Quick Sips - Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #32

It’s a new issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly and it’s a rather full one with two short stories, two novelettes, and two poems. And everything has a lot to do with violence and cycles. Again and again we see settings that have been torn apart by war and strife, by carnage and murder, trying to find some way forward. Sometimes that means descending down into the muck and mire of killing, but sometimes that means being able to rise up and do something new and different. Sometimes that means finding hope in unexpected places and finally bringing destructive cycles to an end. Whatever the case, it makes for some great reading and I’m going to get to the reviews!

Art by Mark Molchan

Quick Sips - Urban Fantasy #10

Two stories this month from Urban Fantasy Magazine, and both are about loss, though in vastly different ways. In the first story, the loss is of a wife, the main character dealing with the death of his love and seeking to find some way to fill that lack in his life. In the second, the loss is of a mother, and the situation is very different, the mother a sort of curse that is following around her son, her death a thing haunting him. In both, though, there is hope of recovery, of moving on, and perhaps of a lifting of the isolation the loss has caused. To the reviews!