I seem to have hit the ground running this new year, writing-wise, with a new story just published in the excellent Shroud Magazine, and another few publications in the pipeline. You can view my publication history from the past five years or so here: https://tomjohnstone.wordpress.com/publication-history-since-2010/
One recent acceptance I was particularly pleased about was in Terror Tales of the Scottish Highlands, the latest in the long-running and acclaimed regional anthology series edited by Paul Finch for Gray Friar Press. I used to love scaring myself silly reading horror anthologies and books of supposedly true ghost stories, when I was on holiday in the Western Isles as a kid. If they were actually set in the Highlands, so much the better for a delicious frisson when the rain and wind was battering the corrugated iron roof of the cottage my family was renting. Terrance Dicks’s TV tie-in novel Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster was one of the first books to frighten the living daylights out of me, with its recounting of the two Jamieson boys getting lost in the fog while peat-cutting, and the only one of them who makes it back unable for the rest of his life to speak a word, ‘the fear in his eyes… terrible to see’… Thanks, Terrance, for the sleepless nights! Another one that had me sleeping with the light on was a crudely but creepily illustrated book of Scottish ghost stories, about such horrors as ‘The Sallow-Faced Woman’ and the monster of Glamis Castle, so much more thrilling because they were apparently true…
As I got older, I began to enjoy horror and supernatural fiction more than far-fetched fact, but another great Highland holiday read was of course the forerunner of the Gray Friar Press anthology series, Scottish Tales of Terror, edited by Angus Campbell for Fontana, which featured such classics as ‘The Head’ by Dorothy K. Haynes, ‘Consanguinity’ by Ronald Duncan, and ‘The Brownie of the Black Haggs’ by James Hogg. In the more recent series, Paul Finch has lovingly recreated their mixture of literary horror fiction and snippets of folklore, and extended it to English regions such as the Lake District, the Cotswolds, Yorskshire, East Anglia and even London, as well as Wales and the Seaside. It’s an honour to be able to contribute to one of these anthologies, stories from which regularly crop up in one or more of the various ‘Year’s Best’ reprint omnibuses. When I lay in bed reading Scottish Tales of Terror as a youngster, I never dreamed that one day I’d be writing something for a similar anthology…!
tomjohnstone 