Reviews 2
Angels of the Silences by Simon Bestwick
The Signal Block and Other Stories by Frank Duffy
Abolisher of Roses by Gary Fry
The House of Canted Steps by Gary Fry
A Tour of Beaujardin by Marc Lowe
Sein und Werden: Pharamcopoiea edited by Rachel Kendall
Back to Review Page 1
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ANGELS OF THE SILENCES by Simon Bestwick
Horror can be moving.
No, I don’t mean the angst-ridden drivel dished out by imagination-deficient film and TV producers, filled with moody heart-torn vampires and all the rest. I mean real horror and real emotion and heartbreak. Like Simon Bestwick’s novella, Angels of the Silences.
Two teenage girls have the kind of friendship we only often experience once in our lives. More sisters than blood sisters, spiky, argumentative but loyal and close, two sides of the same coin. That sort of friendship can’t be broken easily, even by death. And a terrible death at that. Yet, somehow, they are still “alive”, fleshed, clothed, and human in all but heartbeat.
There is a way to move on, but neither are inclined to do so, because, perhaps, there is a reason they’re still here on earth in the land of the breathing, where they go about their daily lives with their status unsuspected by friends and family alike. There is, they suspect, unfinished business.
But when the time comes, when is it right to move on and leave everyone and everything they love behind them?
Angels of the Silences is short, sharp and for me, immensely touching. The two girls are complete, three-dimensional, recognisable. Their plight as utterly realistic, yes, realistic, because there are dilemmas here; who to tell, how to deal with parents and other loved ones, with the possibility that the truth will out and that there will be questions, torment, terrible grief.
A compelling, intelligent and affecting story with a beautifully atmospheric cover by Neil Williams Angels of the Silences is one of those brief but startling works that we stumble upon very now and then. Read it and I dare you not to be moved.
THE ANGELS OF THE SILENCES by Simon Bestwick
Pendragon Press
Chapbook £3
ISBN 9781906864231
No, I don’t mean the angst-ridden drivel dished out by imagination-deficient film and TV producers, filled with moody heart-torn vampires and all the rest. I mean real horror and real emotion and heartbreak. Like Simon Bestwick’s novella, Angels of the Silences.
Two teenage girls have the kind of friendship we only often experience once in our lives. More sisters than blood sisters, spiky, argumentative but loyal and close, two sides of the same coin. That sort of friendship can’t be broken easily, even by death. And a terrible death at that. Yet, somehow, they are still “alive”, fleshed, clothed, and human in all but heartbeat.
There is a way to move on, but neither are inclined to do so, because, perhaps, there is a reason they’re still here on earth in the land of the breathing, where they go about their daily lives with their status unsuspected by friends and family alike. There is, they suspect, unfinished business.
But when the time comes, when is it right to move on and leave everyone and everything they love behind them?
Angels of the Silences is short, sharp and for me, immensely touching. The two girls are complete, three-dimensional, recognisable. Their plight as utterly realistic, yes, realistic, because there are dilemmas here; who to tell, how to deal with parents and other loved ones, with the possibility that the truth will out and that there will be questions, torment, terrible grief.
A compelling, intelligent and affecting story with a beautifully atmospheric cover by Neil Williams Angels of the Silences is one of those brief but startling works that we stumble upon very now and then. Read it and I dare you not to be moved.
THE ANGELS OF THE SILENCES by Simon Bestwick
Pendragon Press
Chapbook £3
ISBN 9781906864231
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THE SIGNAL BLOCK AND OTHER STORIES by Frank Duffy
(Awaiting cover image)
As far as I can remember, I have never read any of Frank Duffy’s work before, so I approached this collection with that pleasant sense of anticipation reserved for the first-time reading experience; anticipation mixed with trepidation because the experience can go either way.
I’m delighted to announce that I was far from disappointed. Not only does Frank Duffy write a mean story, he writes it well and this collection is one hell of a journey. A dark one, mind. Don’t expect comfort, relief or mercy. This book takes you into the nightside and its author doesn’t hold your hand or tell you that everything’s going to be all right, because it isn’t.
Duffy’s bleak collection is suffused with a malevolent subtlety. The author understands the mechanism for turning an idea into an intelligent story. His ideas are from the shadowed regions of this and other worlds, and, more importantly, from the murky depths of the human psyche. Yes, this is a book of supernatural tales, but the real strength of the work is the way Duffy inextricably melds the very human angst of his characters with the attributes of the monsters that torment, and sometimes destroy, them.
There is an M R Jamesian feel to this, in that the monsters and monstrousness are not always explained. They just are. And they are right. They fit, they are a consequence, by which I don’t mean folk tale come-uppance monsters. Duffy’s monsters are far more subtle, much more entangled with the protagonist’s own personal demons. Another comparison I would make is to the urban horror of Gary McMahon. These narratives are similar graffiti from the back streets of the human soul.
