The Dark, Issue 91, December 2022, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, ed.
This is a compact volume, featuring four stories and a beautifully foreboding piece of cover art from Tithi Luadthong. The star for me was the first story, James Bennett’s Sulta. Every photographer has experienced a bit of the dreaded “GAS”: Gear Acquisition Syndrome. But how often is it that the gear is acquiring you? Belly-Slitter, by H. Pueyo, makes the bloody point that sometimes you might want to ignore the old wives tales but they may not ignore you. Y is for Yesterday from Steve Rasnic Tem brings a piece of Yiddish folklore to life -- if “life” is the right word. Finally, Morana Violeta’s The Cat is spare story which brought out my inner ailurophobe. All good stuff. This is aimed at readers with a subtler taste in SFF/horror, but when the stories land, they land on you with both feet.
Smirk factor: All clear: 2 pts (No smirks given.)
Immersion factor: Shallow water: 1 pt
Writing quality: Above-average: 1.5 pts
Character/plot development: Average: 1 pt
Innovative/interesting: Above-average: 1.5 pts
Total: 7/10
Nightmare Magazine, Issue 121, October 2022, Wendy Wagner, Ed.
“These are the kind of people who probably won’t learn their lesson.
They’ll grieve for a while, they’ll hurt, maybe things will briefly get better, but then they’ll sink back into their bad habits.
They’ll forget, tell themselves it was an aberration, and go back to pretending that everything is okay and they live in a happy place where nothing really bad could happen.”
--A.C. Wise on the townspeople in “Sharp Things, Killing Things”
Previous reviews had featured Nightmare 120 and 122. 121 makes an appearance here plugging the gap. These were excellent stories, selected for the magazine’s tenth anniversary. Sharp Things, Killing Things is a tale of death and revenge set in a small town, but author A.C. Wise pulls in so much nuance that this is much, much more than just that. Tiny Little Wounds by Carlie St. George packs an incredible amount of suffering into 784 vividly uncomfortable words. The star, though, was The Ghost Eaters. This appealed to me as a dog person, but writer Spencer Ellsworth really shines in this tale of a good, good boy.
Not normally a poetry fan, I also loved Okwudili Nebeolisa’s Ritual, which brought back memories of traditional African healers from my time on the Continent. Rounding out a uniformly strong selection of fiction was an excerpt from Desert Creatures, Kay Chronister’s bleak tale of a barren and unforgiving post-apocalyptic world. This month’s “The H Word” wsa a meditation on lycanthropy and didn’t resonate--YMMV. The magazine is rounded out by book reviews and the usual author spotlights.
Smirk factor: All clear: 2 pts (As ever--?--no smirks.)
Immersion factor: Chest-high: 1.5pts
Writing quality: Above-average: 1.5 pts
Character/plot development: Average: 1 pt
Innovative/interesting: High: Above-average: 1.5 pts
Total: 7.5/10
Nightmare Magazine, Issue 123, December 2022, Wendy Wagner, Ed.
Another issue of this multi-threaded magazine. In fiction, this month we get two stories. The issue opens with the hard to describe story Break the Skin If You Have To from Emma Osborne, Jess Essey, and Caldwell Turnbull. Zombie love in a house that hates when you leave it? That and much, much more including flashes of what could be humor leaving the darkness of this beautifully-crafted story. Mari Ness’ Wallers is a bizarre look into the life--or non-life--of a girl who literally fades into the wallpaper.
Poetry is represented by Angela Liu’s Three Symptoms of a Disaster--345 words of beauty and heartbreak. The book excerpt, from Erika T. Wurth’s White Horse offered a snapshot of the novel which was long enough to highlight Wurth’s flowing writing style but too short to sell me on the book. Maybe the single most interesting piece was Chris DiLeo’s thoughtful contribution to the “Creative Nonfiction” section, a meditation on death titled Still Breathing. This issue was fine, but suffered from reversion to the mean, since I read it after Issue 121, which I thought was above and beyond.
Smirk factor: All clear: 2 pts (No smirking, generally well-crafted and carefully edited words.)
Immersion factor: Shallow water: 1 pt
Writing quality: Above-average: 1.5 pts
Character/plot development: Average: 1 pt
Innovative/interesting: Average: 1 pt
Total: 6.5/10