by Joe Vaz

All four of this issue’s stories are never-before-published original fiction.
Starting off the batch is ‘Forge of The Soul’ by Jason Kahn, which takes us to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, a small town about to be struck by fear and paranoia last seen around 40 years earlier, in another small town called Salem. Next up we have another piece from Something Wicked alumni, Paul Marlowe, entitled ‘Cotton Avicenna B iv’ which takes us to the dingy back alleys of London one Victorian night, and features the founder of The Etheric Explorer’s club, (which features in ‘The Resident Member’), Rafe Maddox. Scott Brendel’s ‘Groundswell of Love’ is about a rather unfortunate event, that, coupled with a momentary lapse of concentration, results in a pretty bleak (but surprisingly funny) outcome. And to close off our month of original fiction we have a beautiful piece by Damien Filer, about a girl whose somewhat ill brother requires a life-changing favour from her, in ‘Herman’s Bad Seed’.
Our Feature Interview this month is with Cabin Fever author Diane Awerbuck

From Issue 13 (Sept 2011)
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interview by Joe Vaz

The story took a little while to plot. I knew the direction I wanted to go and I had a pretty good idea who some of the main characters would be, but it wasn't until I started writing that all the characters were formed.

Cover Art by Vincent Sammy From Issue 12 (August 2011)
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by M. Scott Carter

Old man Withers was the first to die.
A mean, ornery bastard with a craggy, rough face and the temper of blind sewer rat, the old man hadn’t lived in Bayside very long - two, maybe three years.
The boys at the VFW hall had warned him about Bayside. They’d told him the stories, and the legends, but old man Withers didn’t care. He was the type of crank who’d sue a ten-year-old kid for laughing. He spent his days spying on his neighbors, complaining and making life miserable for the rest of the residents of Bayside.

Cover Art by Vincent Sammy From Issue 12 (August 2011)
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interview by Joe Vaz

To be honest, this was a story that simply unfolded while writing. I had a vague idea of the setting, a rural town in the southeastern United States, the image of a lost and lonely man, and the intention to explore something strange. I challenged my subconscious to bring the weird and this is what came out.

Cover Art by Vincent Sammy From Issue 12 (August 2011)
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by Brian Kirk

From a distance came the woeful howling of a neighbor’s neglected dog, disrupting the unusually soundless night. The evenings were normally so alive with the incessant buzzing and chirping of restless insects. He stopped, and simply listened, to nothing. Not a rustle of wind. Not a scuttle of bug. Just the dog in the distance, desperately pleading for attention.

Cover Art by Vincent Sammy From Issue 12 (August 2011)
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interview by Joe Vaz

I think what the international thing does is it breaks it open to the mainstream and suddenly you get the people who weren't paying attention. It kind of breaks through... I guess they have cultural barricades up, and I think a lot of that, unfortunately, is against South African stuff, you know.

Cover Art by Vincent Sammy From Issue 12 (August 2011)
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review by Vianne Venter

Published by Angry Robot/Jacana PB 384pages RRP £7.99 (Kindle £3.59) buy from Kalahari.com  In Zoo City, it’s impolite to ask. Morning light the sulphur colour of the mine dumps seeps across Johannesburg’s skyline and sears through my window. My own personal bat signal. Or a reminder that I really need to get curtains. Shielding my eyes – morning has broken and there’s no picking up the pieces – I yank back the sheet and peel out of bed. Benoît doesn’t so much as stir, with only his calloused feet sticking out from under the duvet like knots of driftwood. Feet like that, they tell a story. They say he walked all the way from Kinshasa with his Mongoose strapped to his chest. From Issue 12 (August 2011)
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by Joe Vaz

The fact of the matter is, nothing is more terrifying to us than experiencing a nightmare from which we cannot wake. Total, all encompassing fear where some part of your brain is flashing red warning claxons telling you “it’s just a dream, stupid” but we’re paralysed.

Cover Art by Vincent Sammy From Issue 12 (August 2011)
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interview by Joe Vaz

the greatest reading experience I could imagine having would be to read a collaboration story written by Woody Allen and HP Lovecraft. A fractious working relationship that undoubtedly would have been, but I can't help but imagine that it would have produced something amazing.

Cover Art by Vincent Sammy From Issue 12 (August 2011)
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by Glen Damien Campbell

Thomas Delaney was a hack writer. He knew it and was admirably unashamed of it. The movies he penned and directed were B-grade schlock horror, the type of movies that had desensitised him as a child, the type of movies he loved; cliché ridden, lascivious and cheap. Tom’s own credits in the field included the titles Die Die Dracula, I Was a Teenage Mummy and The Blood of the Virgin, creature features abounding with lusty vampiric femme fatales, their heaving bosoms bound up in gauze nightgowns, with London’s Beckenham Place Park moonlighting as the Carpathian forests.

Cover Art by Vincent Sammy From Issue 12 (August 2011)
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