Tag: Roald Dahl

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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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Wordsworth’s ghosts

 

© Wordsworth Editions

 

I’ve just realised that two-and-a-half weeks from now it’ll be Halloween.  Therefore, as I usually do at this time of year, I’ll be posting a few entries on this blog about the dark, the spooky, the supernatural and the macabre.  To begin with, here’s something I originally wrote in 2019 about three collections of ghostly tales by three forgotten writers of yesteryear.

 

I’ve read a lot of 19th century ghost stories recently.  These have featured in collections published by Wordsworth Editions in its series Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural, which I’ve picked up in various library clearance sales and second-hand bookshops.  The last time I checked, Wordsworth’s Mystery and the Supernatural series consisted of 80 different titles and they’re an admirable balance between works by authors who are well-known, like H.P. Lovecraft, M.R. James, Edgar Wallace, Edith Wharton and Henry James, and works by authors who aren’t – or, in some cases, were famous once but have now disappeared off the reading public’s radar.  By acquainting modern readers with writers in the latter category, the series performs an invaluable service.  It was through reading one of its books a few years ago, for instance, that I discovered the excellent but now neglected writer May Sinclair, about whom I wrote here.

 

Anyway, I’ve just finished reading Wordsworth collections by Amayas Northcote, Gertrude Atherton and J.H. Riddell.  How do their ghost stories measure up?

 

Amayas Northcote is the most elusive figure of the three.  His Wikipedia entry merely states that he was the seventh son of the First Earl of Iddesleigh, who was Benjamin Disraeli’s Chancellor of the Exchequer; he was a businessman in Chicago at one time and a Justice of the Peace in Buckinghamshire at another; and he “wrote ghost stories in the line of those of M.R. James, which were compiled in his only book, In Ghostly Company.”  One likely reason why Company was Northcote’s only book was because it was published in 1921 and he died soon afterwards in 1923, before he had much chance to follow it with further fiction, ghostly or otherwise.

 

I have to admit that while I found Northcote’s stories enjoyable, most of them feel a bit run-of-the-mill.  Often, as in the case of Mr Kershaw and Mr Wilcox, The Late Earl of D., The Steps and The Governess’s Story, they involve manifestations of the supernatural linked to murders, untimely deaths and disappearances.  The two most interesting stories are those that stray furthest from the formula.  The Downs deals with a secluded stretch of British countryside that, one night a year, becomes the scene of a haunting on a spectacular scale; while The Late Mrs Fowke strays unexpectedly into the realms of devil worship and reads like a prototype for the occult potboilers that Dennis Wheatley would start writing little more than a decade later.

 

© Wordsworth Editions

 

Considerably greater in range and ambition are the stories of American author Gertrude Atherton collected in The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories, originally published in 1905.  These are tales that are by turns grisly (The Striding Place), phantasmagorical (The Dead and the Countess) and imbued with a psychological intensity reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe (Death and the Woman).

 

Some aren’t supernatural at all but are grim character studies.  A Monarch of a Small Survey is about a sad and frumpy lady’s companion who suffers the double misfortune of being cut out of her employer’s will and becoming futilely besotted with a younger man.  Similarly, The Tragedy of a Snob looks at the gulf between the haves and have nots, chronicling the efforts of a man of limited means to gain access to the world of high society.  And The Greatest Good of the Greatest Number is about a physician who convinces himself that by eliminating the life of one worthless person he can improve the lives of all the decent people who’ve been blighted by her – but finds the execution of the deed harder than he’d expected.  Simply but compellingly set up, The Greatest Good feels like a Roald Dahl story with a stern moral conscience.

 

I have to say, though, that my respect for Atherton was diminished by the inclusion of A Prologue, which is presented as the first part of an unfinished play.  It’s a brooding, gothic piece set on a West Indian island about to be pulverised by a hurricane and is slightly reminiscent of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966).  It’s also racist, with a household’s black slaves cowering and wailing pathetically on the floor while their white owners stomp around, cursing them for their superstitious uselessness and trying to secure the premises without their help.  Yes, I know the work simply reflects the attitudes of white people towards slaves and slavery back then and  should be taken as being ‘of its time’.  But it still left a bad taste in my mouth.

