The Horror Zine – Blood and Porridge

May 1, 2023May 13, 2023

Jim Mountfield gets something woolly for his 50th

© The Sirens Call Publications

Jim Mountfield, the pen-name under which I write horror fiction, has today had a new story published in the spring 2023 edition of the short-story and poetry ezine The Sirens Call. Entitled Wool, it’s set in rural Scotland in the near future and envisions a time when science has made agriculture – at least, agriculture where animals are reared for meat and wool – truly grotesque and nightmarish. The Sirens Call’s spring edition can be downloaded here.

According to my calculations, Wool is the 50^th story I’ve had published as Jim Mountfield. I came up with the name a dozen years ago, when I realised I had some good ideas for horror stories and wanted to put them down on paper, but was painfully aware that my real name ‘Ian Smith’ was hardly a memorable one for an author of scary fiction – or any sort of fiction, for that matter. While I was trying to think of a pseudonym, I noticed that I had playing in the background an album by the rock band Primal Scream. And Primal Scream’s bass player at the time was the affable Gary ‘Mani’ Mountfield, who’d earlier played for – and would later play for again – the legendary ‘Madchester’ band the Stone Roses. “Mountfield,” I thought, “what a cool surname!” Meanwhile, the ‘Jim’ part of ‘Jim Mountfield’ came easily, as ‘James’ is my middle name.

Looking back over the 50 stories that have appeared in print bearing Jim Mountfield’s name, I think the following ten are my favourites.

Laughing Dragon, which appeared in the now-defunct ezine Flashes in the Dark in 2011, was a piece of flash fiction that featured a stained-glass window depicting a dragon and a man paranoid about the fact that his girlfriend was much younger than he was. Despite the story’s 1000-word length, I managed to fit in some brazenly scatological humour too. Laughing Dragon shouldn’t have worked, but I think it did, somehow.

© Midnight Street Press

The Next Bus appeared in issue 4 of the magazine Hellfire Crossroads in 2014. I had a lot of fun writing this story, which combines the misery of waiting for a bus that doesn’t seem to want to come with the terror of dealing with a knife-wielding psychopath at the bus-stop. I also really liked The Groove, which appeared in the subsequent issue of Hellfire Crossroads, because it wasn’t just about horror but about something else close to my heart, music. The story’s villainess was a scheming widow whose “CD collection consisted of just six titles: The Essential Mariah Carey, Phil Collins’ Hits, Robbie Williams’ Greatest Hits, Whitney Houston’s Ultimate Collection, Bryan Adams’ Best of Me and the musical soundtrack for Titanic.” Her evilness was such that she had her music-loving husband’s funeral defiled by the playing of Robbie Williams’ Angels (1997). Both issues of Hellfire Crossroads can be purchased here.

Ae Fond Kiss, also the title of a Robert Burns song, was about a circus, an automaton designed by Henri Maillardet and some teenagers holidaying on the coast of south-western Scotland. I didn’t include the next words of the song – “And then we sever…” – in the title, as that would have given away the ending. The story appears in the summer 2018 print edition of The Horror Zine, which can be bought here.

© The Horror Zine

The same summer saw the publication of In Hog Heaven in Aphelion. This story feels special to me because it was the first time I tried setting a supernatural story in Northern Ireland, the place where I’d spent my childhood. In Hog Heaven can be read here. In July the following year, Aphelion published my story They Draw You In, about a teacher doing some groundwork for a school trip in a small, dingy, provincial art gallery that displays some unusual paintings by an artist who was known too for his Aleister Crowley-type proclivities. Again, They Draw You In was one of those stories where the disparate elements seemed to work together nicely. It’s accessible here.

The webzine Horrified was under threat of closure last year but, happily, it’s still on the go. In November 2020, my story First Footers appeared in its collection Christmas – Horror Stories from Horrified: Volume 1. Not quite set at Christmas, First Footers had a pair of lads in the Scottish Highlands attempting to revive the old Scottish tradition of first-footing on New Year’s Eve and having a series of increasingly bizarre experiences. Like a lot of the stories in my top ten, I valued this one because it contained a fair amount of humour. I can’t find a link to the collection now, unfortunately, but my story Where the Little Boy Drowned, published on Horrified’s fiction page in January 2021, can be read here. The story of a man trapped in a hellish physical predicament, with the possibility that a vengeful ghost is lurking close by, Where the Little Boy Drowned received some good feedback from its readers.

