Interzone

Cover

Interzone's 2019 cover artist is Richard Wagner

 

Fiction

The Realitarians by James Warner
illustrated by Richard Wagner

At Jacinta’s Paris hotel, a bald Russian in a leather jacket handed her a credit card she could use till Nestor showed up.

The corridor to her room was lined with paintings in Gothic frames. Her room had a black marble mantelpiece. Her fridge was full of Georgian champagne.

 

Float by Kai Hudson 

Rhiva squints up at the bright sky bleeding through the slats of her fingers. An endless ocean, was how Educator-Bioecology described it. Robin’s egg blue.

They’d all laughed at that, of course. Ocean means water, infinite water, enough to fill an entire hangar bay and then some, and of course so much water in one place didn’t exist.

 

Harmony by Andy Dudak 

1. The song plays everywhere in this frontier provincial capital, piped into shops and bazaars, blaring from police fortifications and mobile propaganda vehicles mingling with tank columns. The melody is cloying, the singers children who were press-ganged into local stardom. It’s clear from the accompanying video – also ubiquitous on large screens throughout the city – that the children were chosen to represent the ethnic groups at odds here. They chant civic virtues and howl about unity. But there is something more within the song, in its harmonies and resonances. Some call it auditory magic, but it’s more properly termed “interference technology”. Within the spheres of the song, you stroll in a civic euphoria. You’re in a thriving metropolis that provides jobs and infrastructure, courtesy of the occupiers. You are home.

 

A Dreamer Arrives in the Occupied City by Malcolm Devlin

Maya had been to Tierra’s Bar many times before, but she let Anton lead the way as though the discovery was his.

He had her by the hand, leading her breathless through the crowded market district, and when they reached the stall selling simple, red clay sculptures of the Citadel, he tugged her arm and they peeled off from the late afternoon shopping crowd, ducking behind the faded canvas drape that the stallholder had strung across the alleyway behind.

 

Scolex by Matt Thompson
illustrated by Richard Wagner

It isn’t the drugs that fuck you up. It isn’t the sound of your teeth chattering so hard they start to chip, or your synapses firing points of turquoise light across your retinas; or that twitch in your fingers, or that rush in your veins that takes you up and over the edge till there’s no way back, not now, not ever. It’s not having the drugs that kills you. That’s when the shadows start to lurk beyond the streetlights, when the paranoia hits. Everyone’s had their ups and downs. Who hasn’t? But don’t misunderstand. It doesn’t make you an addict. Not like some. You just need to know a good thing when it comes your way.

 

Café Corona by Georgina Bruce

Night stalks you into morning on its long, melancholy legs of rain. You’ve given up on the sky, on the colour blue. The day is grey and cold, with noodles of rain hanging from the air.

 

Our Fathers Find Their Graves in Our Short Memories by Rebecca Campbell

The Ossuary does not evaluate its contents, only preserves them. Its order is not human order.

 

Black Static 69 Out Now

Black Static is published at the same time, and in the same format, as Interzone. Issue 69 contains new dark fiction by Simon Avery, Erinn L. Kemper, Joanna Parypinski, Daniel Bennett, Jack Westlake, and Daniel Carpenter. The cover art is by Joachim Luetke, and interior illustrations are by Richard Wagner, Vincent Sammy, Martin Hanford, and Vince Haig. Regular features: Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker; Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore; Case Notes book reviews by Georgina Bruce, Laura Mauro, Ross Warren, David Surface and others; Blood Spectrum film reviews by Gary Couzens. To take out a subscription to Black Static, or Black Static + Interzone combined, please click on the Shop link above or below.

 

Interface

Guest Editorial
Georgina Bruce 

 

Future Interrupted: Boullée's Dome, Robot Servants and the Afterlife of Diminished Dreams
Andy Hedgecock

 

Climbing Stories: The Unanswerable Why
Aliya Whiteley

Ansible Link
David Langford

 

Reviews

Book Zone

Books reviewed include The Tide Went out + The Darkest of Nights by Charles Eric Maine, Do You Dream of Terra-two by Temi Oh, Snakeskins by Tim Major, New Suns edited by Nisi Shawl, The Record Keeper by Agnes Gomillion, Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan, This House of Wounds by Georgina Bruce (plus author interview), and more

 

Mutant Popcorn
Nick Lowe

Films reviewed include Avengers: Endgame, Captain Marvel, Shazam!, Serenity, Little, What Men Want, Us, Dumbo, Pet Sematary, Missing Link, The Man Who Killed Hitler And Then The Bigfoot, Border, Hellboy

 

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 a subscription direct with us. You'll receive issues much cheaper and much quicker, and the magazine will receive a much higher percentage of the revenue. No postage charge is added to UK orders, and overseas shipping is just £1 per item.

 

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

“Crimewave 13 explores a broadly common theme — the utter blurring of the traditional boundaries between the criminal and the victim, with the trajectories and locations of each of the stories quite distinct from each other and the clever use of partial perspectives confounding the reader throughout” Morning Star