 

I’d been looking forward to J.H. Riddell’s Night Shivers, a volume that contains 14 short stories and is rounded off with a short novel, The Uninhabited House, which was first published in 1875.  This was because Riddell originated in Northern Ireland, like I did.  She was born in Carrickfergus, County Antrim, in 1832 and lived there until 1855, when she and her mother moved to London.  She remained in England until her death in 1906 and during the intervening years established herself as a prolific author.  Her Wikipedia entry lists some 40 novels and a half-dozen short story collections.

 

I’d been hoping that Ms Riddell’s ghostly fiction would have a strong Irish flavour and, occasionally, it does – to good effect.  The Last of Squire Ennismore sees a dissolute Irish landowner come to an infernal end for his misdeeds, through the agency of a mysterious stranger with ‘an ambling sort of gait, curious to look at’ who leaves cloven hoof-prints on the sand of the local beach.  Hertford O’Donnell’s Warning features that most Irish of supernatural creature, the banshee, though in the incongruous (but effective) setting of a Victorian London hospital.  And Conn Kilrea features another Irish family haunted by a spectral, though non-banshee, harbinger of death.

 

However, most of the stories take place in England and, because I’ve read countless other English ghost stories over the year, their scenarios seem very familiar and they have the same generic feel as Amyas Northcote’s work.  Riddell enjoys presenting her ghosts and supernatural phenomena as puzzles that the living characters have to solve.  Invariably, they turn out to be traces and echoes of nefarious incidents – usually murders – that once upon a time occurred in the ‘real’ world.

 

One thing I like about Riddell’s fiction is her depiction of unusually (for the era) feisty and unconventional female characters, even if they come across as somewhat grotesque. The most notable of these are Miss Gostock, the hard-working, hard-bargain-driving and hard-drinking landlady in Nut Bush Farm; and the formidable Miss Blake, ‘the child of a Scottish-Ulster mother and a Connaught father’ who ‘had ingeniously contrived to combine in her person the vices of two distinct races, and exclude the virtues of both’, in The Uninhabited House.

 

Also, I like how she portrays the main character in Walnut-Tree House.  He’s an unpretentious fellow who comes into possession of a haunted property in London after spending years as a ‘digger’ in the Australian goldfields.  The snobby Londoners he has dealings with disdain him as ‘a rough sort of fellow’ who’s ‘boorish’ and has ‘never mixed with good society’.  But when he encounters the ghost in his house, that of a child, he doesn’t react as characters normally do in these stories and cringe or flee in terror.  Instead, he feels sorry for the poor child’s ghost and resolves to find a way to make it rest in peace.

 

© Wordsworth Editions

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Favourite Scots words, D-F

 

From en.wikipedia.org

 

This evening is Burns Night, marking the 261st anniversary of the birth of Scotland’s greatest poet, and one-time ploughman, Robert Burns.

 

In a normal, pandemic-free year, children in schools the length and breadth of Scotland would have spent the past few days standing in front of their classmates and teachers reciting Burns’ poems.  Those poems, of course, were written in the Scots language; so this must be the only time in the year when kids can come out with certain Scots words in the classroom without their teachers correcting them: “Actually, that’s not what we say in proper English…”

 

In fact, lately, Scots has been getting attention that has nothing to do with tonight being Burns night.  Scots-language poetess Miss PunnyPennie has won herself tens of thousands of fans in recent months with her tweets and YouTube videos, in which she recites her poems and discusses a different Scots word each day.  Those fans include author Neil Gaiman, comedienne Janey Godley and actor Michael Sheen.

 

Unfortunately, she’s also had to put up with a lot of negativity.  She was the subject of a condescending and mocking piece published recently in the Sunday Times, which added insult to injury by calling her a blatherskite (‘ill-informed loudmouth’) in its headline.  More seriously, she’s received much trolling on twitter.  For instance, political ūber-chancer George Galloway – currently trying to reinvent himself as a diehard British nationalist in a bid to get elected to the Scottish parliament – tweeted something derogatory about her, in the process exposing her to potential abuse from his nutjob twitter followers.

 

Actually, Scots seems to have become part of the culture wars being waged in Scotland at the moment.  Pro-United Kingdom, anti-Scottish independence zealots like Galloway hate the idea that Scottish people might have their own language because it contradicts their narrative that everyone on the island of Great Britain is one people and culturally the same.  Hence, much online protestation (by people whose profiles are slathered with Union Jacks) that Scots is just ‘an accent’ or ‘slang’ or ‘a made-up language’ or ‘normal English with spelling mistakes’.