© Horrified Magazine

March 2022 saw the publication of Never Tell Tales Out of School in Schlock! Webzine. This one felt close to my heart because it revisited my memories of school in the 1970s, which was ‘rough and tumble’ to say the least. Its plot had a troubled author returning to his old school, which is now ultra-child-safety-conscious, ultra-inclusive and ultra-politically-correct, hoping that they’ll stock his new book in their library, and then being tormented by visions of bullying he suffered there 45 years earlier. This edition of Schock! Webzine is available here.

Also partly set in the 1970s was my story Guising, which was printed in the Halloween 2022 issue of The Sirens Call. An account of some kids participating in the Scottish variation of trick-or-treating, back in the days when they could just go up to and knock on strangers’ front doors unaccompanied by an adult, I enjoyed writing this because I could tell the story through the kids themselves – whose grasp of what is going on is somewhat less-than-complete. Like the current issue of The Sirens Call, the Halloween 2022 issue is downloadable here.

Finally, I’m delighted that Jim Mountfield should be celebrating the publication of his 50^th story on May 1^st, May Day, an auspicious date in the horror-genre calendar. The climax of the greatest horror movie of all time, Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973), took place on this day, which is important in pagan, pre-Christian cultures because it falls halfway between the spring equinox and summer solstice and marks the beginning of summer. Come to think of it, 2023 marks the fiftieth anniversary of The Wicker Man’s release. There’s that number again, 50…

© British Lion Films

September 12, 2022

A second homecoming for Jim Mountfield

© The Horror Zine

A collection of scary short fiction entitled The Best of the Horror Zine: The Middle Years has just gone on sale. Its 31 short stories first appeared in the ezine The Horror Zine between 2013 and 2020 and were picked for this collection by its editor and assistant editor, Jeani Rector and Dean H. Wild. The stories include Coming Home, something I wrote under my horror-writer pseudonym of Jim Mountfield and originally published in The Horror Zine in 2014.

Coming Home is basically an old-fashioned haunted house story, but with a dash of extra flavour in that it deals with parallel universes too. The story was inspired by an irrational fear I sometimes experienced when I was 11 or 12 years old. My family had just moved from Northern Ireland to Scotland, and we were living in a new – well, new for us, though technically the building was old – house that wasn’t yet fully renovated or furnished. Compared to our former house in Northern Ireland, for a while at least, it just didn’t feel homely. That’s ‘homely’ in the British sense of the word, meaning ‘cosy and comfortable’, not the American sense, meaning ‘unattractive in appearance’.

Meanwhile, my parents, no doubt feeling slightly dislocated and lonely, managed to track down a few other Northern Irish families who’d moved to Scotland over the years and were living within driving distance of us. It was customary to invite these folk to lunch, or to be invited to their houses for lunch, on Sundays. Northern Irish protocols of hospitality being what they are (think Mrs Doyle in Father Ted), and the Northern Irish propensity for blethering being what it is, these ‘lunches’ would invariably extend to tea in the late afternoon, and to dinner in the evening. If you were an adult and not the designated driver, a fair bit of whisky was consumed too. It was usually late when the visitors headed home and, if we were being entertained in somebody else’s house, we frequently didn’t get back until after midnight.

And as a kid, after we finally arrived home on those dark Sunday nights, I felt distinctly uneasy. My parents would unlock the front door and we’d enter a black, silent house that we hadn’t yet got accustomed to living in. Amid the darkness and silence, just before someone found the switches and the lights came on, I’d hear an internal voice telling me: “This is not our house!”

And if it wasn’t our house, whose was it? Who – or what – was already living there? That’s a childhood fear that, nearly 40 years later, I tried to explore in Coming Home.

The Best of the Horror Zine: The Middle Years can be obtained on kindle or as a paperback here.

January 1, 2021January 10, 2021

My 2020 writing round-up

© Schlock Webzine

I’m sure few people will be sad to see the back of 2020, although towards its end it did provide two glimmers of hope for the future. These were the development of vaccines against Covid-19, the main reason for the year’s horribleness, and the defeat in the US presidential election of Donald Trump, the Clown-Master General who’s supervised a four-year circus of corruption, cronyism, disinformation, racism, culture wars, environmental destruction, denial of science and pandering to right-wing terrorism in the world’s most powerful nation.

