Black Gate

Michael Penkas took on the lion’s share of our magazine coverage this month, with in-depth reviews of the latest issues of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Nightmare. Mike joins our current magazine reviewer, Fletcher Vredenburgh (whose beat is primarily sword & sorcery), as well as our Retro-reviewers, Rich Horton and Matthew Wuertz.

In other magazine news this month, Rich Horton presented his 2017 Hugo Nomination thoughts, recommending dozens of stories from all of the major magazines. See all the details here.

Check out all the details on the magazines above by clicking on the each of the images. Our February Fantasy Magazine Rack is here.

…

Read More Read More

Issue #219 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies is now available, completely free on their website. It is dated February 16, 2017 and features fiction by Grace Seybold and Jeremy Sim, an Audio Fiction Podcast by Margaret Killjoy, and a reprint by Cory Skerry.

Jason at Featured Futures was enthusiastic about the Seybold.

Jeone Serrica is climbing what seems to be a world entirely of mountainside or cliff-face when, after scaring off a giant lizard, she encounters a village of strange women. After being somewhat ambivalently welcomed and despite being told to remain in her guest quarters, our intrepid explorer sneaks a peek at the villagers’ rites. What she sees mystifies and horrifies her but, before she can even try to come to terms with it, she’s snatched by a giant bird and taken off to an even stranger realm and an encounter that requires much more from her than even facing down giant lizards…

The imagination brought to bear in conceiving this doughty protagonist and this amazing world and the entities she interacts with was extremely impressive… it was fascinating throughout and will live in the memory for quite some time.

Read Jason’s complete review here.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents for issue 219.

…

Read More Read More

Usually with Nightmare, by the end of the issue I’ve picked a clear favorite story. The stories are always well-written, but there’s usually one that especially moves me. This month, we’ve got two haunted towns and two haunted families that consistently play with the concept of who is haunted and who is the haunter. And I just can’t pick a favorite.

It starts with “Things Crumble, Things Break” by Nate Southard, about a town that’s slowly dying from a chemical accident. Or from something that they’re told is a chemical accident. While the author never mentions Flint (either in the story or in the proceeding interview), it’s impossible not to read this story of a toxic, abandoned city without thinking that tragedy wasn’t at least a subconscious influence.

Next up is “Alice Through the Plastic Sheet” by Robert Shearman (originally published in Remember Why You Fear Me: The Best Dark Fiction of Robert Shearman), that starts with the familiar trope of the boring suburban family being disturbed by loud neighbors … only to veer off in a David Lynchian direction rather quickly.

“You Will Always Have Family: A Triptych” by Kathleen Kayembe starts with a noise in a locked room (yet another familiar horror trope) and slowly reveals a tale of possession that alternates between three different points of view (hence the “Triptych” in the title). Kayembe doesn’t spare with the gruesome imagery, but at its heart this is a story about family and what it means to different people. And while I normally hate horror stories that delve too much into explaining the physics behind the supernatural, this one puts in just enough that we understand the stakes, while also explaining why so many possessed people end up looking so ragged so quickly.

It all winds up with “Seven Minutes in Heaven” by Nadia Bulkin (originally published in Aickman’s Heirs, appropriately enough), another “haunted town” story that has a twist ending that actually comes up in the middle. So you might begin reading this story thinking, “Oh, I know where this is going,” and you’re right, but that twist gets revealed in the middle, leaving the reader to sink even deeper into the nightmare. Because the only thing worse than finding a monster in your closet is realizing that there’s another closet behind that one.

…

Read More Read More

The February 2017 issue of Clarkesworld, issue #125, marks an important milestone for the magazine — and for its editor and founder, Neil Clarke. Here’s Neil to explain (from his editorial, “The Next Chapter Begins“).

The day this issue is published will be my first day as a full-time editor, which isn’t to say I’ve reached the point where I’m making a full-time salary. That’s going to take time, which I finally have. The first order of business is to close the salary gap between Lisa’s job and my old one and to cover the cost of our new health plan. I’ve agreed to do some consulting and knowledge transfer sessions with my former employer, so that should help create a bit more of a buffer before our savings account has to come into play.

As for the impact all this new-found time and energy will have on Clarkesworld, give me a couple of months to work that out. I still have some backlogged tasks that need to be completed and then I can start hammering out a long-range plan. In the meantime, each new subscription, Patreon supporter, or advertiser takes a little bit of the financial pressure away, so this will be one of my immediate areas of focus.The other will probably be targeting more anthology projects, both original and new, including catching up on the remaining Clarkesworld annuals. I’ll probably take on a few more ebook clients as well.

If you are already a subscriber or supporter, thank you. You’ve made this leap possible. If you aren’t a subscriber, there’s no better time than now. I know money is tight for many of our readers and listeners, so if you can’t afford to, you can always help by amplifying the calls for new subscribers/supporters on social media or perhaps adding a review on one of the many sites that sell our digital subscriptions — you’d be really surprised by how much of an impact that sometimes makes.

And while part of me will miss my old career, I’m eager to get started on this new chapter in my life and look forward to the new opportunities it presents. Now, back to work… !

