November’s Fireside Magazine focuses on relationships. Mostly romantic, where people are learning to navigate this shared space with their partners. Where each of them bring to the mix something wonderful and alive and warm, but also some damage. Something that makes it tricky sometimes to know what to do or say. The stories follow the ways that these people can hurt each other, and how they can set each other free. They are at turns beautiful and tragic and excellent, and I should get to reviewing them!
It’s a special Zodiac-themed double issue of Apex Magazine this month, guest edited by Sheree Renée Thomas (who also just guest edited the SEUSA Strange Horizons special issue in late July). There’s A LOT of fiction and as with most of the Apex special issues, poetry is back! There’s actually six short stories and well as six poems in this issue, making it perhaps the biggest I’ve read from the publication. And it all swirls around the idea of the Zodiac, of divination, of astrology. Not always literally, though the actual signs and horoscopes make an appearance or two. Instead, the stories look very much at the stories that we tell. At the ways these stories then become everyone’s stories, our minds making them personal, intimate, and topical. Because our lives have a way of getting into the stories we tell and the stories we take in, and then we might mistake our pulling them out again like a bit of magic and mysticism. But there’s a lot of different takes on stories and truth to find in these SFF works, and I should just quit talking about reviewing them and get to reviewing them!
It’s a huge issue of Lackington’s out this month, focusing on the Gothic. And from literal Ostrogoths to exquisite corpses, there’s a lot to see and a lot of amazing interpretations of the theme. There are eight original stories (and a reprint that you should definitely check out but that I’m not reviewing this time) and each of them feature themes and settings that embrace the Gothic aesthetic. Haunted houses, neglected estates, and isolated villages all make the stories ripe with shadows that just might swallow up the unwary traveler. These are pieces about facing the strange and the dangerous, the supernatural and the all-too-human. And, well, not always coming out the other side. There’s a great mood to these stories that really gets at the heart of the theme, and it’s a fantastic way to explore what is one of the oldest kinds of SFF stories. So let’s get to it!
