Grimdark Magazine #34, Beth Tabler, Sarah Chorn, eds. April 2023
I love it when new issues of this magazine drop – so much so, that when I sat down to write “a few lines” I came up for breath four paragraphs later. Knocking this review out took almost as long as reading it had because I wound up opening the issue up to check something…and promptly reread large chunks of it. As usual, very strong fiction. The non-fiction was credible, interesting and mostly a wonderful complement to the fiction – although let down a little by two shorter pieces that seemed more like odds and ends viewed against the lovingly put together totality of things.
The jewel in the crown is The Royal Game from Christopher Ruocchio. It starts with a game of chess; like the “game of kings,” it quickly turns out this is being played for stakes that go beyond pieces on a board. Yazdan ban Vahid, accomplished spymaster, is an avid player of dark, patient games. He’s had a great track record, until an evening when he learns the truth of the saying that if you come at the king, you best not miss. (Omar from The Wire would have 100% understood the point of both the scene and the story.) This story is taut and exciting, a good advertisement for what other reviewers have said is a longer series.
The other fiction is uniformly excellent. Ken Scholes’ The Night Sung Out My Name is a timely look at how breaking up with your combat A.I. is hard to do. Black Library veteran Guy Haley unleashes The Cure, a dark and grim mercenary adventure story which – shockingly – is a bit short on sympathetic characters. “More pay for the living” is a great theme, though, and Haley uses it to set the stage for horrors to come. Electric Sonalika from Samit Basu offers a horrifying update on the Cinderella story, in which a foot, rather than just a shoe, plays a telltale part. Last but not least comes Miles Cameron’s Dead Reckoning, a crisp adventure with another spy, this time a more down to earth type who finds high drama in deep space. I want to read more by all these folks.
This issue is rounded out by a strong collection of non-fiction. There are good interviews of authors Alexander Darwin and Jeff VanderMere, along with reviews of The Ten Percent Thief by Lavanya Lakshminarayan, M.R. Carey’s Infinity Gate, VanderMere’s Veniss Underground, The Book That Wouldn’t Burn from Mark Lawrence (start of the deceptively dull-sounding “Library Trilogy”), and an anthology, Life Beyond Us, credited to something called the European Astrobiology Institute. Interspersed with them are two shorter, free-form pieces which were good tries but weak. The topics were video game adaptations and the climate crisis – the latter ending rather bleakly with, well, “at least we’ll have some great stories to leave behind.”
Let’s hope it’s not that bad. But if it is this issue is a good downpayment on that legacy.
Smirk factor: All clear: 2 pts (Smirk-free.)
Immersion factor: Full-body: 2 pts
Writing quality: Above-average: 1.5pts (The fiction resonated; the non-fic was let down a little by the miscellaneous pieces.)
Character/plot development: Above-average: 1.5 pts
Innovative/interesting: Above-average: 1.5 pts
Total: 8.5/10 (4.25 stars, rounded to 4)
The Dark Magazine, Issue 95, Clara Madrigano, ed. April 2023
Another consistent favorite. This slim volume opened with Bibiana Ossai’s tripartite The Faceless, The Watch Guard, and Sugar which spans the distance between Lagos and an Ohio amusement park with surreal and refined prose. Steve Rasnic Tem’s Fish Scales takes us through a most unusual form of post-traumatic growth – one wonders how much of this reflect’s the author’s experience with bereavement. Town Z by Ash Caballero is a whirlwind of suffering and deranged revenge. And Sean Padraic Birnie offers Hand-Me-Down, in which a second-hand item turns a new mother’s life upside down. Getting stories which are this consistently strong takes time and effort, but the magazine delivers month after month.
Smirk factor: All clear: 2 pts (Zero smirks)
Immersion factor: Chest-high: 1.5 pts
Writing quality: Above-average: 1.5pts
Character/plot development: Above-average: 1.5pts
Innovative/interesting: Above-average: 1.5pts
Total: 8/10 (4 stars)
Nightmare Magazine, Issue 127, Wendy N. Wagner, ed. April 2023
Nightmare Magazine’s editor greeted April as “that month of fools and taxes” but there was very little taxing with the April issue. Organized around the urge to “spit into the very face of annihilation” as the editor puts it, this issue had the familiar mix of lovingly-assembled fiction, non-fiction and miscellanea.
Natasha King’s Root Canticle opens the issue with a hallucinogenic, horrifying and definitely one-way trip into an exceptionally dark basement. Beatrice Winifried Iker’s Delicate Webbing was is short (834 words) but quite evocative, beautifully describing a search for connection of a very particular kind. Jumper by James Tatam compellingly explores taking the search for thrills to illicit extremes—and activated my fear of heights from my front porch, elevation four feet.