The Signal Block opens the book and takes us, with a film crew, into the grim, dank walls of a former prison that was once besieged by the relatives of the wretched inmates. The Object follows hard on its heels and is a visceral, visual story that reeks of rotting wood, mud and the sweat of unease. Scant Offerings for the Birds is the third tale and, in its way, a much more straightforward narrative about a photographer who makes money from some very unsavoury images. And so we move on via such disturbances as a strange village in which the characters seem to be the protagonists in some grotesque show, a haunted church that resonates with a man’s past, the lingering reverberations of past atrocities that are suddenly more than shadows, cutting edge art, which really does draw blood and my own personal favourite, Permanent Hunger which tells of a horrible government-backed experiment in population control.
I have deliberately kept my descriptions of these works vague because this book needs to be approached fresh and without foreknowledge. Its unpredictability is part of the…well, I was going to say fun but I’m not sure if that is the right word for such a voyage into the desolate.
Is this meal best eaten whole or nibbled at? I think the latter. I did find the bleakness of these stories wearing when consumed one after the other. A regular visit would be my recommendation, preferably late at night. And alone.
THE SIGNAL BOX AND OTHER STORIES by Frank Duffy
Published by Sideshow Press
Paperback - Awaiting price information
As far as I can remember, I have never read any of Frank Duffy’s work before, so I approached this collection with that pleasant sense of anticipation reserved for the first-time reading experience; anticipation mixed with trepidation because the experience can go either way.
I’m delighted to announce that I was far from disappointed. Not only does Frank Duffy write a mean story, he writes it well and this collection is one hell of a journey. A dark one, mind. Don’t expect comfort, relief or mercy. This book takes you into the nightside and its author doesn’t hold your hand or tell you that everything’s going to be all right, because it isn’t.
Duffy’s bleak collection is suffused with a malevolent subtlety. The author understands the mechanism for turning an idea into an intelligent story. His ideas are from the shadowed regions of this and other worlds, and, more importantly, from the murky depths of the human psyche. Yes, this is a book of supernatural tales, but the real strength of the work is the way Duffy inextricably melds the very human angst of his characters with the attributes of the monsters that torment, and sometimes destroy, them.
There is an M R Jamesian feel to this, in that the monsters and monstrousness are not always explained. They just are. And they are right. They fit, they are a consequence, by which I don’t mean folk tale come-uppance monsters. Duffy’s monsters are far more subtle, much more entangled with the protagonist’s own personal demons. Another comparison I would make is to the urban horror of Gary McMahon. These narratives are similar graffiti from the back streets of the human soul.
The Signal Block opens the book and takes us, with a film crew, into the grim, dank walls of a former prison that was once besieged by the relatives of the wretched inmates. The Object follows hard on its heels and is a visceral, visual story that reeks of rotting wood, mud and the sweat of unease. Scant Offerings for the Birds is the third tale and, in its way, a much more straightforward narrative about a photographer who makes money from some very unsavoury images. And so we move on via such disturbances as a strange village in which the characters seem to be the protagonists in some grotesque show, a haunted church that resonates with a man’s past, the lingering reverberations of past atrocities that are suddenly more than shadows, cutting edge art, which really does draw blood and my own personal favourite, Permanent Hunger which tells of a horrible government-backed experiment in population control.
I have deliberately kept my descriptions of these works vague because this book needs to be approached fresh and without foreknowledge. Its unpredictability is part of the…well, I was going to say fun but I’m not sure if that is the right word for such a voyage into the desolate.
Is this meal best eaten whole or nibbled at? I think the latter. I did find the bleakness of these stories wearing when consumed one after the other. A regular visit would be my recommendation, preferably late at night. And alone.
THE SIGNAL BOX AND OTHER STORIES by Frank Duffy
Published by Sideshow Press
Paperback - Awaiting price information
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ABOLISHER OF ROSES by Gary Fry
One thing writers are told to do by the many people wanting to give them advice is to “show, not tell”, in other words, to get the reader into the head and behind the eyes of their characters and to be more than a mere camera but to actually relay feeling and emotion. In this, the writer’s advisors are right, and certainly more helpful than the “Why not send you stories to Reader’s Digest?” type of helpfulness I still receive from some of my relatives. Well, Gary Fry has certainly followed the former direction within the pages of this new, and gorgeously presented, Spectral Press chapbook, Abolisher of Roses. You are Peter, awful as he is, and by an odd process of transference, intensely sympathetic towards his long-suffering and suddenly strong wife.
The chapbook’s strange title is taken from a quotation by James Russell Lowell, by the way, and perfectly fits the story itself.
Abolisher of Roses is the second release from the intriguing Spectral Press and is a visceral, vivid tale of art-for-art’s-sake versus a positively Thatcherite materialism and a view of worth as belonging only to something that serves a practical purpose or makes money. Pete, a successful businessman, the eponymous self-made man, is reluctantly attending a new and novel art exhibition, where his wife, her artistic talent newly discovered, is one of the exhibitors. Not only is this recent pastime ridiculous to Pete, it is also vaguely threatening, because the woman he has dominated all his married life has found her own way and developed a measure of physical and emotional independence. Pete’s contempt for all things arty and those he feels are basically hippy timewasters is convincing and one we have all encountered in our weary journey through the world.