 

From cheezburger.com

 

Anyhow, as promised, here’s my next selection of favourite Scots words, those starting with the letters ‘D’, ‘E’ and ‘F’.

 

Dander (n/v) – stroll.  Over the centuries, a lot of Scots words made their way across the Irish Sea to the north of Ireland, where I spent the first 11 years of my life, and the delightful word dander is one of them.  I heard as many Northern Irish folk announce that they were ‘goin’ fir a dander’ as I heard Scottish folk announce it later, after my family had moved to Scotland.

 

Deasil (adv) – a Gaelic-derived word that means ‘clockwise’.  It’s a less well-known counterpart to the Scots word widdershins, meaning ‘anti-clockwise’.   I suspect the latter word is better known because it figures heavily in witchcraft and there’s been at least one journal of ‘Magick, ancient and modern’ with ‘Widdershins’ as its title.

 

Deave (v) – to bore and sicken someone with endless blather.  For example, “Thon Belfast singer-songwriter fellah Van Morrison is fair deavin’ me wi his coronavirus conspiracies.”

 

Dicht (n/v) – wipe.  Many a dirty-faced youngster, or clarty-faced bairn, in Scotland has heard their mother order them, ‘Gie yer a face a dicht’.

 

Doonhamer (n) – a person from Dumfries, the main town in southwest Scotland.  For many years, I had only ever seen this word in print, not heard anyone say it, and I’d always misread it as ‘Doom-hammer’, which made me think Dumfries’ inhabitants must be the most heavy-metal people on the planet.  But then, disappointingly, I realised how the word was properly spelt.  Also, I discovered that the word comes from how Dumfries folk refer to their hometown whilst in the more populous parts of Scotland up north, for example, in the cities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dundee.  They call it doon hame, i.e. ‘down home’.

 

Dook (n/v) – the act of immersing yourself in water.  Thus, the traditional Halloween game involving retrieving apples from a basin of water using your mouth, not your hands, is known in Scotland as dookin’ fir apples.

 

Douce (adj) – quiet, demure, civilised, prim.  My hometown of Peebles is frequently described as douce.  However, that’s by outsiders, short-term visitors and travellers passing through, who’ve never been inside the public bar of the Crown Hotel on Peebles High Street on a Saturday night.

 

From unsplash.com / © Eilis Garvey

 

Dreich (adj) – dreary or tedious, especially with regard to wet, dismal weather.  A very Presbyterian-sounding adjective that, inevitably, is much used in Scotland.

 

Drookit (adj) – soaking wet.  How children often are on Halloween after dookin’ fir apples.

 

Drouth (n) – a thirst.  Many an epic drinking session has started when someone declared that they had a drouth and then herded the company into a pub to rectify matters.  Its adjectival form is drouthy and Tam O’Shanter, perhaps Burns’ most famous poem, begins with an evocation of the boozing that happens when ‘drouthy neebors, neebors meet.’  Indeed, Drouthy Neebors has become a popular pub-name in Scotland and there are, or at least have been, Drouthy Neebors serving alcohol in Edinburgh, St Andrews, Stirling and Largs.

 

From Tripadvisor / © Drouthy Neebors, Largs

 

Dunt (n / v) – a heavy but dull-sounding blow.  It figures in the old saying, “Words are but wind, but dunts are the devil,”  which I guess is a version of “Sticks and stones will break your bones, but names will never hurt you.”

 

Dux (n) – the star pupil in a school.

 

Eejit (n) – idiot.  Inevitably, in 2008, when Dundonian poet Matthew Fitt got around to translating Roald Dahl’s 1980 children’s book The Twits into Scots, he retitled it The Eejits.  Actually, there’s a lot of other Scots words in the D-F category that mean ‘idiot’.  See also dafty, diddy, doughball and dunderheid.

 

© Itchy Coo

 

Eeksie–peeksie (adj/adv) – equal, equally, evenly balanced.  A quaint term that was recently the subject of one of Miss PunniePenny’s ‘Scots word of the day’ tweets.

 

Fankle (n/v) – tangle.  I’ve heard the English plea to someone to calm down, “Don’t get your knickers in a twist!” rephrased in Scots as “Dinna get yer knickers in a fankle!”

 

Fantoosh (adj) – fancy, over-elaborate, a bit too glammed-up.

