Interzone

Cover

Interzone's 2019 cover artist is Richard Wagner

 

Contents

 

Fiction

The Winds and Persecutions of the Sky by Robert Minto
illustrated by Martin Hanford 

Sib’s face itches beneath his filter mask, but he can’t scratch. He’s clinging with both hands to one of the vines that trail up the outside of the skyscraper like veins on a muscled arm. They’re some kind of mutated creeper, grown thick and tenacious. Sib used to fear the vines – when he knew them only as snaking shadows on the far side of translucent windows – but his views changed several moments ago, when he began hugging them for dear life as the wind tried to suck him into whistling, sunrise-pink emptiness. Air, he feels, shouldn’t be like this. It should circulate decorously from vent to vent.

 

Of the Green Spires by Lucy Harlow

Some said the starthistle was native to the streets of Jericho, outside Oxford’s old city wall where the canal fed its inconceivable, alien branches, but they were wrong on both counts – which is to say, it was not native to Jericho, and it wasn’t a starthistle at all.

 

Jolene by Fiona Moore
illustrated by Richard Wagner

 

“I’ve got a case for you,” said Detective Inspector Wilhemine FitzJames. “It’s a country singer whose wife, dog and truck have all left him.”

 

The Palimpsest Trigger by David Cleden 

There were a hundred different ways things could go wrong and Marni knew them all.

 

Fix That House! by John Kessel

Judy and I did not know what we were letting ourselves in for when we bought the ancient, grand but seedy mid-19th century mansion out on Chinaberry Road. Certainly we knew from the start that the place had seen better days, but we had no idea of the many details to which we would have to attend, and the at times seemingly impossible roadblocks we would face – and have to figure out a way around – before we could live in our dream home.

 

James White Award Winner
Two Worlds Apart by Dustin Blair Steinacker 

Warm, for a rock without a star, Varhely thought after landing.

Still she shivered, feeling air on her skin for the first time in two weeks. Two weeks of travel in amniotic suspension, watching the stars stretch like grains of rice at the Milky Way’s fringe.

 

Black Static 71 Out Now

Black Static is published at the same time, and in the same format, as Interzone. Issue 71 contains new dark fiction by Stephen Hargadon, Sarah Read, Steven Sheil, Daniel Bennett, and Seán Padraic Birnie. The cover art is by Joachim Luetke, and interior illustrations are by Richard Wagner, Jim Burns, Warwick Fraser-Coombe and others. 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, Andrew Hook, David Surface, and Daniel Carpenter (including Paul Tremblay interviewed by Laura Mauro); 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
John Kessel 

 

Future Interrupted: Irrationality, Forgetfulness and a Load of Goebbels
Andy Hedgecock

 

Climbing Stories: From One to the Next
Aliya Whiteley

Ansible Link
David Langford

 

Reviews

Book Zone

Books reviewed include A Year Without A Winter edited by Dehlia Hannah, This is How YOu LOse the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, Palestine +100 edited by Basma Ghalayini, Menace of the Machine edited by Mike Ashley, The End of the World and Other Catastrophes edited by Mike Ashley, A Brightness Long Ago by Guy Gavriel Kay, Learning Monkey and Crocodile by Nick Wood, Driving Ambition by Fiona Moore, Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes, The Library of the Unwritten by A.J. Hackwith, The Complex by Michael Walters, Ivory Apples by Lisa Goldstein

 

Mutant Popcorn
Nick Lowe

Films reviewed include Aniara, Spider-Man: Far From Home, The Angry Birds Movie 2, UglyDolls, Playmobil: The Movie, Yesterday, In Fabric

 

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
NOT MANY COPIES LEFT • NOW ONLY £5 

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

VERY FEW COPIES LEFT

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