Quick Sips - Uncanny #31 [December stuff]

Art by John Picacio

December brings three short stories and two poems to Uncanny Magazine, including two flash fictions. The pieces do a great job of mixing fun with some much darker elements. From superhero academies where a young girl is struggling with an enormous power to a market where the people going in are not always quite the same people who come out, to a very interesting kind of cosmic horror detective tale, the works blend fear, desperation, and vulnerability to amazing effect. Add into the mix the poetry, which looks at grief and monsters, expectations and fear, and the issue as a whole hits hard. And the main balm is that the works are also a joy to read, at turns wrenching and funny, sexy and tense. So let’s get to the reviews!

Quick Sips - Apex #101

October has arrived at Apex Magazine and I have to admit, I keep expecting the month to be a bit…spookier than it’s shaping out to be. Which isn’t really a complaint, because what I’m getting instead are much subtler dark stories, full of atmosphere and a sort of suffocating oppression that sinks into every nook and cranny of these stories. We find a piece reimagining the fate of Hitler in powerful fashion, a story of performance and pain and destruction, a story of yearning and possibility and potential, and every a flash fiction with some suspect Salisbury Steak. So it’s a rather large issue of Apex, all told, and one that brings many different flavors of dark SFF. Some tinged with hope and others more heavily laced with despair and crushing need. So yeah, to the reviews!

Art by Rubén Castro

Quick Sips - Apex #82

This issue of Apex Magazine definitely takes some chances. From a story about leaning heavily on Philip K. Dick to a prose poem about a woman rising from the ground to a dark science fiction piece about death and memory, the issue is filled with pieces that carry with them a certain pervasive strangeness, and darkness. And while most of them I think pay off, with so many ambitious steps it was perhaps inevitable that there was...one, really, that I personally didn't much care for. Still, this is an issue that goes bold, and so I will attempt to be equally bold in reviewing it!

Art by Vincent Sammy

Quick Sips - Apex #80

Fuck this is a huge issue of Apex Magazine. And I know, I know, that's the whole point, because this is the publication hitting eighty issues! It's also the reward issue for the subscription drive from late 2015, which means there is...a lot of fiction and poetry. Six pieces of original fiction and seven original poems make this the largest I've read this month, and it's not like the stories are all that short, with no flash and one story tipping the scales at 14k. So yes, it's big. But is it good? Yes. So much yes. Two stories by Ursula Verson bookend the fiction, circling around age and friendship and changing roles, and the gooey center features stories about inequality and difference and the unseen that exists all around us, about worlds within worlds, about danger and otherness and it's dark and effective and yes, very good. The poetry mixes science and love, loss and grief. All in all, it's a hell of an issue, a giant thank you to fans of the publication, and I'm going to review it, okay?

Art by Matt Davis