This was my first encounter with Abyss & Apex, a generalist speculative fiction webzine that seeks to publish “powerful stories with emotion that resonates in our minds and hearts long after the first reading” and “stories that stand out from the norm even in a genre that pushes the envelope of normal.” With the five stories of issue #26, I would say they haven’t quite hit that mark.

In “One Wicker Day” by Andrew S. Fuller, funerary services have been taken over by a mysterious government agency. Dressed in white and led by the sinister Mr. Morrow, they arrive immediately after someone dies and carry the body away in a silver cylinder to who-knows-where. This is in stark contrast to the old way that our protagonist, Netta, remembers, of the whole family being involved in placing the departed in a wicker basket. Today old and new will clash, as Netta’s husband, Harry, dies; and, sure enough, Morrow and his Servicemen duly turn up on her doorstep—but they’re not the only ones who do…

Fuller’s is not a story that explains its fantastic elements, or even hints much about them—you take them as you find them, or not at all. This creates a certain distance between reader and story, making it harder to engage emotionally with its theme, which appears to be that the traditional should sometimes win out over the modern and bureaucratic. Still, it works, because Fuller is an effective writer. It struck me that “One Wicker Day” would make a good short film; certainly, parts of it are very cinematic in style (the beginning, for instance, where Netta’s reaction to her husband’s dying at table alternates with Harry’s fork flying through the air). But of course the movie in your head is just as fine.

“Wolfling” by Laura Anne Gilman examines the human consequences of a virus which has left the majority of the population “Changed”—that is, with wings or extra-springy legs for jumping higher, and so on. Straight away, this story has a hurdle to overcome, which is that this sort of idea has been treated so often before, in X-Men, in Heroes, in…but you hardly need me to give you a list. In Gilman’s future, it’s the Changed who are normal and the “Normals” who are other; efforts are being made to improve the lives of the minority, but they are still at a significant disadvantage—so what’s young Steven to do when his baby sister is born a Normal?

Considered by itself, “Wolfling” is a perfectly decent look at some of the issues around minority groups and “difference”—but it is very hard to consider the story by itself when it’s probably nothing you haven’t seen before through a very similar lens. However, the author weaves the divergences between the fictional world and the real elegantly into the story, so the experience of reading Gilman’s tale is still an enjoyable one.

Peter Greene, the student protagonist of Lawrence M. Schoen’s “Xenosomnambulism,” has had a lifelong capacity for lucid dreaming; but lately he’s been getting dreams he can’t control, dreams of the Carlyles, the aliens whose deputation arrived on Earth just over a year ago. As the story begins, Peter has a dream in which one of the Carlyles tells him to phone an Agent Yampell. Next morning, he does so—only to observe his landlord being taken away by men in suits at the very same moment.

Agent Yampell, we learn, is working with the Carlyles to bring in Peter, who (the aliens say) may be an “Opener,” capable of opening a way between Earth and the Carlyles’ dream-reality (dreams being another full form of consciousness to them), which will give humans access to the aliens’ “Dreaming.” But the Carlyles, we also learn, have been hiding something from Yampell: Peter is indeed an Opener but not quite of the sort they claim. What follows is a race to see who’ll reach him first, Yampell or the Carlyles.

The chase is fun, but Schoen reveals too much too early, so it’s not that hard to guess the true implications of Peter’s abilities as an Opener (though, as I recall, it’s never made clear exactly why they are so important to the Carlyles); the rest is just playing out what we anticipate. The result is that “Xenosomnambulism” is a jolly romp, but not much else—and it ends as the most interesting part arrives.

“Ghosts of Cretaceous Park” by Larry Hodges is pretty much a shaggy dog story (or perhaps a shaggy dino story), but it does its job assuredly. The odious Sam Birdle makes his family’s fortune when he discovers that a dinosaur’s ghost makes a daily appearance on land owned by their corporation and builds a tourist attraction around it. But Sam is jealous of his brother Bruce’s majority share in the company and plots Bruce’s downfall. Hodges appropriately makes Sam the kind of anti-hero one feels like booing, and poetic justice is suitably served in the end.

Vylar Kaftan’s “Disarm” is a striking look at the rights and wrongs of fighting back. Our world has been conquered by inscrutable aliens we call “tickheads,” who turned our weapons against us and now rule Earth as “benevolent dictators.” Trey served in the army against the tickheads but was injured and has been left “marked” by the aliens. Now he wants to find a way to beat them. His friend, Ryan, who was exempt from the draft, would rather live and let live. The idea of the tickheads’ “mark” (which manifests itself differently to everyone who sees it) works well as a metaphor for the difficulty that demobbed soldiers can experience settling back into civilian life, and the way Kaftan depicts the aliens suggests how unknown “the enemy” may be to people caught up in a conflict and its aftermath. Yet it’s not the metaphors that have the greatest force in the tale but the more direct statements; for example, as Trey says to Ryan, “You want to save everybody, but you don’t want to fight. You can’t have it both ways.” Both young men have a point, and it’s this sort of thing that shows just how intractable the issues are. “Disarm” is certainly a story that provides the reader with much food for thought.

In short, the most successful stories here are Kaftan’s (perhaps the only one which fully lives up to the zine’s ideals) and Hodges’s (which, though entirely successful on its own terms, does not have “Disarm”’s emotional depth). Fuller’s piece is good, but not as engaging as it needs to be; Gilman’s works but is too familiar; Schoen’s is a romp that would be better with a shorter beginning and a longer ending. Still, despite these reservations, reading this issue of Abyss & Apex would be far from a waste of time.