Interzone

Cover

Interzone's 2019 cover artist is Richard Wagner

 

Fiction

The Backstitched Heart of Katharine Wright by Alison Wilgus
illustrated by Richard Wagner

Died — At West Dayton on the 12th of June, Orville Wright, youngest son of Bishop Wright. The deceased was riding a safety bicycle when he suffered a fatal collision with a milk cart at the intersection of Hawthorne and Fitch. He is survived by three brothers, one sister, and his devoted father.

Katharine Wright is seventeen, and when she opens her eyes she wonders, at first, if she dreamed up the accident entirely.

 

The Fukinaga Special Chip Job by Tim Chawaga
illustrated by Richard Wagner 

Tsingtao, the Twisted Sister, City of Forking Paths

A city of roads that never end. Instead, they loop around until they begin again, or fork out to become other roads. It is bad luck in Tsingtao if your house is at the end of a road. Good luck if it instead completes a circle, very very good luck if it takes a path and frays it into many. These areas are coveted, home to businessmen and parliamentary folks, people who Get Things Done.

 

This Buddhafield is Not Your Buddhafield by William Squirrell 

The owner is not there.

The owner is never there.

The agent from the hiring service had been very clear about the situation: “You will likely never see another human being again.”

 

For the Wicked, Only Weeds Will Grow by G.V. Anderson
illustrated by Richard Wagner 

We wait on the concourse as the gondola docks, our cilia and the grass below us stirred by a soft breeze. The giant clamps squeal as they close. We must get those seen to, Uah muses.

 

Seven Stops Along the Graffiti Road by David Cleden
illustrated by Martin Hanford

1. Child of the Road

When Ry came upon the girl crying in the road, weeks of steely resolve crumbled in an instant.

She was just a child, no more than six or seven. Someone like that shouldn’t be out here alone.

 

Terminalia by Sean McMullen
illustrated by Richard Wagner

My field is new, it is just fourteen years since Friedrich Maas used cardiac compression to restart the hearts of two patients. Sadly, successful revivals are greatly outnumbered by failures, and even when patients have been dragged back from the afterlife, the functioning of their brains is often impaired. Exploration of the frontiers of death is not impossible, but it remains difficult and dangerous.

 

Black Static 67 Out Now

Black Static is published at the same time, and in the same format, as Interzone. Issue 67 contains new dark fiction by Ralph Robert Moore, Mike O'Driscoll, Kristi DeMeester, Eric Schaller, and Michelle Ann King. The cover art is by Ben Baldwin, and interior illustrations are by Joachim Luetke, Ben Baldwin, and Dave Senecal. 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, 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: Escaping Into Visions
Sean McMullen 

 

Future Interrupted: Do it All Over Again
Andy Hedgecock

 

Climbing Stories: Chaotic Goodness
Aliya Whiteley

Ansible Link
David Langford

 

Reviews

Book Zone

Books reviewed include Puma by Anthony Burgess, Near Future by Suzannah Evans, Europe at Dawn by Dave Hutchinson, Our Child of the Stars by Stephen Cox, Starfield edited by Duncan Lunan, The Sky Woman by J.D. Moyer, The Quantum Magician by Derek Künsken

 

Mutant Popcorn
Nick Lowe

Films reviewed include Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Ralph Breaks the Internet, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, The Grinch, Mortal Engines, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, Overlord, Sorry to Bother You, Aquaman

 

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