The H Word, April edition, sees Neal Auch explore the powerful human urge to retribution through violence, weaving in the Final Girl trope, and then ending with Albert Camus’ The Plague. Meg Elison uses de-crypt-ed to decry rampant misogyny in Hell House, an early ‘70s foundational haunted house novel which has aged badly. I’ve never read it, and actually don’t think I’d heard of it, but will happily take Elison at her word and avoid it. Finally, two cheers for Xander Odell’s pair of author spotlights, focused this month on King and Tatam.
And last but definitely not least: the “creative nonfiction.” Maria Haskins uses A Piece of Paper, Burned to recount a “good story” from her Swedish ancestors about unusual powers and hidden knowledge. Her clear, straightforward prose serves the story up cleanly but powerfully. The premise was also unusual and fascinating – I could easily imagine my grandmother or great-grandmother dishing up an Irish version of Haskin’s family history. I usually find any given month’s fiction the strongest part of the magazine, but for April I think Haskins took pride of place, with Jumper second.
Smirk factor: All clear: 2 pts (No smirking.)
Immersion factor: Chest-high: 1.5 pts
Writing quality: Above-average: 1.5 pts (The worst piece this month is average.)
Character/plot development: Above-average: 1 pt (Solid work all around.)
Innovative/interesting: Average: 1 pt (Fiction dragged down a bit by the non-fic section.)
Total: 7.5/10 (3.75 stars, rounded to 4)
Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 155, John Joseph Adams, ed. April 2023
Lightspeed for April was another stimulating read. I appreciate care which evidently goes into producing this month after month. The good parts are…good, and the not-good was still pretty reasonable. Every Bone a Bell from Shaoni C. White was my favorite of the lot. Her protagonist has an extremely useful skill, is badly used, but in the end gets the last, shattering word. White writes tight, economical prose that nonetheless packs a punch; reading the story, I felt I was being carried along down an event horizon spun from words.
The SF section also featured Brian K. Hudson’s Virtually Cherokee, which frames AI against a human/civil rights theme with strong contemporary overtones. Amy Johnson’s Lament of a Specialist in Interspecies Relations looks at “becoming” in a very bureaucratic future. Spaceman Jones by Adam-Castro Troy has a midshipman taking one drink he shouldn’t have had, and revels in the results thereof—including a twist that’s very Los Angeles.
In fantasy, John Wiswell cleverly cleaves apart the distance between enmity and love in the short So You Want to Kiss Your Nemesis. Bogi Takacs offers Construction Sacrifice, with the memorable opening sentence “There’s dysphoria, and then there’s turning into a mid-size city.” All that follows flows from that propostion, laid out from two fascinatingly different perspectives. When the Giants Came Through the Valley by Derrick Boden strained heavily under the weight of an allegorical perspective that’s both super-interesting and just a little too much to pull off. Amanda Helms rounds out the section with The House, The Witch and Sugarcane Stalks, charting the uneasy life and even less easy dreams of a witch dwelling in an abode of magical confections and uncertain identity.
The novel excerpt this month was from The Ten Percent Thief from Lavanya Lakshminarayan. It looks polished and well-written, probably drawing to good effect from the author’s work as a game designer. Ironically, the excerpt turned me off from wanting to read it: I’m not paying for a multi-hundred page description of a dystopia in which social media has run amok and apparently stopped mirroring society and just taken it over. I can wince through that same effect by opening my news feed for more or less free. This sounds a little too on the nose, I think.
Chris Kluwe reviews The Thick and the Lean by Chana Porter. I feel like I may not be the target audience for either the review or by extension the book, which is recommended for those who inter-alia “sometimes…just want to burn it all down.” Everybody seems like they have a match, but no one has a plan for what to do after the fire which might be, you know, important or something? Anyway, see preceding paragraph on why I’m probably not going to read The Ten Percent Thief either. Same logic applies.
Aigner Loren Wilson offers Emma Torzs’ Ink Blood Sister Scribe which sounds very sweet and tries to bring out the (literal) magic of books. Last but not least, Arley Sorg reviews Khadijah Queen and K. Ibura’s Infinite Constellations. Sorg is very enthused—slightly more than 1800 words worth of excitement—and the anthology sounds like it’s worth reading for the exposure to new and fresh voices.
The magazine is rounded out by Lauren Amberdine’s author notes, which include a fascinating take from Takacs on the folk roots of Construction Sacrifice, the story’s (disapproving) nod at historic anti-Semitic blood libels – and we learn that like Sorg, he likes Infinite Constellations—which he manages to summarize in a sentence. Brian Hudson, Amy Johnson, and Amanda Helms also get the usual deft treatment.
Smirk factor: All clear: 2 pts (No smirks found.)
Immersion factor: Shallow water: 1 pt (A bit less ‘sticky’ than I remember in past editions.)
Writing quality: Above-average: 1.5 pts
Character/plot development: Above-average: 1.5 pts
Innovative/interesting: Above-average: 1.5 pts
Total: 7.5/10 (3.75, rounded to 4 stars)