Tag: Railroad Tales

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

My 2021 writing round-up

 

© Midnight Street Press

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

© DBND Publishing

 

As Jim Mountfield:

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

 

© Horrified Magazine

 

As Rab Foster:

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

 

© Aphelion

 

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

 

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

Posted on

Jim Mountfield takes a train

 

© Midnight Street Press

 

My short story Ballyshannon Junction is featured in the recent anthology Railroad Tales, edited by Trevor Denyer and published by Trevor’s Midnight Street Press.  Railroad Tales is a collection of stories ‘involving railroads, trains, stations, junctions and crossings’ that also involve the ‘horrific, supernatural or extraordinary’.  For that reason, Ballyshannon Junction is attributed to the pseudonym Jim Mountfield, the penname I attach to my macabre fiction.  (Well, my real name ‘Ian Smith’ hardly sounds as evocative as, say, ‘Edgar Allan Poe’ or ‘H.P. Lovecraft’ or even ‘Dean R. Koontz’.)

 

Ballyshannon Junction had a long gestation period.  It’s rooted in my childhood in Northern Ireland when, up until the age of eight or nine years old, I was lucky enough to have a former railway station as my personal playground.  My family were farmers and, after my parents got married, my grandparents decided to move out of the family farmhouse to let their son and new daughter-in-law get on with the running of the farm.  They bought the nearby Bundoran Junction, a former railway-station building and its surroundings that’d last seen trains in 1957 when the Irish Northwest line was closed, and they lived there in retirement.

 

The property had two platforms, one by the line to Enniskillen in County Fermanagh and one by the line to the seaside town of Bundoran in County Donegal.  My grandfather planted trees along one line and filled in part of the other to create a lawn.  I often spent the day there, or stayed with my grandparents overnight, and the place was like catnip to my young imagination.  The station house had a glasshouse-like annex that I’d always thought was the old waiting room, although I’ve recently learned that it operated as a ‘refreshment room’.  In addition, there were sheds, a pavilion building, a pond whose water was presumably used for filling the old steam locomotives and, best of all for a kid like me, an intact signal box with a staircase leading up to it – great for playing at being soldiers, knights, the Foreign Legion, the US Cavalry or anything else that might require a fort.  I also remember a section of rusty metal wall that, according to this website, had once been the station’s urinal and, obstinately, still stands today.

 

Just to make the Junction seem more exotic still, the strip of ground behind the station building, between the two platforms and lines, was covered in trees. This belt of woodland was only a few metres wide, but to someone of my small size and immaturity it seemed like a dense forest.

 

In the mid-1970s, my grandparents relocated to the village of Ballinamallard, three miles away, and Bundoran Junction was bought by a retired clergyman, the Reverend Robert Simmons, and his family.  However, after that, I remained a regular face at the Junction because I was at school with the Simmons’ two sons and sometimes got invited to visit them.

 

I’d been trying to use my memories of the Junction as the basis for a story since my teens. In fact, when I was 16, I wrote the first 20 pages of a story wherein a young homeless man, wandering about the countryside, stumbles across a disused railway line and starts living in an old signal box.  There were no station building or platforms in the story, and I added a railway tunnel, but otherwise the setting was identical to Bundoran Junction.  (The story’s premise was that the young man became convinced that something hideous and evil was lurking in the tunnel.  He’d even find weird slimy footprints in the mornings, leading up the stairs to the door of the signal box, which suggested the thing was stalking him.  But – curses! – I could never figure out what the thing in the tunnel actually was and eventually I abandoned the story.)

 

In the years since, I’ve tried several times to write other stories based on the Junction, but with a similar lack of success.  Then, earlier this year, when Trevor Denyer announced that Railroad Tales was open for submissions, I decided to try again.

 

It also occurred to me that with my previous attempts at Junction stories, I’d always set the action not in Northern Ireland, but in some anonymous, generic tract of the English countryside.  This time, I thought, why not write something about Bundoran Junction that’s actually set in Northern Ireland?  To my surprise, I got the story finished and, to my immense satisfaction, it was accepted for Railroad Tales.

 

Not only does Ballyshannon Junction – Ballyshannon is a town in Donegal that’s close to Bundoran, the place that the real Junction was named after – take place in Northern Ireland, but it’s set in the year 1982, which wasn’t long after the period when I played there as a kid.  For that reason, although it contains supernatural elements, Ballyshannon Junction is also informed by the mistrust, conflict, sectarianism and terrorism that blighted Northern Ireland at the time.

 

309 pages long, and bringing together 23 weird and creepy stories with a railway theme, Railroad Tales can be purchased through Amazon UK, here.

 

From eadiemcfarland.co.uk