Interzone

Cover

Interzone's 2019 cover artist is Richard Wagner

 

Fiction

Verum by Storm Humbert
illustrated by Richard Wagner

I stood by my 23rd floor window and held the vial of Regina Luwei’s verum up to the light. It was transparent amber, like all good verum – dense enough to turn the sun into a dull circle. Then, I angled it down to look through the verum at Chestnut Street below, and I wondered about all the stories that marched through that tiny vial – how everyone’s world was a delicate coordination of neurochemistry and that the only difference between that and verum were the guidance nanoparticles.

 

Can You Tell Me How to Get to Apocalypse? by Erica L. Satifka
illustrated by Vincent Sammy

 

A dozen little dead kids sit on the styro­foam steps outside the only apartment building on Gumdrop Road. They’re listening to the newspaper seller. He’s talking to them about time.

“Time,” says the newspaper seller. He pauses a very long while, as if he’s forgotten his lines. I can’t blame him; everyone gets a little fuzzy at the end of a long day of shooting. “It’s how we measure the length between one event and the next. There are sixty minutes in an hour, and twenty-four hours in a day. Would any of you like to sing the time song with me?” When he says this, he doesn’t look at the little dead kids, but instead at the viewers-at-home, like he was trained to do.

 

The Frog's Prince; or, Iron Henry by N.A. Sulway 

After sixty years, we sit at a table by the window. Storms break in the distance, registered here as intermittent flashes of light. The waitress brings water, menus; I wave her away. The menus have an image of a frog on their green plastic covers, beneath the half-erased gold cursive of the restaurant’s name: Palais de la Grenouille. If you recognise this place at all, it is a misrecognition. Perhaps the shape of the doorway is familiar, that incongruent gothic arch through which the waitress passes into the kitchen. Perhaps something about the ceiling roses might recall you to yourself: the pattern of frogs and starflowers. You were so pleased with the folly of them at the time, whistling that stupid song about the butterfly ball as we danced around the parquet floor. I try to remember the room as it once was: no fluorescent lighting or plastic palm trees in plastic pots, but chandeliers that leaked warm light over our guests, long buffet tables laden with champagne glasses and silver punch bowls. The wall panels – long since painted over – with their trompe-l’œil of mist-shrouded gardens. You, in the centre of the room, more luminous than any other man, beckoning to me across the tops of everyone’s heads.

 

The Princess of Solomon Pond Mall by Timothy Mudie
illustrated by Martin Hanford 

Fridays are Kaya’s favorite because that’s when the supply drops parachute down, but today turns out to be extra special. Today, nestled at the back of the crate in the empty far corner of the mall parking lot, behind the canned pasta, bottled water, and books, sits a robot. Not much of a robot – even though it’s seated, she can tell she’s taller than it, and she’s not even five feet. Instead of a face like a person, it has one long eye that looks like an astronaut’s facemask. No nose or mouth or ears, just little holes under the eye that are probably a speaker and microphone.

 

Heaven Looks Down on the Tomb by Gregor Hartmann
illustrated by Richard Wagner

Shortly before noon, when the other Collectors were dormant, Mei sneaked away from camp and headed toward the showdown. In the fierce gravity she walked carefully alongside the red cliff of the canyon, taking each step cautiously, trying to go easy on her fragile lunar bones. It was creepy to have nothing but blue sky overhead instead of a low ceiling crisscrossed with pipes and conduits. At midday, the sun beat down like a welding laser.

 

FiGen: A Love Story by Kristi DeMeester

I will bury the animal you once were in the snarled remainders of someone else’s heart.

This was the first line of the book you gave me on our fifteenth wedding anniversary. I’d been reading it before bed – off and on as you pretended to poke at the screen of your phone beside me – and I’d not made it past page fifty. You watched over my shoulder, waiting for me to get to the part you wanted me to, and I slowed down on purpose, adoring the way the scar above your lip grew deeper in your frustration. But it was not a book for me. You knew when you presented it to me, wrapped in a thick paper the color of clotted cream and iris. Your wife, who had devoted her life to theories and numbers, carried no love in her heart for the beauty you saw in our language, but this difference was the thing that drew us together when we were not young but carried fewer years on our bodies.

 

Black Static 70 Out Now

Black Static is published at the same time, and in the same format, as Interzone. Issue 70 contains new dark fiction by Ralph Robert Moore, Kristi DeMeester, Natalia Theodoridou, Jack Westlake, Steven J. Dines, Cody Goodfellow, and Steven Sheil. The cover art is by Jim Burns, and interior illustrations are by Richard Wagner, Vincent Sammy, Sebastian Mazuera, and Ben Baldwin. Regular features: Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker; Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore; Case Notes book reviews by Georgina Bruce, Mike O'Driscoll, Andrew Hook, Daniel Carpenter and others (including interviews with Nathan Ballingrud and Nicholas Royle); 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
Kristi DeMeester 

 

Future Interrupted: Corporate Ziggurats and Fabulous Ruins
Andy Hedgecock

 

Climbing Stories: The Breath Before the Beginning
Aliya Whiteley

Ansible Link
David Langford

 

Reviews

Book Zone

Books reviewed include The Dollmaker by Nina Allan (plus author interview conducted by Andy Hedgecock), Beneath the World, A Sea by Chris Beckett, The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders, The Resurrectionist of Caligo by Wendy Trimboli & Alicia Zaloga, New Maps: More Uncollected John Sladek edited by David Langford, Luna: Moon Rising by Ian McDonald, AfroSFv3 edited by Ivor W. Hartmann

 

Mutant Popcorn
Nick Lowe

Films reviewed include X-Men: Dark Phoenix, Brightburn, Tolkien, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Men in Black: International, Aladdin, Toy Story 4, Detective Pikachu, The Dead Don't Die, Diamantino, A Dog's Journey, High Life

 

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
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

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