Interzone

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Cover

Abductees 3 by 2018 cover artist Vince Haig

 

Contents

 

Fiction

Grey Halls by Rachael Cupp
illustrated by Richard Wagner

 

The poets invariably went to the end or the beginning. AndÄ›l could see the romance in it, the great inherent drama of watching the first city rise, fields laid out in heretofore unknown green geometries, or that final push, the same fields enveloped in one last burst of irradiant blight. But these points in time held little interest for him. It was the fault of his songs. The midpoint of crescendo was always more satisfying, more fluid than the beginning or end. Intros and outros served only to frame all the beautiful unresolved melodic tension. When he finally won his journey – it was with the ballad Grey Halls, his sole popular composition, trite and cheery and crowd pleasing – he began to look for something in the middle, along the way to the end but not so near it that the figurative horns were blaring full force.

 

Superbright by Ryan Row
illustrated by Martin Hanford

Tom drifted at the vast fringe of a swirling string of stars. This felt like the edge of something, way out here in the universe, but Tom knew better now. The long golden cape of his costume, torn and holey, shimmered and rippled around him. There was no wind out here except the wind in his mind. He wasn’t cold, but he thought he should be. He could feel the slight pull, like a thought, of the double black hole of the galaxy. He could feel all the hard little lights and smooth surfaces of the stars pulsing. Like other hearts.

 

Tumblebush by Darby Harn
illustrated by Dave Senecal 

1. Mercy isn’t your mark

I fling the glue trap out the window. Mouse still squealing. Sometimes I make the water. Most times I come up short, and the traps pile in the narrow passes between the cluttered stacks of shipping containers on the Manhattan Bridge with the rest of the trash. Below, a woman on horseback tries not to get stuck. Hip waders on. Hunting rifle across her lap.

Only in New York.

 

P.Q. by James Warner 

This year Daljeet discovered a new species of harvester ant in the California desert, near Needles, and spent the summer studying them.

 

Throw Caution by Tim Major

Haru Ito watched as the fleet of AkTraks banked the steep dunes to perform an ungainly about-turn. The caterpillar tracks of the four tethered vehicles spun wildly. The metal cross-braces that bound the vehicles together and that supported the central bowl-shaped ‘personnel carrier’ groaned under the shearing force. Haru rubbed his left shoulder, which had bumped repeatedly against the inner surface of the carrier. A three-hour journey, and nobody had bothered to install seats.

 

So Easy by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

You woke me at the time we used to call noon. This isn’t important; it could’ve been any time for the clouds outside the windows. My only guarantee that you told the truth was the ticking watch on my wrist, the kind of guarantee that thieves make. The watch could’ve been broken, slowed or quickened. It could’ve been wrong to begin with. You could’ve reset it while I was sleeping.

 

Eyes by Paul Crenshaw
illustrated by Richard Wagner

Michael found the eyes swimming down the stream after a rain. He had been sitting on the bank watching the water run over the rocks and the eyes came bobbing along like little boats. He stood and watched them come and when they were even with him he waded into the water and fished them out.

 

Black Static 64 Out Now

Black Static is published at the same time, and in the same format, as Interzone. Issue 64 contains new dark fiction by Simon Avery, Phoenix Alexander, Sam Thompson, Seán Padraic Birnie, Tim Cooke, and Jack Westlake. The cover art is by Martin Hanford, and interior illustrations by Richard Wagner and Martin Hanford. Regular features include Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker, Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore, Case Notes by Peter Tennant (book reviews), Blood Spectrum by Gary Couzens (film reviews). To take out a discounted subscription to Black Static, or Black Static + Interzone combined, please visit this website's shop.

Winner of the 2017 This Is Horror Fiction Magazine of the Year Award.

Potential subscribers outside the UK should note that six issues of 12-issue subscriptions have absolutely no postage added: you'll pay exactly the same as a UK subscriber.

New subscribers can get this issue free by using "BS64 FREE" as your Shopper's Reference during checkout. The same offer applies to Interzone (use "IZ276 FREE") and a dual subscription to both magazines (use "IZ276 + BS64 FREE").

 

Interface

Braving the Post-Apocalyptic Landscape
Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam 

 

Future Interrupted: Technological Marvels, Hideous Situations and the Collective Unconscious
Andy Hedgecock

A few months ago I attended an appalling ‘programme of continu­ing professional develop­ment’ that contained a single absorbing element. Participants interviewed each other in pairs and produced a timeline of stories that fired our imaginations as children and young adults. We weren’t allowed to nominate TV programmes, films or books on the basis of a vague nostalgic glow, we had to justify their inclusion by vividly describing a specific scene or plot element.

 

Time Pieces: The Long and the Short of it: Marian Womack’s Lost Objects
Nina Allan

Short stories are the devil’s business. An extreme statement, no doubt, but this is genuinely how I have come to feel, as a writer, about a medium that increasingly brings me nothing but grief. It’s not that I don’t care for short fiction [she added, hastily], it’s that I don’t seem to know how to write it any more. Perhaps I never did. Certainly it seems to me now that most of my early stories were not so much stories as attempts to get to grips with the art of long-form narrative, ambiguous statements that eventually coalesced into medium-length runs of stories on particular themes and based around the same set of characters – mosaic novels, in other words, still a favourite form of mine and one I fall into instinctively: two of the very few stories I have managed to write in the past couple of years hark back to characters I first wrote about a decade ago.

 

Ansible Link
David Langford

News, obituaries.

 

Reviews

Book Zone

Books reviewed include Nebula Awards Showcase 2018 edited by Jane Yolen, Close Your Eyes by Paul Jessup, Adrift by Rob Boffard, Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee, Shattermoon by Dominic Dulley, The Adventures of the Ingenious Alfanhui by Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Apocalypse Nix by Kameron Hurley, The Green Man's Heir by Juliet McKenna

 

Mutant Popcorn
Nick Lowe

Films reviewed include Solo: A Star Wars Story, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Deadpool 2, The Cured, Hereditary, The Endless, How to Talk to Girls at Parties, Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms, The Little Vampire

 

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, etc.

The best thing though is to follow any of the Shop/Buy Now/Subscribe links on this website and buy this new issue (scroll down to the bottom of the Shop), or better still take out a subscription (at the top of the Shop), direct with us. You'll receive issues much cheaper and much quicker, and the magazine will receive a much higher percentage of the revenue.

Potential subscribers outside the UK should note that six issues of 12-issue subscriptions have absolutely no postage added: you'll pay exactly the same as a UK subscriber.

SPECIAL OFFER: New subscribers can get this issue free by using "IZ276 FREE" as their Shopper's Reference during checkout.

 

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The Teardrop Method by Simon Avery

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 this website's 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 out 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 Shop now.

"Crimewave goes further, and the quality is higher" The Times

"It just keeps on getting better, maintaining its capacity to both please and surprise" Crime Time

"A must-have collection of the hottest crime stories around" Ian Rankin