaginary book); and the granddaddy of spooky made-up books, The Necronomicon in H.P. Lovecraft’s stories of the Cthulhu Mythos, which was supposedly written by ‘the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred’ in the 8th century and translated into English in Elizabethan times by Dr John Dee, no less.

 

I’m also a sucker for fantastical or sinister libraries, like the one featured in the short story The Library of Babel (1962) by Jorge Luis Borges again; or the one that appears near the end of Umberto Eco’s medieval detective novel The Name of the Rose (1980) – Eco gently takes the piss out of Borges by having it run by a blind, malevolent librarian called Jorge of Burgos.

 

Not that any of the above works had any influence on The Library of Vadargarn.  Weirdly enough, the only thing that might have influenced it was the novel I was reading at the time I wrote it, Still Midnight (2009) by the Scottish writer Denise Mina.  This ‘tartan noir’ crime thriller is about a businessman getting kidnapped and, while his family try to put together the ransom money, being held prisoner in a disused furnace in an old Glaswegian factory…  Which may have had some bearing on where the climax of my story takes place.

 

For the next few weeks, The Library of Vadargarn can be accessed here.

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Rab Foster has something to crow about

 

© Sword & Sorcery Magazine

 

My first published story of 2022 has just appeared in issue 120 of the online Swords & Sorcery Magazine. As the magazine puts out a new issue each month, and as there are twelve months in a year, issue 120 marks the tenth anniversary of its founding. Thus, I’m honoured to have work featured in this important birthday edition.

 

The story is a fantasy one called Crows of the Mynchmoor and is credited to Rab Foster, the pseudonym I use for my fantasy fiction.  I won’t give anything away about its plot but I will say its setting – moorland, heather, ferns, stone dykes, sheep – is inspired by the upland landscapes around Peebles in the Scottish Borders, where I grew up.  In fact, the name ‘Mynchmoor’ is derived from the real-life Minch Moor, which rises south of the village of Traquair a few miles along the road from Peebles.

 

However, for the route that the hero follows over the Mynchmoor in the story, I was thinking more of the Gypsy Glen drove road that climbs out of the southern edge of Peebles and crosses the summits of Kailzie Hill, Kirkhope Law and Birkscairn Hill.  I’ve never walked along that drove road when the surroundings have been anything less than lovely, but to make the story atmospheric and gothic, I made the route misty, cold and damp – which the drove road no doubt is if you venture up there in wintertime.

 

 

Also, I think Crows of the Mynchmoor could constitute an important first in the history of fantasy fiction, because playing a prominent role in its plot are… turnips.  Yes, George R.R. Martin, you might have made a fortune and become a household name thanks to the Game of Thrones books, but did you ever think about featuring turnips in them?  No?  Well, you must be kicking yourself now.

 

For the time being, the main page of issue 120 of Swords & Sorcery Magazine is accessible here, while Crows of the Mynchmoor itself can be read here.

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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!

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Rab Foster clears the foliage

 

© Jim Pitts / Parallel Universe Publications

 

Rab Foster, the pen-name under which I write fantasy fiction, has just had a short story published in the collection Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3.  This is the tenth piece by Mr Foster that’s seen publication in recent years, which I’m pleased, but also surprised about.  I’ve always enjoyed reading fantasy literature by the likes of C. L. Moore, Karl Edward Wagner, Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock, but for most of the 21st century I’d assumed there were few outlets where you could get works in the genre published – at least, in its short-story form, which is my speciality.  However, lately, there seems to have been a surge in the number of magazines, ezines and anthologies devoted to fantasy fiction, which has created many new opportunities.  Maybe this is due to the popularity of the Games of Thrones TV series (2011-19).  If so, thanks for that, George R.R. Martin.

 

I’m particularly happy to have a story published in this collection because it’s been put together by David A. Riley and Jim Pitts at Parallel Universe Publications.  Lancastrian artist Jim Pitts has illustrated the volume and I well remember his artwork from 40 years ago when it appeared in a magazine called Fantasy Tales.  As I said in a recent blog-entry, Fantasy Tales was the first publication that I, as a young, aspiring and acne-ridden writer, submitted stories to.  While they weren’t accepted, one of Fantasy Tales’ editors, Dave Sutton, was decent enough to write back and offer advice about how to make my work more organised and presentable.  He told me to leave spaces after punctuation marks when I was typing my manuscripts, so that my sentences didn’t turn into typographical pile-ups.  Also, in an effort to build tension, I employed a lot of one-sentence paragraphs, which hit the protagonists with one revelation after another.  Probably not a good idea, he pointed out, to have six or seven one-sentence paragraphs in a row…

 

I remember Fantasy Tales as a gorgeous-looking little magazine, with Pitt’s colour artwork adorning its cover and his intricate, atmospheric black-and-white illustrations on the pages inside.  Here’s a few examples.

 

© Jim Pitts / Fantasy Tales

© Jim Pitts / Parallel Universe Publications

 

Anyhow, I’m chuffed that one of my stories is sharing a book with Jim Pitts’ artwork at last.

 

Rab Foster’s story in Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3 is entitled The Foliage, and I suspect it’s no coincidence that I started writing it soon after watching the movie In the Earth (2021), a forest-set piece of sci-fi / horror eco-weirdness from filmmaker Ben Wheatley.  The story also owes something to a 1976 Doctor Who adventure called The Seeds of Doom, which featured Tom Baker as the Doctor and a marvellously-deranged Tony Beckley and John Challis (who later became a much-loved comedy actor and who, sadly, died in September this year) as the villains.  I know nerds between the ages of 15 and 70 will argue till the cows come home about what the scariest ever Doctor Who adventure is, but for my money, The Seeds of Doom is the one.

