Quick Sips - The Dark #60

Art by denissimonov

The two original stories in the May The Dark Magazine have some pretty heavy content warnings to them (perhaps to be expected given the publication). They both also find women dealing with abusive relationships and having to navigate their own shame and feelings of culpability for their pain and harassment, their oppression and fear. The situations they find themselves in are wrenching, dangerous, and dehumanizing, and the women are left having to make some impossible decisions. Accept the course that the men around them have laid out, even when it contains their own annihilation...or stand against them, and take whatever power is possible to smash the walls threatening to box them in. It’s not an easy month of stories, but it’s some moving and powerful horror. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Apex #113

October certainly brings a creepy batch of dark SFF to Apex Magazine, with three short stories delving into violence, voice, and transformation. In each of the stories, there is a woman facing violence from men. Not always of the physical kind, but always of an unjust kind. Misogynist. Racist. The men of these stories all know that they’re doing wrong, that they’re hurting women. And yet all of them justify it somehow. Because they’re a devil, or because of their ambition, or because that’s all they know. But it leaves women in the position where they must either ask men for what they want or, being denied, take what they need. That can come with a violence of its own, or it can come with a flight. With an escape. With a hope that there is a place beyond this corruption. So yeah, let’s get to the reviews!

Art by Vinz El Tabanas

Quick Sips - Shimmer #44 [July stuff]

Shimmer is ending. The announcement has been made that 2018 will be the last for the publication. It’s a bit of a poignant moment for me, because Shimmer was one of the first publications I reviewed, back when I was at Tangent. Since then, it’s been a source of some of my favorite stories, and has provided a consistent and luminous stream of short SFF. The July offerings are no exception, with two quite haunting tales about the pressure that a setting can put on a person. The pressure to conform, and fit in, and succeed in the expected ways. The pressure to suppress hungers that aren’t appropriate for human communities. The stories are at turns tragic and grimly hopeful. Not that pain or rending flesh or burbling lungs can always be avoided, but that life can sometimes move beyond those hurts and take forms more suitable to thriving in oppressive situations. To the reviews!

Art by Sandro Castelli

Quick Sips - The Dark #23

For the original fiction in this issue of The Dark Magazine, I might say that the theme is hauntings. At the very least, the two new stories look very closely at the ways that people can haunt and be haunted. The way that places and situations and especially relationships can link people, tie them together, and not always in a very good or healthy way. These stories explore how the dysfunction and abuse between people can create a story of haunting, a situation where people become trapped in a place, or near a person, and lose the ability to escape. There is a gravity to pain and torment, lies and longing, and the issue does a great job complicating that. But before I ramble on too long, to the reviews!

Art by Aleksandra Grahovac

Quick Sips - Apex #89

It's October at Apex Magazine, which means that there's extra reasons to revel in some dark SFF. Halloween! And while neither the stories nor the poetry evoke the holiday directly, they do bring the darkness and bring the horror and don't let up. The prose is…well, it's violent and full of monsters and uncomfortable truths. About the people who get overlooked and how the abuses the world creates lead to monsters. Lead to death and tragedy. The poetry looks a bit more at the past and the future, reaching and touching the unknown through shared experiences, through the constellations of what joins us as humans. Today also kicks of Apex's subscription drive, so be sure to give that a look! It's a spooky issue and I'm going to jump right into the reviews! 

Art by Denis Corvus

Quick Sips - The Dark #17

The two stories of this issue of The Dark Magazine take on some deep subjects, namely death and history. And not just death, but suicide and loss. And not just history, but torture and oppression and erasure. They both look at the wounds left over by loss, by violence, and both concern people and places being haunted. Not being allowed to move on. Having to deal first with what has happened, what has been taken, before healing can begin. These are stories with some definite punch and a strong creepiness and I'm going to jump right to the reviews! 

Art by Tomislav Tikulin

Quick Sips - The Dark #15

The stories from The Dark Magazine this month seem to focus on families. Mothers and daughters. Or stepmothers and stepdaughters. These are stories about how things are inherited. How the darkness that the mother grows can reach for the daughter. Or how the stepmother can feed the stepdaughter to the darkness only to find it…doesn’t go to plan. As always with this publication the stories are filled with uncomfortable moments, unsettling silences, and some unforgettable horrors. Tackling fairy tales and apocalyptic destruction, they don’t pull their punches and are not for the faint of heart. To the reviews! 

Art by Tomislav Tikulin

Quick Sips - The Dark #11

Well, as always, The Dark Magazine offers up just what it promises, four stories of inky darkness that frighten and delight. The issue has a nice mix of dark fantasy and outright horror to satisfy fans of all stripes, though things are kept strictly speculative. And, more than the darkness, the stories carry with them a sense of mystery, that idea that the dark here is concealing something too horrible or glorious to behold, something full of sublime that we can only glimpse the reflection of. From alien threats to mental illness, the stories build worlds where the dark is encroaching into the lives of the characters. So time for me to get to those reviews!

Art by Daniel Bérard

Quick Sips - Shimmer #28 (December Stuff)

The final Shimmer stories of the year certainly show off a nice depth and a strong darkness. From a story about a girl who can find anything lost to a story about historical erasure and discovery, these stories thrive on balancing moments of subtle art with moments where message takes center stage, unavoidably and unwilling to disappear. Both feature characters striving to regain something. Their place in history, the people they have lost, the things that gave their lives meaning. What results are stories that creepy like frost, sinking into the bones of the reader, slow but with a weight that sits on the chest like a twenty pound cat napping. And now, to the reviews!

Art by Sandro Castelli