Next SFF Author: Gena Showalter

Previous SFF Author: Martin L. Shoemaker

Series: Short Fiction

Magazine Monday: Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Issues 83 through 86

My favorite email every other week is the one containing the new issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Each issue contains two stories of what the online magazine calls “literary adventure fantasy.” The quality of the stories has been high throughout the year or so I’ve been reading the magazine, but it seems to be getting even better with recent issues.

Issue #83, published December 1, 2011, opens with “The Gardens of Landler Abbey” by Megan Arkenberg. The tone and setting of the story remind the reader of Jane Austen or other Regency fiction,

Magazine Monday: Granta 117, Horror

Granta strikes me as an unusual place to find horror fiction; it normally is home to the toniest of literary fiction. But Issue 117 is entitled “Horror,” so I thought I’d see what a literary magazine’s vision of this genre is.

As it turns out, the issue is a lot more about horror in real life than it is about the type of horror that is more safely tucked away in my imagination. Tom Bamforth’s nonfiction essay about war in Sudan, “The Mission,” presents a picture one wishes were only imagined,

Magazine Monday: The Empress of Mars

The Empress of Mars is a new quarterly production of Dreadnought Press. The inaugural issue of January 2012 is a lovely glossy magazine with good art, starting with the cover image of a trio of idealized spaceships by Martin Rotherham. Alas, the fiction within rarely matches the promise of the cover. And the magazine desperately needs a copy editor, one who can fix the run-on sentences, sentence fragments, and the many instances where “it’s” was used when “its” was meant. Perhaps, as with many magazines, these are merely labor pains, and future issues will be better;

Magazine Monday: Unstuck, Volume I

I love fantastic literature with a literary bent. Give me a good Italo Calvino novel, a Jorge Luis Borges short story, or any of Steven Millhauser’s work, and I’m a happy camper. So the new periodical, Unstuck, should be perfect for me. It states its mission this way:

“We emphasize literary fiction with elements of the fantastic, the futuristic, the surreal, or the strange — a broad category that would include the work of writers as diverse as Borges, Ballard,

December 12th, 2011. Terry Weyna | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 5 comments |

Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories

Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories by Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant (eds.)

Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories is a new young adult collection edited by veteran anthologists Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant. Featuring twelve conventional short stories and two graphic entries, Steampunk! showcases a wide variety of ideas and styles that fall under the steampunk umbrella. The collection is entertaining and is lent extra freshness by the variety of settings explored by the authors: none of the stories are set in Victorian London.

December 1st, 2011. Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 4 | Cassandra Clare, Cory Doctorow, Delia Sherman, Garth Nix, Holly Black, Kelly Link, Libba Bray, M.T. Anderson, Ysabeau S. Wilce | Short Fiction, Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |

Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper: This is for a limited audience

Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper by Robert Bloch

Robert Bloch is justly famous for writing the scariest shower scene in history, even if it was Alfred Hitchcock’s movie that introduced it to a broader audience. Bloch is the author of Psycho, which introduced us to the cross-dressing, multiple personality-mass murder Norman Bates.

Over several decades Bloch wrote crime fiction, thrillers and horror. One recurring theme was that of the unsolved murders in Whitechapel, London in 1888, and the unknown killer with the nickname “Jack the Ripper.”

Subterranean Press has gathered together a collection of Bloch’s Ripper-themed work called Yours Truly,

20th Century Ghosts: A prime collection of short fiction

20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill

Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son. Good, now that’s out of the way. 20th Century Ghosts (2007) is a prime collection of short fiction. Some stories are horror, some are literary horror and some aren’t horror at all. Hill has a strong style, a distinctive voice, and a willingness to indulge in post-modernism. This means that the conclusions of some stories are left up to the reader. This is not the undisciplined writing of someone who can’t commit to a resolution,

Magazine Monday: Interzone 236 (September-October 2011)

Interzone is a periodical I find delightful as much for its excellent nonfiction as its terrific fiction. David Langford’s “Ansible Link,” for instance, reports what’s going on in the speculative fiction community. It also provides information on how that community is viewed from outside in a section entitled, “As Others See Us,” usually pointing to something stupid said in the mainstream media about science fiction, fantasy or horror. My favorite bit has always been the section entitled “Thog’s Masterclass,” pointing out silly sentences in published fiction.

“The Book Zone”

Changing Planes: The perfect book to read in the airport

Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin

Airports are horrible places — the boring waits, the noisy rush, the germy stale air, the ugly utilitarian décor, the nasty food. That is, until Sita Dulip, while waiting for her delayed flight from Chicago to Denver and noticing that “the airport offers nothing to any human being except access to the interval between planes,” developed a technique to change planes inside the airport. She discovered that in the airport the traveler is uncomfortable, displaced, and already between planes and can therefore easily slip into other planes of existence while waiting for a flight.

Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters: An elegant horror collection

Mr. Gaunt by John Langan

We are living in a Golden Age of the short story of the fantastic, as is ably demonstrated by John Langan in his first collection of short stories, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters. Langan writes the sort of psychological horror that reminds one of both Henry James and M.R. James, as Elizabeth Hand points out in her introduction to this collection. Each story is elegantly written, with craft evident in every sentence.

Next SFF Author: Gena Showalter

Previous SFF Author: Martin L. Shoemaker

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