 

Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3 is currently available at amazon.co.uk here and at amazon.com here.

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Another orchestration from Rab Foster

 

© Swords and Sorcery Magazine

 

My short story The Orchestra of Syrak is now available to read online in the 116th issue of Swords and Sorcery Magazine.  As the name of the magazine suggests, The Orchestra of Syrak belongs to the fantasy genre and for that reason it’s been published under the penname Rab Foster, the name I attach to any fiction I write that involves magic, castles, mythical monsters and brawny, heroic swordsmen lumbering around clad in nothing but leather jockstraps, and that evokes the spirit of such writers as Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock and Karl Edward Wagner.

 

Actually, The Orchestra of Syrak involves only a small dollop of magic and monstrousness and contains no castles or brawny swordsmen at all.  It’s about a group of thieves who discover a strange assortment of musical instruments and, if it’s indebted to any writer, then it probably owes something to the American pulp-ster Clark Ashton Smith.  In the 1920s and 1930s, Smith churned out dozens of phantasmagorical stories, many of which were published in the doyen of pulp-fiction magazines, Weird Tales.  In the 1970s, some of his better-known stories appeared in Britain, published by Panther Books in paperback collections with titles like Lost Worlds Volume 1 and Volume 2, The Abominations of Yondo and Genius Loci.  The collections’ covers featured some fabulously colourful and evocative artwork by Bruce Pennington.  In fact, I like Pennington’s artwork so much that I’ll use this entry as an excuse to reproduce it here:

 

© Panther Books

 

Returning to Clark Ashton Smith – one thing you can’t ignore about him is the unashamed verbosity of his prose.  He was never a writer to use one adjective when half-a-dozen, multi-syllabled and archaic ones would do.  I know I’m guilty of overwriting occasionally, but the opening paragraph of The Orchestra of Syrak contains six adjectives and adverbs, while in the similar-sized opening paragraph of the title story in The Abominations of Yondo I counted 21.  Still, although Smith’s prose veers off into dark shades of purpleness, I have to say I find it endearing, though it’s not something I can digest in more than small doses – any more than I’d want to eat slices of rich, dark, thickly-creamed Black Forest Gateau all the time.  (I think it’s a shame, however, that so many young, up-and-coming fantasy writers are so influenced by Smith that they laboriously try to emulate his writing style.  While Smith’s style is uniquely appealing, that of his imitators is often just unreadable.)

 

For the next month, The Orchestra of Syrak can be read here, while the home page of issue 116 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine can be accessed here.

 

And here’s a picture of the young Clark Ashton Smith, looking oddly like Jarvis Cocker in his His ‘n’ Hers period.

 

From wikipedia.org 

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Rab Foster gets theatrical

 

© Aphelion Webzine

 

I’m pleased to announce that my 13,000-word story The Theatregoers has been published in the July 2021 edition of the webzine Aphelion.  The Theatregoers is a sword-and-sorcery story in, I hope, the tradition of such revered pulp writers as Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and C.L. Moore and, as usual with my fantasy fiction, I have published it under the pen-name Rab Foster.

 

On this blog I’m not normally presumptuous enough to offer other writers, or aspiring writers, advice on how they should go about creating stories.  On this occasion, though, I’ll suggest two strategies that helped me to put The Theatregoers together.

 

Firstly, when you have an idea for a story, get that idea written down as quickly as you can before it flits from your memory again.  (At my age, things flit from my memory with terrifying speed.)  I have a 17-page-long document on my computer hard drive containing more than 400 ideas I’ve had for stories over the years and I’m constantly adding to it.

 

Admittedly, many of those ideas will probably never see the light of day as stories and, to be honest, looking at some of the ideas I wrote down long ago thinking they were bolts of divine genius, I don’t think the world will be missing anything if they don’t.  I doubt if anyone really wants to read a story about the notoriously bad Dundonian poet William McGonagall building a time machine in order to travel back in time to prevent the Tay Bridge Disaster from happening; or about a Sri Lankan tuk-tuk driver who’s secretly a superhero; or about ‘a fashion show for serial killers’, where the dresses have been fashioned out of…  Well, you can probably guess what they’re made of.

 

The other writing strategy I’d suggest is to keep reviewing your list of ideas and particularly think about how two or more ideas can be incorporated into one story.  In other words, don’t see each idea as a single seed from which a single story is grown.  Many times, I’ve had an idea that’s looked good on paper but that has resolutely refused to develop into a story – until it’s occurred to me to try splicing it together with another, seemingly totally different idea elsewhere on the list.

 

In fact, with The Theatregoers, I ended up throwing no fewer than four disparate ideas from my 17-page list into the creative blender.  I’d always wanted to write: (1) a story set in an abandoned city out in the middle of some inhospitable desert (similar to the setting of the 1921 H.P. Lovecraft story The Nameless City); (2) a story set in a theatre, where the characters would have adventures falling through trapdoors, scrabbling down stage curtains, flying about on wires above the stage, running through storerooms full of assorted props, and so on; (3) a story about vampire-like creatures that don’t drain their victims of blood but of moisture; and (4) a story about a tattooed person whose tattoos aren’t as inanimate as you’d expect, reminiscent of the title character in the classic Ray Bradbury collection The Illustrated Man (1951).  Somehow, I came up with a single, hopefully coherent narrative.

 

© Panther Books

 

For the next few weeks, the main page of the July 2021 edition of Aphelion can be accessed here, while The Theatregoers itself can be accessed here.