Author: Terry Weyna

Shimmer has recently announced that it is paying professional rates for its stories, which is big news for this little magazine. It publishes contemporary fantasy, with an occasional foray into science fiction or horror, “and the stories tend to be tinged with sorrow,” as its home page says. On the basis of Issue 15, I’d call that a fair description — especially the sorrow part.

“The Undertaker’s Son” by Nicole M. Taylor, is about a boy who was introduced to the notion of death early on in his boyhood,

Beneath Ceaseless Skies has just published its 100th issue, and it’s a double issue in celebration. That means there are four stories instead of two, and they’re very good stories at that.

The first, “In the Palace of the Jade Lion” is by Richard Parks, who is rapidly becoming one of my favorite short story writers. It’s set in the Kingdom of Zhao, which seems an awful lot like China. The protagonist is a poor young scholar named Xu Jian, who has won a posting as an Official Censor in a remote northern province.

Murky Depths is a quarterly magazine of “dark speculative fiction” — I’d call it simply horror — that marries illustration — specifically, graphics (or comics, if you prefer that term) — and story in a way different from any other magazine I’ve seen. The black and white drawings sometimes intensify the effect of a story beautifully; sometimes, however, they seriously detract from a story by making it seem comic or by giving too much of a story away. It’s an interesting approach that appears to be giving greater exposure to a number of new illustrators and writers.