On a personal note, 2020 wasn’t so bad for me in one way. I did get a number of stories published. These appeared under the pseudonyms Jim Mountfield (which I use for my horror fiction) and Rab Foster (for my fantasy fiction) and, a couple of times, under my real and boring name Ian Smith. Here’s a round-up of those stories and details of where you can find them.

Firstly, as Jim Mountfield:

Back in January, The Path, a cosmic horror story inspired by some rainy season trekking I’d done in Sri Lanka’s Knuckles Mountains, appeared in Issue 30, Volume 15 of Schlock! Webzine. The issue can be accessed here.
Witch Hazel, a folk-horror story playing on one of humanity’s most basic fears – there’s something following you! – was published in the February 2020 edition of The Horror Zine and can still be accessed here. It also appears in the Spring 2020 hard-copy edition of The Horror Zine, which can be purchased here.
March saw a story inspired by the many frustrations of working in an office, The Away Day, appear in Issue 2, Volume 16 of Schlock! Webzine, a kindle edition of which can be downloaded here. Come to think of it, The Away Day is probably already dated. Will there be such a thing as an office culture once the Covid-19 pandemic has passed and companies realise it’s cheaper and more practical to have their employees working at home?
In spring 2020, just as most countries were waking up to the seriousness of the pandemic, my violent sci-fi story New Town Tours was included in the aptly dystopian collection Midnight Street Anthology 4: Strange Days, published by Midnight Street Press. It can be purchased from Amazon UK here and Amazon US here. Also, you can find a clip of me (as Jim Mountfield) talking about the story and reading an excerpt from it here. I know, the clip looks and sounds like it was filmed by John Logie Baird in 1926, but I was subject to a Covid-19-inspired curfew at the time, didn’t have access to proper video equipment and had to record it in a dark room at the back of an apartment building.
In June, my story The Four-Legged Friend, set in Bangkok, inspired by a visit I once made to a Thai surgical museum and tapping into the same fear as Witch Hazel, appeared in Issue 5, Volume 16 of Schlock! Webzine. A kindle edition of it can be downloaded here.
Having had cosmic horror and folk horror published in 2020, I was pleased to get some body horror published in it too. In September, my story The Nuclei was included in a new collection called Xenobiology: Stranger Creatures. It’s a sci-fi body-horror story set in Edinburgh after an apocalypse. Now that’s a sentence you don’t get to write very often. Xenobiology can be purchased here.
Don’t Hook Now, a nasty sci-fi story I wrote about perverts using future virtual-reality technology to interact with saucy scenes from old movies, was published by Horrified Magazine in October 2020 and can be accessed here.
My ghost story First Footers, set as its title suggests in Scotland on New Year’s Eve, has been included in a recent collection of spooky tales entitled Horror Stories from Horrified (Volume 1): Christmas, again courtesy of Horrified Magazine. Available as a digital eBook, it can be purchased here.

As Ian Smith:

In March, my slightly Roald Dahl-esque story The Yellow Brick Road was published in Volume 2, Issue 2 of the Sri Lankan literary magazine Write. The last time I looked, copies of this issue of Write were still on sale in the Barefoot Shop at 704 Galle Road, Colombo.
To keep its contributors motivated during the March-May curfew that the Sri Lankan government imposed in response to Covid-19, Write started putting up stories on its social media platforms. These included my flash-fiction story Ferg’s Bike, which can be accessed here.

As Rab Foster:

October saw my fantasy-horror story No Man’s Land, inspired by the works of Ambrose Bierce, published in Issue 9, Volume 16 of Schlock! Webzine. Its kindle edition is available here.
Finally, my quaintly named story Pockets of the Janostovore is featured in the December 2020-January 2021 edition of Aphelion. It can be read here. Gratifyingly, it’s been listed as one of Aphelion‘s picks of 2020 for long fiction.

So 2020 has been a productive year for me in terms of my writing even if, in most other respects, it’s been as shit for me as it’s been for everybody else. Let’s hope 2021 sees me retain that productivity, while generally offering a better experience for all of us.

Anyway, with fingers crossed, I bid you… Happy new year!

© Midnight Street Press

May 23, 2020June 6, 2020

Begin again

© Decca Records

There was an old man named Michael Finnegan,

He grew whiskers on his chin-e-gan.