 

Fash (v) – to anger or annoy, commonly heard in the phrase “Dinna fash yerself”.  Like a number of Scots words, this is derived from Old French, from the ancestor of the modern French verb ‘fâcher’.

 

Feart (adj) – scared.  During my college days in Aberdeen in the 1980s, on more than one occasion, I had to walk away from a potential confrontation with Aberdeen Football Club soccer casuals. the juvenile designer football hooligans who seemed to infest the city at the time.  And I’d have the scornful demand thrown after me: “Are ye feart tae fight?!”  Meanwhile, a person who gets frightened easily is a feartie.

 

Fitba (n) – football.

 

Flit (n/v) – the act of moving, or to move, house.  Commonly used in Scotland, this verb has had success in the English language generally, as is evidenced by the use of ‘moonlight flit’ to describe moving house swiftly and secretly to avoid paying overdue rent-money.

 

Flyte (v) – to trade insults in the form of verse.  This combative literary tradition can be found in Norse and Anglo-Saxon cultures, but flyting was made an art-form in 15th / 16th-century Scotland by poets like William Dunbar, Walter Kennedy and Sir David Lyndsay.  There’s a poetic account of one flyting contest between Dunbar and Kennedy that’s called, unsurprisingly, The Flyting of Dumbar and Kennedie and consists of 28 stanzas of anti-Kennedy abuse penned by Dunbar and another 41 stanzas of Kennedy sticking it back to Dunbar.  According to Wikipedia, this work contains “the earliest recorded use of the word ‘shit’ as a personal insult.”  Thus, flyting was the Scottish Middle-Ages literary equivalent of two rappers dissing each other in their ‘rhymes’; and Dunbar and Kennedy were the Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls of their day.

 

Footer (v) – to fumble clumsily.  I remember reading a Scottish ‘coming of age’ story – though I can’t recall its title or author – in which the inexperienced hero footered haplessly with a young lady’s bra-clasp.

 

Favourite Scots words starting with ‘G’, ‘H’ and ‘I’ will be coming soon.

 

From unsplash.com / © Illya Vjestica

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So un-macho

 

© Library of Congress / From unsplash.com

 

An extremely right-wing author and essayist recently caused an uproar by saying something offensive on social media.  That’s hardly news these days.  Anyway, impelled by morbid curiosity, I checked out said author and essayist’s blog.  No, I’m not going to provide a link to it because the dribbling jackanapes has already received enough free publicity.  One remark on that blog caught my eye and made me think, though.  It was a description of President, soon-to-be ex-President, Donald Trump as  ‘the alpha-male of alpha-males’.

 

Let me get this straight.  Donald Trump is not only an alpha-male, but is the most alpha-male going?  You’ve got to be kidding.

 

The last four years and, indeed, most of the past 74 years that Trump has been on the planet are peppered with instances that show him to be not so much an alpha-male as an alpha-wuss.  Indeed, the past month-and-a-half since the US presidential election, when Joe Biden handed Trump his arse on a plate by massively winning both the popular vote and the electoral college, has shown him to be even more pathetic than normal.

 

Seeing Trump react to defeat with a display of whiny, shrieky, stamping-his-little-feet, waving-his-little-fists, chucking-his-toys-out-of-the-pram petulance doesn’t make me think of some muscled, lantern-jawed, bare-chested, testosterone-oozing specimen of maleness swaggering his way through a Hollywood action movie.  Rather, it makes me think of the obnoxious Violet Elizabeth Bott, the lisping little girl in Richmal Crompton’s William books (1922-70) who, when anyone refused to let her have her way, would threaten: “I’ll thcream and thcream and thcream till I’m thick!”  Or of Veruca Salt, the monstrously spoilt little girl in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), who proved so unbearable that Willie Wonka’s squirrels ended up throwing her down a garbage chute to the factory’s incinerator.

 

Ironically, the right-wing dingbats who support Trump often lament the decline of good old-fashioned masculine values, thanks to, as they see it, assaults in recent decades by feminists, liberals, socialists, gay rights activists, trans activists, etc.  In fact, if you look at the best-known embodiments of traditional masculine values, as portrayed on the cinema screen, you’ll see that their hero Trump displays none of those values himself.  He falls laughably short in comparison.  Imagine how he’d react and behave if he were in the shoes of Hollywood’s most famous macho-men during their most famous movies.

