LIVER BEWARE! You're in for a Drunk Review of Goosebumps #12: BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

Do you hate children? Because if so, this is probably the Goosebumps book for you. Yes, yes, I know, the books are about children and most of them do involve putting said kids in deadly danger for the reader’s enjoyment and terror. This is, presumably, horror, after all. But this book takes things to a whole new level. It introduces a character only to torture her, to teach her that the world is a cruel, dark place, and every kindness and good deed will return back to her as sorrow and pain and hate like some sort of goddamn shit-boomerang. This is the lesson of this book, that there is no hope but the release of dark magic and that no matter how good your intentions you can’t escape the injustice of genetics, longing, and pre-teen girls. Also, I’m drinking a Luna Coffee Stout from Hinterland Brewing, a drink nearly as dark as this story, though much sweeter. ONWARDS!!!

Quick Sips - Strange Horizons 09/17/2018 & Samovar 09/24/2018

It’s a bit of a surprise to close out the month as Strange Horizons and Samovar both have new issues to look at, highlight short SFF both in translation and not. It’s perhaps extra appropriate, though, that even the non-translated work is about translation. Is about trying to be understood across the barriers of ability and culture and language. Is about trying to find a place to be safe and secure and finding that it doesn’t always exist, that sometimes people intrude, and trespass, and violate. And it’s a beautiful if dark collection of works, moving as they do around various kinds of violence and damage. Through systems that are decidedly not just, where people are trying to get by any way they can. But it’s a deep and rich bunch of short SFF that I’ll get right to reviewing!

Art by Kali Gregan

Quick Sips - The Book Smugglers September 2018

September brings a new short story to The Book Smugglers’ Awakenings season of short SFF. And it’s a striking and difficult piece about bodies, identity, and perfection. Or perhaps about the push to perfection, both the reaching for it and the way that for some people the world seems to demand it. Extort it. And how people can become ground to dust by the pressures to succeed and be flawlessly successful. It’s a powerful story, and I’ll get right to my review!

Art by Reiko Murakami

Quick Sips - Mithila Review #10 [poetry]

With the fiction done yesterday, it’s time to look at the poetry from the latest Mithila Review! And wow, there’s a lot of it. Seven poems and all flesh out themes of cycles and birth and death, family and resistance and war. These pieces together seem to me to speak to the strengths of language and poetry—to capture the mercurial and the non-literal, to evoke sensation and meaning, and to make brilliantly alive all those things that might be obscured by darkness. Poetry is often a light to shine on truths otherwise too difficult to face, and even in the storms of violence and tragedy, poetry can find beauty, and hope, and connection. So yeah, let’s get to the reviews!

Quick Sips - Mithila Review #10 [fiction]

It’s been a while since the last issue of Mithila Review, and I’m happy to say there’s a new huge issue with tons of short SFF to read and enjoy. Because there’s so much, I’m once again breaking my review of the issue into two parts. And today I’m looking at the first part, covering the fiction! There are eight different stories presented here, covering a nice range of genres, though leaning a bit toward the weird and on stories that unfold in strange cities and desolate wastes. There are pieces that look at escape, at legends, and at food. And overall this is a very visceral issue, one that doesn’t hesitate to unsettle or confront the reader with themes and formats that are difficult. And overall I think there’s a great deal to take away from this issue’s many hungers and truths and warnings. So without further delay, to the reviews!

Quick Sips - Shimmer #45 [September stuff]

September’s Shimmer Magazine releases two very different stories—stylistically, thematically, and tonally. And yet I guess at their core these are stories about three people. In each, a man and a woman meet under slightly unusual circumstances, brought together because of their shared connection to an absent man. And in both, these people who meet awaken something in each other, in such a way that it feels that there’s really no going back afterward. Of course, in one of these cases this is a wrenching, difficult experience. And in the other, it’s a fun and bloody romp. But it’s a very interesting pair of stories, and I’ll get right to the reviews!

Art by Sandro Castelli

Quick Sips - Nightmare #72

The September horror from Nightmare Magazine certainly lives up to the name, bringing two pieces that definitely lean toward the bloody and gruesome side of things, though in very different ways. The first takes splatter horror and runs with it, featuring hungry houses and the people who feed them. The second outweighs the first in terms of atrocities committed, though, if not perhaps on the grisly details. For it, though, the horror is more about how this kind of thing is normalized and even used as entertainment. And together they make for a rather unsettling, rather shocking, but very interesting issue of speculative horror. To the reviews!

Art by Grandfailure/ Fotolia