Up came the wind and blew them in again,

Poor old Michael Finnegan.

Begin again.

There was an old man named Michael Finnegan…

So runs a particularly disturbing children’s rhyme / song I remember from my boyhood. It’s disturbing because it’s never-ending. You sing those 27 words about poor old Michael Finnegan and the whiskers on his chin-e-gan, then you say, ‘Begin again’, and off you go again, repeating the same verse into infinity – or until you and / or your listeners go insane. And I recall kids in the playground at my primary school who had nothing better to do but test their own endurance, and test other people’s endurance, by singing Michael Finnegan for as long as they could. I even seem to recall the Irish singer Val Doonican, that knitwear and rocking-chair-loving easy-listening troubadour who had his own show on BBC TV from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s and who was much admired by ‘ladies of a certain age’, performing it on television one evening. Wow. Val Doonican singing Michael Finnegan over and over again, for all eternity. That sounds like a very specialised version of hell.

Anyway, like Michael Finnegan’s whiskers, I’m afraid this blog has had to begin again. In recent weeks it had been hacked into a couple of times. Despite the efforts of the technical support people at the webhosting company, it was no longer possible to restore the site from back-up – too many longstanding files had been infected, leaving the door open for future hacking. So, reluctantly, I agreed to have the site eviscerated of its files so that I could set it up again with a clean sheet. That’s why it’s in the highly functional, impersonal-looking state it’s in at the moment, but hopefully I will be able to improve its appearance when I have time.

It’s a shame this happened, as the blog had been puffing along fairly happily since 2012 and I had posted over 750 entries, which of course are all down now. I have, however, saved the majority of those past entries as Word files and I will hopefully repost some of the more interesting ones over the weeks and months to come. (Obviously, though, there’s no point in reposting many of them as they were strictly ‘of their time’ – my ruminations about Tunisian politics after the revolution of 2011, written while I was living in Tunisia, for example; or my pontifications about Scottish politics in the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum of 2014.)

Meanwhile, to hold the fort, here are some updates on pieces of writing I have recently had published, under my various pseudonyms, with links to where to find them.

Published under the pseudonym Jim Mountfield (the name I use for horror fiction and dark stuff generally):

My short story The Four-Legged Friend should be appearing in the June 2020 edition of Schlock! Webzine. Its home page is here.
My short story The Away Day was published in the March 2020 edition of Schlock! Webzine. A kindle edition of this issue can be downloaded here.
My short story New Town Tours has been included in the new collection Midnight Street Anthology 4: Strange Days, published by Midnight Street Press. It can be purchased from Amazon UK here and Amazon US here. Also, you can find a clip of me (as Jim Mountfield) talking about and reading an excerpt from New Town Tours here. Yes, I know the clip looks and sounds like it was recorded through a wet towel inside a portaloo, but I’ve been under a Covid-19-inspired curfew for the past two months and I didn’t have access to proper recording equipment.
Witch Hazel, a short story I had published in the February 2020 edition of The Horror Zine, can still be accessed here. It also appears in the Spring 2020 hard-copy edition of The Horror Zine, which can be purchased here.
The Lights, a longer short story with a Christmas theme, is still available to read on the December 2019 / January 2020 edition of Aphelion webzine, here.

Published under the pseudonym Rab Foster (the name I use for fantasy fiction):

Closing Time at the Speckled Wolf, a short story I had published in Aphelion webzine 14 months ago, was listed in its final edition of 2019 as one of the webzine’s best stories of the year. It can be accessed here.
My short story The World Builder was the featured story in the Halloween 2019 edition of Blood Moon Rising magazine and is still available here.

And published under my real and very boring name Ian Smith:

My short story The Yellow Brick Road was published in Volume 2, Issue 2 of the Sri Lankan literary magazine Write. Unfortunate timing meant that the issue went on sale just a few days before the Sri Lankan authorities announced an ongoing curfew in reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, there are signs that the curfew is now being eased slightly, and as far as I know, copies of Write are available at the Barefoot Shop at 704 Galle Road, Colombo, which has definitely been open in recent days.
Finally, my flash-fiction story Ferg’s Bike appeared last month on Write’s social media platforms. The first page of it can be accessed on Facebook here and the second page here.

And that’s everything for now. Hopefully, normal service will, as they say, be resumed as soon as possible.