Xenobiology – Stranger Creatures

January 1, 2025

My 2024 writing round-up

© The Sirens Call Publications

“Well, 2024 was an excellent year!” No future historians will say, ever. Come to think of it, because of events in 2024, there might not be any future historians. Not any future, full-stop.

However, on a personal level, 2024 saw some improvements in my situation. Firstly, in March, my partner and I, and our cat, moved apartments in our current city (and country) of abode, Singapore. We’d been in an expensive condo, inhabited mostly by rich Western and Chinese expatriates, in a modern part of the city-state. We moved into a cheaper and more modest condo in an older and more traditional district where our neighbours are nearly all Singaporean. It’s so much nicer. For one thing there are no spoilt, bratty kids running riot outside our front door because the unfortunate Filippino / Indonesian / Burmese girls hired by their expat parents as ‘maids’ or ‘helpers’ and made to look after them are afraid or unwilling to discipline them. Also, our new neighbourhood is handier for getting to our work and has several notable Hawkers’ Centres and eateries offering a range of good but modestly-priced foods. Singapore is generally expensive and its Hawkers’ Centres are one of its saving graces.

Secondly, I had a successful year with regard to my writing. Indeed, in terms of short stories published, 2024 even topped 2023, when 15 of my stories made it into my print. This has been my best writing year to date.

So, here’s a round-up of my stories published in 2024. Details are provided about who published them, what pseudonym they were published under and, when possible, how they can be accessed today.

As Jim Mountfield:

Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I stick on my horror fiction, was first published in 2024 at the end of January when the story Underneath the Arches was included in the quarterly fiction-and-poetry magazine The Sirens Call. Heavily inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, Underneath the Arches was written by me at a young age – and I think it shows in the florid writing style. However, I was grateful to The Sirens Call for giving the story (which’d languished on my computer hard-drive for decades) a home at last. Alas, The Sirens Call ceased publication late in the year and I can no longer provide a link for downloading its past issues.
In April, Issue 11 of The Stygian Lepus featured my ‘cosmic-horror’ story The Followers, which was set in the English city I lived in from 2002 to 2005, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Specifically, it was set in two parts of it, Grainger Market and Chinatown on Stowell Street. Issue 11 can be read here if you become a member of The Stygian Lepus’s Back Catalogue; or purchased here.

© The Stygian Lepus

April was also when my Northern-Ireland-set short story The Crawler, which involved a devious policeman and a collection of sinister dolls, appeared in 2024’s second issue of The Sirens Call.
And in July the next – and unfortunately, the last ever – issue of The Sirens Call contained my sci-fi / horror story The Colony. This was set in East Anglia after manmade climate change has hoicked up temperatures and sea levels. Its premise was that scientists had created, through genetic engineering, millions of giant jellyfish-like organisms and tethered them offshore in order to hold back storm surges and reduce coastal erosion. Obviously, nothing could go wrong with this scheme. Nothing at all…
The Hole in the Wall was a ‘folk-horror’ story about a member of an organisation modelled on Britain’s Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) who’s researching a couple of pubs. First, he visits a horrible dump of a pub; then he stumbles across a pub that’s so classy it seems too good to be true. And yes, the second one is too good to be true because it has a mysterious, malevolent something lurking in its walls. The Hole in the Wall appeared in Volume 18, Issue 12 – the October 2024 edition – of Schlock! Webzine, which can be purchased here.
Also in October, my story The Activation was the opening number in the anthology Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024, the annual volume of scary fiction published by Cloaked Press. As the collection’s title suggests, its theme this year was body horror, described by Wikipedia as “a subgenre of horror fiction that intentionally showcases grotesque or psychologically disturbing violations of the human body or of another creature…” including “aberrant sex, mutations, mutilation, zombification, gratuitous violence, disease, or unnatural movements of the body.” The Activation contained about five of those things, so I think it fitted the bill. It was also a prequel to my story The Nuclei, which appeared in the 2020 collection Xenobiology – Stranger Creatures. Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024 can be purchased on Kindle here and as a paperback here.

