Richard Stanley – Blood and Porridge

© Stygian Lepus

I grew up on a farm. In fact, I grew up on two farms, one in Northern Ireland and the other in Scotland. So when I write fiction, farms are a common setting for my stories. That includes scary stories, which I write under the pseudonym Jim Mountfield.

A big inspiration for my ‘farm-horror’ stories was a 2005 Irish film called Isolation, written and directed by Billy O’Brien. It’s about a lonely and financially-pressed farmer forced to take the filthy lucre of a bio-genetics company and let them experiment on his cattle. Being a horror film, this doesn’t result in faster-growing livestock as the company hopes but some nightmarishly malformed, slimy organisms whose alien tissue is soon infecting all living things on the farm, bovine and human. Though it’s not well-known, Infection has a great cast – including two of my favourite Irish actors, John Lynch and Ruth Negga, plus Essie Davis and Sean Harris.

What really impressed me, though, was its bleak agricultural setting, one where soulless concrete animal-sheds and black-tarped silage pits loomed next to decaying barns and lakes of slurry, everything dark and driech in the continuously pissing rain. This made me realise that, at least on a bad-weather day, much modern farming is so grim it’s a horror story even before any monsters show up.

© Film Four / Lions Gate Films / Irish Film Board

Last year, I had three farm-horror stories published – Wool in (the now sadly-defunct) The Sirens Call, The Turnip Thieves in Schlock! Webzine and The Shelter Belt in Witch House. Feeling I’d rather overdone this sub-genre, I didn’t write any more for a while. Until now – for I’ve just had a new, farm-set story published, one featuring the requisite soulless concrete sheds and decaying barns, rain and muck. It’s called Rack and Ruin and appears in the newly-published Issue 19 of The Stygian Lepus.

The original idea for Rack and Ruin came from the roadkill I’d frequently see on the back-road beside my family’s farm in Scotland. One very wet day, walking along that back-road, I encountered some roadkill that’d been so mashed by the wheels of passing cars, and partly-dispersed by the pounding rain, that I had no idea what animal it’d been. I gave the gruesome thing a wide birth as I walked by it. I would have given it an even wider berth if this had happened after I saw Isolation, for it resembled one of the squishy, hellish things in the film.

Rack and Ruin was also influenced slightly by the classic H.P. Lovecraft story, The Colour Out of Space (1927), in which a meteorite crashes in the hills of Massachusetts and releases a strange blight on the surrounding land – the property of a farmer called Nahum Gardner, who subsequently sees his crops and livestock mutate and become uneatable and unsellable and his family members die, disappear, go mad or grow horribly deformed. This is accompanied by the appearance of an indescribable colour that exists outside the visible spectrum.

Lovecraft’s story is told through the eyes of a narrator, a surveyor, who gets the details of the story from one of the Gardners’ neighbours. Thus, there’s little from the perspective of the farming family actually at the centre of the horror. I thought I would try to address this in Rack and Ruin. Farming is tough enough in the real world, being tethered to a piece of ground, toiling at it night and day in all weathers, trying to make a living from it whilst at the mercy of the natural climate and the economic one. Imagine how much worse you’d feel if your precious land was threatened by something inexplicably cosmic in origin.

The Colour Out of Space has been filmed several times and at least one of them, a 2019 version directed and co-written by Richard Stanley, does tell the story from the viewpoint of the Gardners. However, as Nathan Gardner – Stanley’s renamed Nahum Gardner – is played by Nicolas Cage, he hardly behaves like any farmer I’ve ever met. The scene where Cage freaks out after discovering his beloved tomatoes have been spoiled by the pesky meteorite is funny, though.

© SpectreVision / RLJE Films

For roughly the next month, my story Rack and Ruin can be read here. And for the contents page of The Stygian Lepus, Issue 19, and access to all its stories and articles, visit here.

© Horla Magazine

A new short story of mine, Problem Family, is now available to read online at Horla Magazine. As it’s a horror story, it’s attributed to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write macabre fiction.

The main inspiration for Problem Family was a real-life incident that happened to me in Colombo a couple of years ago, when I was living in a different apartment building from the one I live in today. An extremely noisy family lived in an apartment on the floor below mine. For some reason – the building’s acoustics, the way the stairwell was positioned – the noise they generated seemed to flow straight up to my front door. Indeed, it sometimes seemed like the loud melodramas they were enacting were taking place right on the other side of my door. One evening, I heard adult male and female voices screaming at each other and became convinced that, if this went on for much longer, the woman was going to be assaulted. So, reluctantly, I ventured downstairs, ostensibly to tell them to shut up, but really to find out if I needed to report something to the police. Thankfully, the situation proved to be non-violent – and at my appearance, the pair of them did shut up.

Also, in part and completely differently, Problem Family was inspired by the famous 1927 sci-fi / horror story The Colour Out of Space by H.P. Lovecraft. This is an account what happens after a meteorite strikes a remote area of Massachusetts. A nearby farming family begin to succumb to what initially seems to be a weird, creeping, expanding poison but is actually a grotesque alien lifeform exuding an indescribable colour – it was ‘only by analogy that they called it a colour at all’. The Colour Out of Space has been filmed several times, starting with a rather duff version starring Boris Karloff and directed by Daniel Haller in 1965, and most recently in 2019 with a phantasmagorical version courtesy of director Richard Stanley. The 2019 film is slightly too reminiscent of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), but benefits from a striking colour palette – it’s difficult to depict unknown alien colours on celluloid, so Stanley settles for making everything a garish purple – and from Nicholas Cage in the lead role, doing the sort of acting things that only Nicholas Cage is capable of doing.

You can also hear The Colour Out of Space being read aloud on this video from the BBC’s ‘interactive culture magazine’ Collective. Brilliantly, the reader is none other than the late, great Mark E. Smith, vocalist with and guiding light of abrasive post-punk / alternative rock band the Fall. The sound of Smith’s thick Mancunian accent and the Massachusetts accents of Lovecraft’s characters battling for supremacy is something else. I have to say, though, that the bit at the beginning where Smith sticks out and wiggles his tongue is as terrifying as anything in the story itself.

Fittingly for a magazine that takes its name from The Horla, the classic 1887 story by Guy De Maupassant, Horla describes itself as ‘the home of intelligent horror’. Its main page, which gives access to a bevy of cracking stories, can be reached here. Meanwhile, Problem Family itself can, for now, be read here.

Tag: Richard Stanley

Jim Mountfield racks up another one

Jim Mountfield keeps it in the family