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\u00a9 Cloaked Press, LLC<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Back in September 2020, I had a story called The Nuclei<\/em> included in an anthology called Xenobiology: Stranger Creatures<\/a>.\u00a0 <\/em>All its stories, in the words of one of the editors, Michele Dutcher, shared a theme of \u201cbiology 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.\u201d\u00a0 Being about artificially-created biological creatures, <\/span>The Nuclei<\/em> was classifiable as science fiction, but it definitely lurked at the horror end of the sci-fi spectrum.\u00a0 In fact, the creatures featured in <\/span>The Nuclei<\/em> were the result of me attempting to imagine the most revolting monsters possible.\u00a0 For that reason, the story was credited to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I use for my macabre fiction.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The<\/em> Nuclei<\/em> was also a post-apocalyptic story, set in the ruins of Edinburgh \u2013 we definitely need more post-apocalyptic stories set in the capital of Scotland \u2013 after my revolting, artificially-created creatures had decimated humanity and brought human civilisation to an end.\u00a0 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 \u2018the Activation\u2019 shortly before civilisation fell, when the artificially-created horrors were first unleashed on mankind.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I have now written that story, called The Activation<\/em>, and have just had it published under the penname of Jim Mountfield too.\u00a0 It features in Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024<\/em>, the latest instalment in the annual Nightmare Fuel<\/em> collections of scary fiction put out by Cloaked Press, LLC.\u00a0 As its title indicates, the theme for this year\u2019s collection was body horror, which Wikipedia<\/a> defines as \u201ca subgenre of horror fiction that intentionally showcases grotesque or psychologically disturbing violations of the human body or of another creature.\u201d\u00a0 Well, the modus operandi<\/em> of the creatures in The Nuclei<\/em> involved a lot<\/em> of body horror, so this seemed a natural home for its prequel.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The setting and main character of The Activation<\/em> were inspired by something that happened to me once and by somebody I used to know.\u00a0 Firstly, the happening was a misadventure I had while travelling on the London Tube back in 2016, somewhere between King\u2019s Cross and Liverpool Street Stations \u2013 I must have been on either the Circle, Metropolitan or Hammersmith and City lines.\u00a0 A young woman had what is euphemistically described as an \u2018episode\u2019 and started screaming hysterically at her fellow passengers.\u00a0 Unfortunately, among the things she screamed was the claim that she was carrying a bomb.\u00a0 The train promptly stopped at the next station and remained there with its doors sealed for 20 or 25 minutes.\u00a0 Nobody could get in or out.\u00a0 Meanwhile, the woman kept shrieking gibberish at everyone.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n At one point, a pair of British Transport Police officers walked down the train, but didn\u2019t actually stop to deal with the unhinged woman when they reached her.\u00a0 No, they just walked past her, to the train\u2019s far end, and then walked back \u2013 again doing nothing when they passed her a second time.\u00a0 Later, when I researched the protocol for occurrences like this, I found out that the Transport Police officers had done an \u2018assessment of the incident scene\u2019.\u00a0 Satisfied that they knew where the problem was, and that it wasn’t a case of terrorism, and that there weren\u2019t any other problems elsewhere, they then informed the local police and told them where to find the problem.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Obviously, this took time.\u00a0 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\u2019d been a real<\/em> terrorist present.\u00a0 I guess we were considered \u2018expendable\u2019.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n By the time the Transport Police did their assessment, it’d become clear to everybody that the young woman causing the trouble wasn\u2019t<\/em> a terrorist.\u00a0 She was just some poor, mixed-up soul who\u2019d probably forgotten to take her medication that day.\u00a0 I realised this when, at one point during her ravings, she started listing \u2018all the great prophets in history\u2019.\u00a0 These were Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed and\u2026 Zippy, the gimpy zip-mouthed puppet from the British kids\u2019 TV show Rainbow<\/em> (1972-92).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I had<\/em> to put that detail into my story The<\/em> Activation<\/em>.\u00a0 Although, because Nightmare Fuel: Body Horrors<\/em> is an American publication, I changed Zippy from Rainbow<\/em> to the better-known Cookie Monster from Sesame Street<\/em> (1969-present).\u00a0 Sorry about that, Zippy, but you just aren\u2019t internationally famous enough.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a9 Teddington Studios \/ Thames Television<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a9 Sesame Workshop<\/a> \/ BBC \/ From X<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Secondly, the main character in The Activation<\/em> was inspired by a former colleague, a PE teacher, who was employed by an English private school I worked at in 2002.\u00a0 He was an ex-soldier.\u00a0 One evening, the two of us were having a pint in the neighbourhood pub when he told me \u2013 with a preliminary request not to say anything about it to the school\u2019s headmistress \u2013 that when he went to the school to be interviewed for the PE-teacher position, he\u2019d been homeless.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Homelessness among former members of the Armed Forces<\/a> is something that\u2019s tragically common.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Anyway, for The Activation<\/em>, I thought the hero would be somebody with experiences similar to my old colleague \u2013 a former soldier, homeless, desperately trying to turn his life around.\u00a0 And then he gets caught up in the hideous events of the story and is put through hell. \u00a0Yes, I know.\u00a0 I\u2019m a sadist.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Containing 14 tales of grisly, gruelling terror, Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024<\/em> can now be purchased on Kindle here<\/a> and as a paperback here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a9 Cloaked Press, LLC Back in September 2020, I had a story called The Nuclei included in an anthology called Xenobiology: Stranger Creatures.\u00a0 All its stories, in the words of one of the editors, Michele Dutcher, shared a theme of \u201cbiology that has been artificially produced, or biological creatures that have been produced … <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/bloodandporridge.co.uk\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/Z-from-RB.jpeg\")
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