© Cloaked Press

In November, a Jim Mountfield story appeared in the collection Monster: Underdog Anthology 2024 from Leg Iron Books. A monster of a book indeed, this featured 39 spooky stories, including my Halloween-set effort Bag of Tricks. The story was inspired by a memory I had of riding on Bangkok’s Skytrain one October 31^st when some Thai kids entered the carriage wearing fancy dress, presumably on their way to a Halloween party; but most of Bag of Tricks actually takes place in Scotland. Monster: Underdog Anthology 2024 can be bought on Kindle here and as a paperback here.
The Tears of the Pontianak, which appeared in the Samhain 2024 edition of the magazine The Hungur Chronicles, published in November too, was a first for me. This was my first published story where the setting is my current home, Singapore. As you can tell from the title, it’s mainly about a Pontianak, a blood-drinking demon of Malaysian, Singaporean and Indonesian folklore. But the idea for the story actually came to me one afternoon when I was exploring Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum and encountered some beautiful pieces of local, antique furniture. The Hungur Chronicles’ Samhain 2024 issue can be purchased directly from Hiraeth Publishing here or from Barnes & Noble here.
Coming from a farming background, quite a few of my stories are set on farms. However, I only had one ‘farm-horror’ story published in 2024. This was in Issue 19 – the December 2024 edition – of The Stygian Lepus and its title was Rack and Ruin. It owed something to the legendary American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, although the Lovecraftian elements were mixed with the mud, muck and rain of a hill farm in autumnal southern Scotland. Again, Issue 19 can be read here if you’re a member of The Stygian Lepus’s Back Catalogue; or simply bought here.
The influence of H.P. Lovecraft could also be seen in The House of Glass, the final Jim Mountfield story I had published in 2024. As its title implies, most of the action takes place inside a house made almost entirely of glass. The house stands in the mountains of Sri Lanka, the country where I lived in real life from 2014 to 2022. The House of Glass appears in the anthology Swan Song: The Final Anthology, which, sadly, is the last volume to come from Trevor Denyer’s Midnight Street Press – from now on, Midnight Street Press will exist only to sell what’s on its back catalogue, not to produce anything new. It can be purchased from Amazon UK here and from Amazon US here.

© Swords and Sorcery Magazine

As Rab Foster:

Rab Foster, the pseudonym I use when writing fantasy fiction – usually the unruly sub-genre of fantasy called ‘sword and sorcery’ – hit the ground running in 2024. On January 1^st, the second and final part of my story The Boots of the Cat appeared in Volume 18 Issue 3 of Schlock! Webzine. This was about a group of mercenaries who, while sequestered in an unwelcoming city, find themselves in a strange scenario inspired by a famous fairy tale. And no, despite the title, that fairy tale isn’t Puss in Boots. The issue can be purchased here.
Because of a publishing delay, the December 2023 edition of the fiction magazine Savage Realms Monthly didn’t appear until January 2024. It contained my story Pit of the Orybadak, which combined fantasy elements – slimy flesh-eating monsters slithering around in a giant bog – with the pertinent real-life theme of how soldiers are treated (or mistreated) when they become prisoners of war. This issue of Savage Realms Monthly can be bought here.
The Fleet of Lamvula, a heady story inspired by my love of ‘lost graveyards of ships’ stories, and the movies of Ray Harryhausen, and the trippiest song ever recorded, Black Sabbath’s Planet Caravan, appeared in late January in Issue 144 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine. The story can now be read in Swords and Sorcery Magazine’s archive, here.
In July, my Rab Foster story The Drakvur Challenge made it into the pages of Issue 3 of Crimson Quill Quarterly. This was a milestone for me, being (by my calculations) the 100^th short story I’ve had published. The Drakvur Challenge was inspired by a visit I made to Tirta Gangga Royal Water Garden in Bali, Indonesia – a place I found fascinating because of its beautiful ponds, fish, fountains and networks of stepping stones… while, stowed away in a compound at the back, it also had some surprisingly monstrous-looking statues. However, like much of my fantasy fiction, The Drakvur Challenge owed a big debt to the cinematic marvel that was Ray Harryhausen too. Issue 3 of Crimson Quill Quarterly can be obtained as a paperback here and on Kindle here.

© Crimson Quill Quarterly

August saw the appearance of my story The Scarecrow of Terryk Head in Issue 151 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine. In it, one of my recurring fantasy-fiction characters, Gudroon the Witch, had to deal with not only the evil scarecrow of the title but with three doltish farmers – and with three even-more-doltish farmers’ sons. Again, The Scarecrow of Terryk Head is now available to read in the magazine’s archive, here.
In November, Rab Foster strayed into the controversial sub-genre of fantasy known as ‘grimdark’ and served up a tale of violence and gore, nihilism and despair, entitled The Mechanisms of Raphar. (What, I wonder, inspired this? What event in the real world in November 2024 could have induced nihilism and despair in me?) Owing something to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum (1842) and also something to the ’10 Courts of Hell’ display at Singapore’s most remarkable museum, Haw Par Villa, The Mechanisms of Raphar appeared in Volume 18, Issue 13 of Schlock! Webzine. The contents of this issue were available to read for free at the publication’s website during November but haven’t yet turned up for sale in book form. When the issue is available for purchase, a link for it will appear at the bottom of Schlock! Webzine’s archive page, here.

© Schlock! Webzine

As Steve Cashel:

Steve Cashel, the penname I put on non-horrific, non-fantastical and often crime-tinged stories set in Scotland, had one piece published in 2024. In fact, it appeared only yesterday, on December 31^st, the final day of the year. It’s called Malkied and appears on the short-fiction page of the website for the crime-and-mystery publisher Close to the Bone. It’s accessible here.

