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\u00a9 Schlock! Webzine<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n We\u2019re now into October, a month that climaxes with the festival of Halloween.\u00a0 Thus, it\u2019s appropriate that I have just had a Halloween-themed short story published in the October 2023 of the online fiction publication Schlock! Webzine<\/em>.\u00a0 Entitled The<\/em> Turnip<\/em> Thieves<\/em>, it appears under the name of Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I use for horror, ghost and generally \u2018dark\u2019 stories.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The<\/em> Turnip<\/em> Thieves<\/em> takes place on a Scottish hill farm in the early 1980s.\u00a0 It begins with a farmer noticing strange activity on a distant strip of ground where he\u2019s planted turnips \u2013 \u2018neeps\u2019 as they\u2019re called in the Scots language.\u00a0 As it\u2019s one day before Halloween, he thinks he knows what\u2019s afoot. \u00a0Kids from a nearby town, he assumes, must be trying to steal his neeps, so they can make lanterns from them for the upcoming festival.\u00a0 And, vengefully, he sets off to intervene\u2026<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The story is a nostalgic invocation of a time before pumpkins became widely available in Scottish supermarkets and when Scottish trick-or-treaters \u2013 or \u2018guisers\u2019, to give them the correct Scottish terminology \u2013 had to make do with the turnip, the pumpkin\u2019s humble root-vegetable cousin, as a substitute for fashioning Halloween lanterns.\u00a0 Actually, the shrunken, wizened visage of a turnip lantern is, to my mind, much creepier than that of a pumpkin one.\u00a0 On the other hand, howking the hard, pale flesh out of a turnip required a lot more effort than gutting a pumpkin did.\u00a0 And once you had a candle burning inside it, a turnip lantern stank\u2026\u00a0 Or, as they say in Scotland, it reeked<\/em>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The main page of Schlock! Webzine<\/em>\u2019s October 2023 edition \u2013 Volume 17, Issue 15 \u2013 can, for the next few weeks, be accessed here<\/a>.\u00a0 The<\/em> Turnip<\/em> Thieves<\/em> itself can be read here<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/bloodandporridge.co.uk\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Tur-Lan.jpg\")
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