Interzone

Cover

Abductees 5 by 2018 cover artist Vince Haig

 

Contents

 

Fiction

Soldier's Things by Tim Lees
illustrated by Martin Hanford

Summer was glorious that year, they said, warm and bright and beautiful. I spent it in a small dark room at B____, the military hospital, attempting to regain – if not my sanity, at least the sense of who I was, and what I’d lost out there, out in the dirt, and the blood, and the fire.

 

Doomed Youth by Fiona Moore
illustrated by Richard Wagner 

“Is it just me, or are there more ants than usual this year?” Joanie asked. She was throwing stones at the bungalow roof to try and chase away a three-foot-long drone which had landed there by mistake, and was attempting to inseminate our chimney.

 

The Path to War by Louise Hughes
illustrated by Martin Hanford 

One bright summer week I crossed the pass from newland into Banish with a spice caravan and a troupe of rainbow-coated mummers. The latter pranced through a story of good versus evil and good always won so I dropped them at the first opportunity. Cowards and charlatans, and drunks, the whole lot.

 

Heart of an Awl by Eliza Ruslander
illustrated by Dave Senecal 

It’s the first day of spring. The ache for speed is constant and insatiable. I go running when I wake. I kneel on a hand truck and get Roy to run me around the cul-de-sac. He balances his Asahi in his right hand and pushes with his left and runs like he has a death wish. The days are getting longer now but the driveway is still crisp with dead leaves. Something rises in me, like grief, or coolant spillage. So far, these rides with Roy are the closest I can bring myself to exploiting an object for conveyance.

 

Zero Day by Sheldon J. Pacotti
illustrated by Richard Wagner

Stationed at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, I made regular road trips to Austin, one hour north, to make a fool of myself in front of complete strangers. Being young, I shotgunned the Easy Decade like everyone wishes they did, but even by 2036 there were plenty of glitches. One time I didn’t even make it to the highway before my cab swerved off-road into a playground. Wham! Face-plant into a climber dome. A bad omen? Considering what happened later that night, I probably should have listened to that air-bag punch in the face.

 

Birnam Platoon by Natalia Theodoridou
illustrated by Richard Wagner

“Can you tell me the story of the Birnam Soldiers?” you ask, staring at me from the other side of the bars.

But I’ve said it all to the prosecutors, the judges, the scholars.

“One last time,” you say. “In your own words.”

Weren’t they all my own words?

You don’t reply, but your eyes are pleading and kind, so I say okay, sure. I can tell the story one more time.

 

Black Static 66 Out Now

Black Static is published at the same time, and in the same format, as Interzone. Issue 66 contains new dark fiction by Ralph Robert Moore, Steven Sheil, Joanna Parypinski, Giselle Leeb, and Nicholas Kaufmann. The cover art is 'Take Death' by Joachim Luetke, and interior illustrations are by Joachim Luetke, Vincent Sammy, and Ben Baldwin. Regular features: Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker; Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore; Case Notes book reviews by Georgina Bruce (including interview with Kerry Hadley-Pryce), Mike O'Driscoll, Daniel Carpenter, Laura Mauro, Philip Fracassi, and David Surface's 'One Good Story'; Blood Spectrum film reviews by Gary Couzens. To take out a subscription to Black Static, or Black Static + Interzone combined, please visit this website's Shop.

 

Interface

Guest Editiral
Tim Lees 

 

Future Interrupted: When I'm in the Crowd…
Andy Hedgecock

Riotous mobs were established as a key motif in the cinema of the fantastic between the wars. Think of the workers’ rebellion in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, a film reflecting the idealism, repression, poverty and uncertainty of its era; or the final scene of James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), which features a vengeful crowd with blazing torches in their hands and malevolence in their hearts.

 

Climbing Stories: Fear of Freedom
Aliya Whiteley

Mark Kermode’s recent BBC series about how film works, Secrets of Cinema, was as much fun as a movie addict like myself can have without a seat number and a severely overpriced bag of Revels, but as I watched I found myself wondering why there was a difference in approach to the subject matter depending on genre.

 

Ansible Link
David Langford

News, obituaries.

 

Reviews

Book Zone

Books reviewed include The Evolution of African Fantasy and Science Fiction edited by Francesca T. Barbini, The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley (plus author interview), Modern Masters of Science Fiction: Arhtur C. Clarke by Gary Westfahl, An American Story by Christopher Priest, The Song My Enemies Sing by James Reich, Buying Time by E.M. Brown, Death's End by Cixin Liu, By the Pricking of Her Thumb by Adam Roberts, Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar, Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates

 

Mutant Popcorn
Nick Lowe

Films reviewed include Venom, Upgrade, Duplicate, Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween, The House with a Clock in its Walls, The Man who Killed Don Quixote, Mirai, The Predator, Smallfoot

 

How To Buy Interzone

Interzone is available in good shops in the UK and many other countries around the world, including the USA where it is stocked by Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million and elsewhere. If your local store (in any country) doesn't stock the magazine they should easily be able to order it for you so please don't hesitate to ask them. You can also buy the magazine from a variety of online retailers, or a version for e-readers from places like Weightless Books, Amazon, Apple, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, etc.