And finally…

This is cheating. Self-publishing doesn’t count. But on September 18^th, 2024 – the tenth anniversary of Scotland’s referendum on independence – I took the opportunity to post on this blog a short story entitled Mither, which I’d written in 2014 soon after I’d heard the referendum’s result. A mixture of Scottish politics and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), it was too weird to ever get properly published. (Even if I say so myself, though, I think Norman Bates and his mom are a good metaphor for Scotland and the divisions between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ voters that supposedly materialised at the time.) Anyway, if you’re interested, you can read it here.

So, I had 17 short stories published in 2024, which makes it my most successful year as a writer ever. I suspect I will be hard-pressed to equal or better that record in 2025, however. That’s because of the recent disappearances of certain magazines (like The Sirens Call) and publishers (like Midnight Street Press) who have published my stuff regularly in the past.

Meanwhile, 2025 looks like it’s going to be garbage, largely due to Donald Trump regaining the American presidency, which will embolden fascists, climate-change deniers, anti-vaxxers and conspiracy-fantasist nutjobs around the world. I suspect even somewhere as famously stable as Singapore will be affected, negatively, by the USA turning into a mafia state / an oligarchy / the political equivalent of a meth lab. And there’ll be extra, unwelcome input from Elon Musk… Oh well. My strategy for surviving 2025 with my sanity intact will be to keep my head down and keep writing.

© The Sirens Call Publications

October 4, 2024October 4, 2024

Jim Mountfield gets activated

© Cloaked Press, LLC

Back in September 2020, I had a story called The Nuclei included in an anthology called Xenobiology: Stranger Creatures. All its stories, in the words of one of the editors, Michele Dutcher, shared a theme of “biology that has been artificially produced, or biological creatures that have been produced by genetic material being acted upon by outside sources to produce something new.” Being about artificially-created biological creatures, The Nuclei was classifiable as science fiction, but it definitely lurked at the horror end of the sci-fi spectrum. In fact, the creatures featured in The Nuclei were the result of me attempting to imagine the most revolting monsters possible. For that reason, the story was credited to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I use for my macabre fiction.

The Nuclei was also a post-apocalyptic story, set in the ruins of Edinburgh – we definitely need more post-apocalyptic stories set in the capital of Scotland – after my revolting, artificially-created creatures had decimated humanity and brought human civilisation to an end. The human characters, some ragged, malnourished survivors who belonged either to a loony religious cult or to an equally loony militia, referred to an event called ‘the Activation’ shortly before civilisation fell, when the artificially-created horrors were first unleashed on mankind. That gave me the idea of writing a prequel to the story, detailing what happened at the Activation, i.e., on Day One of the nightmare.

I have now written that story, called The Activation, and have just had it published under the penname of Jim Mountfield too. It features in Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024, the latest instalment in the annual Nightmare Fuel collections of scary fiction put out by Cloaked Press, LLC. As its title indicates, the theme for this year’s collection was body horror, which Wikipedia defines as “a subgenre of horror fiction that intentionally showcases grotesque or psychologically disturbing violations of the human body or of another creature.” Well, the modus operandi of the creatures in The Nuclei involved a lot of body horror, so this seemed a natural home for its prequel.

The setting and main character of The Activation were inspired by something that happened to me once and by somebody I used to know. Firstly, the happening was a misadventure I had while travelling on the London Tube back in 2016, somewhere between King’s Cross and Liverpool Street Stations – I must have been on either the Circle, Metropolitan or Hammersmith and City lines. A young woman had what is euphemistically described as an ‘episode’ and started screaming hysterically at her fellow passengers. Unfortunately, among the things she screamed was the claim that she was carrying a bomb. The train promptly stopped at the next station and remained there with its doors sealed for 20 or 25 minutes. Nobody could get in or out. Meanwhile, the woman kept shrieking gibberish at everyone.

At one point, a pair of British Transport Police officers walked down the train, but didn’t actually stop to deal with the unhinged woman when they reached her. No, they just walked past her, to the train’s far end, and then walked back – again doing nothing when they passed her a second time. Later, when I researched the protocol for occurrences like this, I found out that the Transport Police officers had done an ‘assessment of the incident scene’. Satisfied that they knew where the problem was, and that it wasn’t a case of terrorism, and that there weren’t any other problems elsewhere, they then informed the local police and told them where to find the problem. When those police arrived on the platform, the nearest set of doors were opened so that they could board the train and remove said problem.

Obviously, this took time. And with those doors sealed until the local police came, it made me wonder what would have happened to the folk stuck on the train if there’d been a real terrorist present. I guess we were considered ‘expendable’.

