Quick Sips - The Dark #45

Art by Peter Polach (Apterus)

February brings a pair of stories to The Dark Magazine that center energy in different ways. Ghosts, in different ways. Exploitation, in different ways. But both look at women moving through a world where it’s dangerous to exist. Where it’s dangerous to be competent and independent. And where they can’t really maintain what they have without a little help. Now, for one of the characters that help is freely given, a form of justice and strength and hope. For the other...well, for the other it is something taken from those with less power, with less rights, and with less ability to fight back. And both are great dark fantasies that look at the abuses of society and show how hard it is not to be pulled under by the currents of societal roles and expectations. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - The Dark #38

The stories of July’s The Dark Magazine offer up characters stuck in terrible situations. Trying to get by, but also caught in a way where doing something they know or feel is wrong seems to be their only way out. Their only way to claw their way up from the depth that the world has pushed them. Except, even then, there seems only to be more misery waiting, more danger and more trouble. These are stories that don’t offer much comfort or hope, but rather see that certain times, in certain situations, there’s nothing but a doom gliding toward you on a collision course. So let’s get to those reviews!

Art by Gloom82 (Anton Semenov)

Quick Sips - The Dark #14

I'm actually super glad that The Dark Magazine is out so promptly at the beginning of every month. Not so that I can get it out of the way but so that I can have the entire month to recover. Once again The Dark more than earns its name with two stories about artifacts. In one, the artifacts are postcards from a sister. In the other, they are bits of scrimshaw. Both sets of artifacts tell a story, and both stories are in turn interpreted first by someone within these tales and then by us, the readers. The effect is to both create distance from the events, from the traumas described and eluded to, and to obliterate that distance by deconstructing the way that we interpret those artifacts. It's a pair of complex, layered stories, that hit with the vengeance of a storm and have left me a bit adrift in still waters and both glad I have a month's respite before the next issue and hungry for more. So let's get to those reviews! 

Art by Ben Baldwin