 

© Gordon Company / Silver Pictures / 20th Century Fox

 

Take Bruce Willis, for example – an actor who’s well-known for his conservative leanings but who hasn’t, despite scurrilous rumours, shown much enthusiasm for Trump.  As Detective John McClane in Die Hard (1988), Willis attends a Christmas party being held in a skyscraper by the company that employs his estranged wife.  There’s an unwanted festive surprise when a gang of German terrorists show up, seize the building and hold the partygoers hostage.  McClane, who blames the company for his marriage’s break-up and wasn’t feeling comfortable at the party, nonetheless ducks into the nearest ventilation shaft and spends the film crawling around and picking off the terrorists one by one until order has been restored.  You couldn’t imagine Trump selflessly doing any of that.  Actually, someone of his orange bulk would manage to crawl about two inches along the ventilation shaft before getting stuck.

 

No, Trump, the self-proclaimed master of ‘the art of the deal’, would be more like the character of Harry Ellis (Hart Bochner).  Ellis is a sleazy company executive who thinks he can bargain with the terrorists and get them to agree to a plan to lure McClane out of hiding.  “Hey babe, I negotiate million dollar deals for breakfast!” he brags in Trumpian fashion.  “I think I can handle this Eurotrash!”  Too late does the hapless Ellis realise that the terrorists have been stringing him along and don’t intend to honour their side of the bargain.  Inevitably, their leader, Vladimir Putin… sorry, Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) puts a bullet through his head.

 

Or take Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican who’s publicly dissed Trump for his appalling record on the environment.  In Schwarzenegger’s most famous role, as the reprogrammed-to-be-good Terminator in Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), Schwarzenegger realises at the movie’s finale that the central processing unit in his head is the last remaining piece of technology that might enable the machines to take over the world.  So, nobly, he decides he has to be destroyed for the good of humanity and asks Sarah and John Connor (Linda Hamilton and Edward Furlong) to lower him into a vat of molten metal.  Could you imagine Trump being so self-sacrificing?  “I am NOT going in that vat of molten metal!  There’s no CPU in my head!  That’s fake news!  This is the most corrupt decision in the history of my country!  This never happened to Obama…!”  And so on.

 

Probably Trump would prefer to model himself on the bad Terminator played by Schwarzenegger in the first Terminator movie (1984), since that character has traits that the Gross Orange One admires: zero empathy, total ruthlessness, no qualms about using its arsenal of heavy-duty weaponry to blow away anything that defies it.  However, with Trump as the Terminator, the movie would last five minutes.  The Trump-Terminator arrives in 1984 Los Angeles…  Naked, it approaches a group of street-punks (including good old Bill Paxton, who exclaims, “This guy’s a couple of cans short of a six-pack!”)…  Then the street-punks beat it to death.

 

© The Malpaso Company / Warner Bros

 

Who else?  Clint Eastwood, yet another Hollywood Republican who’s been muted about Trump (and in 2020 promised to support Mike Bloomberg if he became the Democrats’ presidential candidate)?  Eastwood built up his iconic macho persona during Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy in the 1960s.  Not only was he The Man with No Name, but he was a man of few words.  He’d squint, keep his jaws clamped around a cigar and unnerve his opponents with a contemptuous silence.  You couldn’t imagine a brash, loud gobshite like Trump, someone whose mouth is five minutes ahead of his brain, doing that.

 

In fact, Eastwood in his other most famous role, as Detective Harry Callaghan, aka Dirty Harry,  offers advice in Magnum Force (1973) that Trump would have been wise to heed: “Man’s got to know his limitations.”

 

John Wayne?  In Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959) and El Dorado (1966), Wayne plays a town sheriff who’s loyal to and protective of his staff – Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson and Walter Brennan in the earlier film, Robert Mitchum, James Caan and Arthur Hunicutt in the later.  Even when Mitchum develops a severe alcohol problem in El Dorado, Wayne puts up with his drunken bullshit and does his best to straighten the guy out.  It’s impossible to imagine the same of Trump, whose four-year tenure in the White House has seen a parade of cringing and crooked underlings being recruited and then, the moment they displease their master, being dumped again.  The loyal-only-to-himself Trump would have pointed a finger at Mitchum and sneered, “You’re fired!”