The best thing though is to click on the Shop button above or the link below and buy this new issue or subscribe direct with us. You'll receive issues much cheaper and much quicker, and the magazine will receive a much higher percentage of the revenue.

 

Please Help Spread the Word

Magazines like Interzone cannot survive without subscriptions, and we always need more. If you enjoy the magazine please blog about it, review it, or simply recommend it to your friends. Thank you!

 

The Teardrop Method by Simon Avery

2018 WORLD FANTASY AWARD FINALIST

Interzone readers will be interested to know that TTA Novella 4, The Teardrop Method by Simon Avery, is out now as a B-Format paperback with wraparound cover art by Richard Wagner and bonus connected short story. You can buy it now from the TTA Shop.

"The Teardrop Method is a story about stories; a beautiful novella about love and loss and the connections people make and then sometimes break. It's quiet, haunting, and ultimately moving" Gary McMahon

"Nightmare plotting infused with an aching mitteleuropäische sadness, Simon Avery’s tale of music and mortality could be the novelisation of a lost Argento movie" Nicholas Royle

"Without any prep or background, I started reading the novella The Teardrop Method by British author Simon Avery, and was immediately engaged by the moodiness, the bleakness, the desperation and creaky, world-weariness of the setting and characters. These appealing elements perfectly coalesced into a tragic and fervent eulogy to the creative process - to Art with a capital A - as a means of salvation and transcendence and doom, and to love itself in all its complex iterations, exploring the concept of loving, dying, and even killing, in order to achieve the proper reception code from the eternal Muse while the roaring Danube drowns out the rest of the world. This is a very European story, in all its faded baroque finery and cafe claustrophobia. The snow is heavier here, the dawn ever more surprising. The supernatural and the natural are not so far removed in places like this. The old and the new forever caught in a twirling waltz. I highly recommend this novella, and cannot wait to see what melody Mr Avery pens next. I'll be listening" T.E. Grau

"A monumentally haunting novella" Des Lewis

“Simon Avery’s descriptions of Krysztina’s music makes me want to hear it. It’s a subtle and beautifully told tale with echoes of European film-makers like Haneke and Kieslowski, as well as their predecessors like Franju and Polanski. It conjures a powerful sense of foreboding that reminds me of Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, and shares with that film a sense of being haunted. It has moments of profound sadness and yet still managed to surprise me with its uplifting ending. One of the novellas of the year” Mike O'Driscoll

“Majestic and compelling throughout, The Teardrop Method is an exemplary specimen of a standout novella. It’s beautifully written, excellently produced, and a sign of publisher TTA Press at the top of their game” Gareth Jones, Dread Central

"I can honestly say that Simon Avery's The Teardrop Method is one of the finest and most fascinating novellas I've ever had the pleasure of reading. I highly recommend this novella to speculative fiction readers, because it's a beautiful and subtly complex exploration of death, love, loss and how to recover from a tragedy. Its darkly beautiful atmosphere and delicate story will captivate everyone who appreciates quiet horror" Rising Shadow

"The Teardrop Method is a complex, intricately structured piece of dark fiction, or perhaps quite horror. It is a story about the weaving of stories, about the transmutation of the darkest personal grief into art, and about the coming to terms with the inevitability of death. As a key line puts it – Art leads you back to the person you were after the world took you away from yourself" Gary Dalkin, Amazing Stories

"Simon Avery’s prose is spare and masterly, and certainly the equal of any Booker Prize nominee I’ve ever read. As much goes on between the lines as on them. The interstitial dark spaces are filled with horrors and a creeping unease that drags the reader in and won’t let go. The characterisation and storytelling, too, are brilliant" John Dodds, Amazing Stories

"This highly original piece is written with the sad, chilly atmosphere of much central European fiction but it has a very British rejection of miserabilism for its own sake. The desire for even the most fantastical stories to make sense and to make progress keeps breaking through and the result is a charming, and charmingly odd, novella which stays in the mind like an overheard song" Mat Coward, Morning Star

"Avery's story is a dark and tense thriller, set against a cold Hungarian back drop. The reconnection between father and daughter gives The Teardrop Method melancholy in light of the father's declining health, and the handling of the supernatural element is done so latently it feels authentic and hence, genuinely spooky. The prose here is compulsively readable and even the stranger members of the cast pop off the page" Nick Cato, The Horror Fiction Review

 

Crimewave 13: Bad Light

Interzone readers might also like to know that a new volume of Crimewave is available now. This 240-page American Royal paperback contains groundbreaking and often genre-bending new stories by Simon Bestwick, Gerri Brightwell, Georgina Bruce, Ray Cluley, Mat Coward, Catherine Donnelly, Stephen Hargadon, Andrew Hook, Linda Mannheim, Ralph Robert Moore, Mike O'Driscoll, Steve Rasnic Tem and others, with wraparound cover art by Ben Baldwin. It's only £10 and available from the TTA Shop now.

“One of the very best anthologies I have ever read, in any genre. An absolute gem” Tim Lees