© Schlock! Webzine
We’re now into October, a month that climaxes with the festival of Halloween. Thus, it’s appropriate that I have just had a Halloween-themed short story published in the October 2023 of the online fiction publication Schlock! Webzine. Entitled The Turnip Thieves, it appears under the name of Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I use for horror, ghost and generally ‘dark’ stories.
The Turnip Thieves takes place on a Scottish hill farm in the early 1980s. It begins with a farmer noticing strange activity on a distant strip of ground where he’s planted turnips – ‘neeps’ as they’re called in the Scots language. As it’s one day before Halloween, he thinks he knows what’s afoot. Kids from a nearby town, he assumes, must be trying to steal his neeps, so they can make lanterns from them for the upcoming festival. And, vengefully, he sets off to intervene…
The story is a nostalgic invocation of a time before pumpkins became widely available in Scottish supermarkets and when Scottish trick-or-treaters – or ‘guisers’, to give them the correct Scottish terminology – had to make do with the turnip, the pumpkin’s humble root-vegetable cousin, as a substitute for fashioning Halloween lanterns. Actually, the shrunken, wizened visage of a turnip lantern is, to my mind, much creepier than that of a pumpkin one. On the other hand, howking the hard, pale flesh out of a turnip required a lot more effort than gutting a pumpkin did. And once you had a candle burning inside it, a turnip lantern stank… Or, as they say in Scotland, it reeked.
The main page of Schlock! Webzine’s October 2023 edition – Volume 17, Issue 15 – can, for the next few weeks, be accessed here. The Turnip Thieves itself can be read here.
And during the run-up to Halloween, I hope to post a few things relating to the macabre, ghostly and generally dark on this blog, in keeping with the spirit of the season.