 

© Armada Productions / Warner Bros

 

Steve McQueen?  McQueen’s most famous role was as the prisoner of war Hilts in The Great Escape (1963), which would have earned him Trump’s disgust immediately.  As he once notoriously declared of John McCain, “He’s a war hero because he was captured.  I like heroes who weren’t captured!”  In fact, McQueen breaks out of the POW camp in Escape but then gets recaptured when his motorbike fails to clear a barbed wire fence on the Swiss border, which I suppose makes him a double loser in Trump’s eyes.

 

In fact, Trump is devoid of the qualities I recognised in the masculine icons with whom I grew up: being loyal, being selfless, doing the right thing, playing fair, saying only things that are worth saying, sticking up for the underdog, being magnanimous in victory, being graceful in defeat.  Then again, this is unsurprising when you see the Neanderthals who support him signalling their masculinity by gathering in mobs outside state legislative buildings, clad in combat fatigues and totting automatic rifles, to protest the implementation of safety measures against Covid-19.  These would-be warriors are too wimpy to countenance wearing small pieces of cloth over their mouths and nostrils to protect their fellow citizens.  Clearly, their notions of masculinity have nothing to do with the qualities I’ve listed above.  Rather, they’re all to do with intimidating, bullying and hurting people.

 

If that’s what masculinity is about, I’ll be glad to see the back of it.  And I’ll be especially glad to see the back of its biggest proponent, the one in the White House – who on January 20th goes from being the alpha-male to being the alpha-fail.

 

© Stewart Bremner

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Hello, yellow brick road

 

 

I suspect that the editors and publishers of Colombo’s Write magazine, which features poetry, short fiction and literary articles by Sri Lankan and Sri Lankan-based writers, must have felt cursed recently.

 

Production problems meant that their latest edition, Volume 2 Issue 2, was delayed for over a year.  Then, in March 2020, just as the new edition was about to go on sale, the Covid-19 virus made its unwelcome but inevitable appearance in Sri Lanka.  As a result, the authorities declared a curfew and the outlets that would have sold the magazine were temporarily closed down.  Not that potential customers would have been able to venture out to buy it, anyway.

 

This was a wee bit frustrating for me, as my short story The Yellow Brick Road was due to appear in that issue of Write.  (Well, I am a Sri Lankan-based writer…)

 

Happily, I can now report that the curfew has been eased somewhat and many Sri Lankan workplaces, businesses and retailers have reopened.  This includes the Barefoot Shop at 704 Galle Road, Colombo, which is the best-known outlet where you can pick up a copy of Write.   I popped in there the other day and saw the magazine’s newest issue, containing The Yellow Brick Road, stocked on its shelves.

 

In addition to some 40 general poems and stories, the issue features a section with poignant tributes to the victims of last year’s Easter Sunday bombings in Colombo, Negombo and Batticaloa.  It also has articles remembering three major figures in the contemporary Sri Lankan literary and arts worlds who sadly passed away in 2019: the poet and writer Jean Arasanayagam, the theatre director and producer Vinodh Senadeera, and the writer, poet and journalist Carl Muller.  (I was particularly a fan of Muller, whose work, besides being very amusing, served as an invaluable record of the minutiae of traditional life in Sri Lanka’s Burgher community.)

 

The Yellow Brick Road isn’t attributed to my usual nom de plume Jim Mountfield, as it doesn’t contain any of the grim, macabre stuff that Mountfield specialises in – for example, children with worm-like and super-intelligent conjoined twins growing out of their shoulders, or elderly farmers’ wives with Alzheimer’s who are haunted by the ghosts of the husbands they murdered and fed to their pigs 30 years ago, or Tunisian medinas in alternative universes that are inhabited by vampires who inhale blood-fumes out of shishas.  Instead, it’s published under my real, ordinary and boring name, Ian Smith.

 

While it isn’t a horror story, The Yellow Brick Road was slightly inspired by those dark gambling stories that Roald Dahl liked to write, such as Taste (1945), Man from the South (1948) or Dip in the Pool (1952), wherein someone gets involved in a highly unusual wager, with potentially ruinous consequences.  However, unlike Dahl’s protagonists who, if they lose, face marrying off their daughter to a complete creep, or having a finger chopped off, or parting with their entire life savings, the main character here is an unhappy and superstitious man who simply makes a bet with himself – one night when he’s alone on Colombo’s Duplication Road and a little bit the worse for drink.

 

Handsomely printed, and containing some gorgeous colour illustrations, Volume 2 Issue 2 of Write is a bargain at 500 Sri Lankan rupees.  The magazine’s Facebook page can be accessed here.