Quick Sips - Tor dot com September 2020

Art by Audrey Benjaminsen

It’s another full month of original fiction at Tor dot com, with four short stories and a novelette. As the seasons change into autumn (here in the U.S. at least), the fiction seems to be shifting as well. The stories are getting a bit more grim, a bit spookier. The works are tending toward horror tropes and elements with vampires, ghosts, monsters, gods, and apocalypses. The works find characters who are trying to get their lives on track following loss, following disappointment, following…life happening. And their attempts run into shadows, into the strange and dangerous mysteries of the world. And if, and how, they come out of those shadows will determine a lot if they can start to recover and heal from what’s happened to them. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Nightmare #88

Art by Ddraw / Fotolia

The two stories in the first Nightmare Magazine of the year both build up some nicely strange and haunting situations. Situations where there’s a mystery to solve. Who murdered a woman? What happens in the forest outside the city? Death is very present in these pieces, and the characters all have to decide what to do and how to approach that death. Will they run from it, or be driven to despair by it? Or will they face it, resolved and ready, and in forcing that confrontation, do something about it? These are some haunting reads, walking a line between triumph and destruction, and I’ll get right to the reviews!