By the time the Transport Police did their assessment, it’d become clear to everybody that the young woman causing the trouble wasn’t a terrorist. She was just some poor, mixed-up soul who’d probably forgotten to take her medication that day. I realised this when, at one point during her ravings, she started listing ‘all the great prophets in history’. These were Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed and… Zippy, the gimpy zip-mouthed puppet from the British kids’ TV show Rainbow (1972-92).

I had to put that detail into my story The Activation. Although, because Nightmare Fuel: Body Horrors is an American publication, I changed Zippy from Rainbow to the better-known Cookie Monster from Sesame Street (1969-present). Sorry about that, Zippy, but you just aren’t internationally famous enough.

© Teddington Studios / Thames Television

© Sesame Workshop / BBC / From X

Secondly, the main character in The Activation was inspired by a former colleague, a PE teacher, who was employed by an English private school I worked at in 2002. He was an ex-soldier. One evening, the two of us were having a pint in the neighbourhood pub when he told me – with a preliminary request not to say anything about it to the school’s headmistress – that when he went to the school to be interviewed for the PE-teacher position, he’d been homeless. At the time he was sleeping inside some giant concrete pipes at the side of a road that were soon to be popped in the ground for a sewage or drainage project. Homelessness among former members of the Armed Forces is something that’s tragically common.

Anyway, for The Activation, I thought the hero would be somebody with experiences similar to my old colleague – a former soldier, homeless, desperately trying to turn his life around. And then he gets caught up in the hideous events of the story and is put through hell. Yes, I know. I’m a sadist.

Containing 14 tales of grisly, gruelling terror, Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024 can now be purchased on Kindle here and 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!

September 30, 2020

Jim Mountfield gets apocalyptic

A 7000-word story of mine called The Nuclei has just appeared in a new collection called Xenobiology: Stranger Creatures. Its subtitle describes it as ‘an anthology of international sci-fi, steampunk and urban fantasy short stories.’

The contents of the anthology are explained in more detail in its introduction by one of its editors, Michele Dutcher: “Since Xenobiology is not a study of naturally occurring organisms, the stories in this anthology deal with biology that has been artificially produced, or biological creatures that have been produced by genetic material being acted upon by outside sources to produce something new. Those new organisms can be intriguing when thrown into the mind of an imaginative author.”

The Nuclei is classifiable as science fiction but definitely lurks at the horror end of the sci-fi spectrum. Therefore, in Xenobiology: Stranger Creatures, it’s credited to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I use for my macabre fiction. Basically, it’s a body-horror story set in Edinburgh after an apocalypse. Now there’s a sentence you don’t get to write too often.

Writing a story with a post-apocalyptic setting was an opportunity for me to address some of the misconceptions people have about what would happen after civilisation collapsed, thanks to watching many Hollywood movies on the theme.

Firstly, and I say this with regret because I’m a big fan of George Miller’s Mad Max franchise, petrol would soon degrade and become unusable. Thus, within a few years, no survivors would be able to drive around in motorised vehicles – not even in the giant armoured battle-trucks that featured in 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road. So in The Nuclei I have the human protagonists riding about on horses or on bicycles. The bicycles possess solid wheels made of micro closed-cell polymer resin that allow them to be rode over the debris-strewn, weed-sprouting streets of post-apocalyptic Edinburgh without the risk of incurring punctures. Also, importantly, when the bicycles aren’t on the road, they’re ‘connected to motors and chargers and used to repower the batteries for essentials like the field radio.’

The story also makes references to a few things that seem too mundane to appear in the average post-apocalyptic movie but that would surely be a big thing for survivors of a real-life global meltdown. For example, scurvy would manifest itself among those survivors if they were suddenly denied access to fruit and vegetables in their diets. And the danger posed by cuts and infections would be immense after whatever supplies of antibiotics had survived the apocalypse ran out.

One crucial point that the story tries to make is that post-apocalypse the remaining humans wouldn’t immediately degenerate into bands of savages hellbent on killing each other. This departs from the anarchic scenarios depicted in Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road and or in just about every zombie-holocaust movie ever made (the latter suggesting that, when it comes down to it, human beings are even worse than any zombies they’re trying to fight off).

Actually – as reports from the aftermath of any earthquake, tsunami or other natural disaster will testify – human beings are genetically programmed to cooperate and help one another out. This is not for any uplifting moral reason but simply because cooperation increases their chances of survival. Hence, in The Nuclei, you get the members of a loopy post-apocalyptic religious cult joining forces with a militia dedicated to the protection of medical science in order to defeat, or at least diminish, a common foe.

And what is that foe? Well, it’s one of the ‘stranger creatures’ of the collection’s title, the result of genetic tampering. It’s also the result of me sitting down and attempting to imagine the most revolting monster possible.

Xenobiology: Stranger Creatures is currently available from Amazon here.