Clarkesworld is one of the finest magazines we have — and one of the best things to happen to genre short fiction in the last decade. If you care at all about the future of the field, I hope you’ll consider supporting Clarkesworld, perhaps by just buying a sample issue at Amazon or B&N.com for $2.99 or, as I did, signing up at their Patreon page. I’m very excited to see what the new era brings at Clarkesworld, and I hope you’ll join us for the ride.

…

Read More Read More

Once again, Beneath Ceaseless Skies delivers a pair of stories that convey a genuine sense of wonder by exposing the reader to ideas and imagery that they never experienced before.

It starts with “Proteus Lost” by Tony Pi, a story about the perils of shapeshifting. So often, magic in fantasy is portrayed in recipe format. Mix these ingredients with those magic words and you get a spell. In this story, we get a genuine sense of the dangers involved in casting a spell on yourself. The “spells” involve a series of conjurations written in a spell book as a list of visual riddles. Get any one riddle wrong and you end up in the wrong shape and need to work your way back to the intermediate shape where you lost your way. Tony Pi pulls off the amazing trick of making two guys sitting in a room reciting spells feel suspenseful.

Next up is “Requiem for the Unchained” by Cae Hawksmoor. I’ll be honest and say that I found the premise of this story to be rather confusing. At its heart, it’s about a captain taking a ship on a dangerous mission rather than losing it. There are old themes here about the old way of doing things being replaced by new ways and a genuinely compelling concept of a sea of ghosts. But the story seemed to have a lot of build-up before the action that didn’t clearly explain what exactly was being done. A smarter reader will probably think I’m just a slow learner, but that was my take on it.

As usual, you can read both stories (as well as a podcast recording and archived story) for free at www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/issues/issue-217, but these publications only survive through financial support. So why not drop ninety-nine cents and actually pay for it?

We last covered Beneath Ceaseless Skies with issue #216.

Quiet horror is a genre that’s a hard sell these days. It’s rarely cinematic, so that you don’t see a lot of film adaptations. And it can be something of an acquired taste. Thankfully, there are some high-profile markets that will take a risk on this sub-genre and, as the February issue of Nightmare demonstrates, those risks can yield darkly wondrous rewards.

We begin with “The Garbage Doll” by Jessica Amanda Salmonson. Dolls are always a creepy and the story is tinged with a sense of regret that comes with age. The dreamlike narrative style might be off-putting to some, but if you read it just before bedtime, you may find yourself wondering where the story ends and your own dreams begin.

“The Dying Season” by Lynda E. Rucker combines the “town with a secret” trope with the “gaslit wife” trope to form an unsettling narrative, where both the reader and the protagonist never quite know what’s going on, even if both agree that getting the hell out of that town is the best course of action.

“Youth Will be Served” by Andrew Fox is another “town with a secret” story, although this secret is only known by a handful of people. Taken as a story about the horrors of growing old, gentrification, or just the sacrifices we’re willing to make for others (and how those sacrifices often benefit us as well), this is a great slow-burn horror/mystery piece.

Once again, Nightmare chooses to save the best for last with “Word Doll” by Jeffrey Ford. Again, dolls are always creepy, but here the author really digs into the concept of dolls and what it means to play with them. There are no simple animated killer toys in this one, but rather something less tangible (and thus more difficult to fight). Unlike so many dark fantasy stories, the “mythology” built up in this story is utterly fascinating.

As with all Nightmare issues, you can certainly read all of the stories online for free, but these publications only survive with financial support, so it’s really better if you drop $2.99 for a copy at www.nightmare-magazine.com/issues/feb-2017-issue-53.

We last covered Nightmare magazine with issue 52.

From far-distant nether dimensions of imagination, editorial overlords have transmitted another fabulous issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly to our mundane plane of existence. Teams of blind scribes in the Himalayas, listening intently to the vibrations of the snow butterflies of Nepal, have transcribed the text with eager hands. And once again, the world owes them a great debt. (And maybe a case of beer. From a mico-brewery, not the cheap stuff.)

The latest issue includes stories by Dennis Mombauer, Aidan Doyle, Raphael Ordoñez, and HFQ editor James Rowe. Here’s the complete TOC, with fiction links.

…

Read More Read More

A lot of exciting changes in the magazine industry this month. Let’s start with the bad news: Warren Lapine’s Fantastic Stories of the Imagination closed up shop. The Good News? We added two brand new magazines to our tracking list: Obadiah Baird’s sharply designed The Audient Void, and the stellar first issue of Occult Detective Quarterly, edited by Sam Gafford and John Linwood Grant.

Fans of vintage magazines had lots of fun material to choose from this month. Rich Horton looked at the June and July 1962 issues of Fantastic, and Nick Ozment riffs off Knights of the Dinner Table from 2008, asking the burning question “Who Would Win? John McClane and James Bond versus a Tribe of D&D Goblins.” In addition to all that, Tangent Online announced their highly-anticipated 2016 Recommended Reading List, Fletcher Vredenburgh reviewed a trio of magazines in his January Short Story Roundup, and Michael Penkas started a brand new magazine review column for us, kicking off with reviews of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, the January issue of Nightmare, and the most recent issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Check out all the details on the magazines above by clicking on the each of the images. Our late January Fantasy Magazine Rack is here.

…

Read More Read More