Interzone

Cover

Interzone's 2019 cover artist is Richard Wagner

 

Fiction

Cyberstar by Val Nolan
illustrated by Richard Wagner

They cut out my eyes before they sent me to meet God. The exenterations took place in a gleaming white surgical suite carved out of the Lesser Skellig. The procedures were elective insofar as I presented with neither malignancies nor with life-threatening infections of any kind. 

 

And You Shall Sing to Me a Deeper Song by Maria Haskins
illustrated by Martin Hanford 

I hear the all-too familiar blast of a bot-gun as a bullet screams by my cheek, thwacking into the gravel between the railway ties behind me. Belem rears up, waving his clawed front feet in the air, and my brain snaps into battle mode. The sound of the weapon sings through the implants nestled beneath my skull as the bot-gun’s specs are transmitted to my cortex. But no specs can tell me why a weapon that shouldn’t exist is being fired at me in this hind-end of the continent, ten years after the bot-war ended.

 

Coriander for the Hidden by Nicholas Kaufmann 

1. Lilac for Joy

His name, in so much as an angel can have a name or a sex, is Suriel. They call him the guardian of the flowers.

 

Everything Rising, Everything Starting Again by Sarah Brooks

The black butterflies are the dead, rising.

In this long summer’s heat, death is catching. Sweating hands pass it on through coins, through door handles, through the clatter of slot machines in the arcades. From my bedroom I watch for windows opening, for black shapes escaping. I wonder what it would be like to be so light.

 

'Scapes Made Diamond by Shauna O'Meara
illustrated by Richard Wagner

Alec doesn’t even look my way as he joins me in the snug confines of the quarantine lock. Twenty-seven years of – what’s that Earth phrase he liked? – water under the bridge and he still blames me for what happened, even though it was I who went to prison.

 

Black Static 68 Out Now

Black Static is published at the same time, and in the same format, as Interzone. Issue 68 contains new dark fiction by Stephen Volk, Tim Lees, Kay Chronister, Amanda J. Bermudez, Tom Johnstone, and David Martin. The cover art is by Joachim Luetke, and interior illustrations are by Joachim Luetke, Ben Baldwin, Dave Senecal, and Richard Wagner. Regular features: Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker; Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore; Case Notes book reviews by Georgina Bruce, Peter Tennant, Mike O'Driscoll, Daniel Carpenter, Laura Mauro, Andrew Hook, 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 click on the Shop link above or below.

 

Interface

Guest Editorial
Shauna O'Meara 

 

Future Interrupted: The Beginning of Wisdom
Andy Hedgecock

 

Climbing Stories: Books That Smile Back
Aliya Whiteley

Ansible Link
David Langford

 

Reviews

Book Zone

Books reviewed include The Orphanage of Gods by Helena Coggan, The True History of The Strange Brigade edited by David Thomas Moore, The Mortal Word by Geneveive Cogman, The Subjugate by Amanda Bridgeman, The Migration by Helen Marshall, Zero Bomb by M.T. Hill, Shadow Captain by Alastair Reynolds, A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, The Girl King by Mimi Yu, The Clockworm and Other Strange Stories by Karen Heuler

 

Mutant Popcorn
Nick Lowe

Films reviewed include Happy Death Day 2U, Glass, Mary Poppins Returns, The Kid Who Would be King, Alita: Battle Angel, Bumblebee, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part

 

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

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