Quick Sips - Fireside Magazine #74

Art by Stephanie Singleton

Fireside wins the award for having the last story out of the year from all the venues that I cover (at least, I’m pretty sure), with the final one dropping of New Years Eve. And it is another full month from the publication, with five stories and a poem to close out 2019. That said, it’s not quite my final review post covering 2019 material (which will drop on Monday), and so with this penultimate 2019 review post, I look at a wide range of SFF, from an ode to a YouTuber who inspires resistance and survival in a dystopian (or maybe just realistic) future to a ghost story about immigration and the pressures to make money. The works are deep and careful, powerful and resonating, and I’ll get right to my reviews!

Quick Sips - The Dark #40

The stories of the September issue of The Dark Magazine deal with a classic horror trope: The Sacrifice. In both stories, the characters are faced with having to sacrifice someone because of their own desires, their own wishes. It’s part of a deal, a bargain by which they hope to escape something or gain something. And for both stories, the sacrifices are supposed to confront the characters with the cost of their desires. Whether they decide that it’s worth it, though, is a bit different from piece to piece. Still, both do engage with what it means to be trapped by expectations, by place, by distance, and how desperate people can be to find some way to escape their circumstances. To the reviews!

Art by Abigail Larson

Quick Sips - The Dark #24

The two original stories from May’s The Dark Magazine are rather slow explorations of death and termination. Of something rotten that seems to be spreading. Of a realization that things aren’t quite so normal and good as they seem. These stories both focus in many ways on people moving around an elephant in the room (though not actual elephants), where the main characters don’t see or don’t want to see what’s happening around them. They want to just continue on as if everything was fine. But it’s not. And they don’t long get to put off their confrontation with reality and darkness. So yeah, let’s get to the reviews!

Art by Vincent Chong