A veteran of horror both supernatural and non-occult, I have to admit that I thought I had worked out what Pete was going to find in the woods that day, but I was not entirely correct. The exhibits hidden among the trees were far more subtle - and the more shattering for that.
As always, Gary Fry not only entertains, but poses some interesting questions, and manages to successfully balance the two. He is a writer of intelligent horror in every sense of the word and deserves much wider attention than he currently receives.
ABOLISHER OF ROSES by Gary Fry
Published by Spectral Press
Paperback £3.00
_________________________________________________________________________________
The chapbook’s strange title is taken from a quotation by James Russell Lowell, by the way, and perfectly fits the story itself.
Abolisher of Roses is the second release from the intriguing Spectral Press and is a visceral, vivid tale of art-for-art’s-sake versus a positively Thatcherite materialism and a view of worth as belonging only to something that serves a practical purpose or makes money. Pete, a successful businessman, the eponymous self-made man, is reluctantly attending a new and novel art exhibition, where his wife, her artistic talent newly discovered, is one of the exhibitors. Not only is this recent pastime ridiculous to Pete, it is also vaguely threatening, because the woman he has dominated all his married life has found her own way and developed a measure of physical and emotional independence. Pete’s contempt for all things arty and those he feels are basically hippy timewasters is convincing and one we have all encountered in our weary journey through the world.
A veteran of horror both supernatural and non-occult, I have to admit that I thought I had worked out what Pete was going to find in the woods that day, but I was not entirely correct. The exhibits hidden among the trees were far more subtle - and the more shattering for that.
As always, Gary Fry not only entertains, but poses some interesting questions, and manages to successfully balance the two. He is a writer of intelligent horror in every sense of the word and deserves much wider attention than he currently receives.
ABOLISHER OF ROSES by Gary Fry
Published by Spectral Press
Paperback £3.00
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THE HOUSE OF CANTED STEPS by Gary Fry
There is an interesting quote from the American anthropologist Margaret Mead about two thirds of the way into Gary Fry’s The House of Canted Steps. I’ll paraphrase it because I don’t want any corporate lawyers banging on my door with writs and accusations of copyright infringement. Mead said that the modern family unit is unnatural, shut away as it is with no extended familial support. It is, she says, an almost impossible situation. I tend to agree (although interfering relatives can also be a big problem!) Well, the modern Western family unit and its infinite permutations , complexities and cross pollination is at the very root of Fry’s novel and makes for a ghost story, and more particularly a haunted house, of a very unique kind.
From the very first page you know you’re about to have dealings with a malevolent and discomforting pile of bricks and mortar, familiar ground, comforting in its way. I love ghost stories and haunted house stories are the best of them all. Here we have Mark the Estate Agent (an unlikely hero for a 21st Century novel) who is divorced, missing his son, and trying to come to terms with both his feelings and the reality of his situation. There is his girlfriend, an almost impossibly understanding and loving young woman with dark secrets of her own buried deep beneath her gorgeous, sunny exterior. There is also the ex, shallow, materialistic, satisfied, at last, in the arms of her successful and flash new partner. And there’s Lewis, the apple of Mark’s eye, a personable likeable little fella who is soon the centre of the house’s baleful attention.
Ghost stories are often about revenge, redemption or justice. Some supernatural force, seeking to exact recompense from whatever unwitting fool utterly stupid enough to buy that particular property or stay in that particular room in that particular hotel. Sometimes there is a genuine injustice to right, the house was built, for example, on hallowed ground by ruthless moneymen who are uncaring of the souls they have disturbed. With Stephen King it is often what he calls, chillingly, a Bad Place, a building in which evil has occurred then soaked into its very fabric.
But this house, with its strange and instantly unnerving canted staircase, with its big, overgrown garden and sheer, luxurious self-indulgent proportions, has a different problem. It is possessed, not by demons, but by a twisted morality that manifests itself in subtle, all but unnoticeable changes in the hearts and minds of anyone who either lives there or so much as darkens its door.
The House of Canted Steps is a fascinating and unsettling ride. It is well written, perfectly paced, the characters are well drawn, the horrors revealed, not in a blood-soaked, breathless rush but slowly, carefully and convincingly. There are few screams, no spilled blood, although there is blood, in more than one sense of the word. There are revelations and shocks but all of them rooted solidly in reality, in the mundane. The real horrors are quietly spoken and familiar.
There were moments when Fry’s restrained style was, perhaps, a little too restrained, when I wanted a shock, a little breathlessness. However, perhaps, the fact that they were revealed in such a matter of fact way fitted more with the tone of the book, that the supernatural darkness is simply an extension of the corporeal one.
What came through was Fry’s insight and intelligence, that he is saying something worth hearing. Not giving us a morality tale or the Hollywood sledgehammer treatment, but analysing the ties that bind, and sometime strangle, us. He is one of our more thoughtful writers, someone with something to say and the means and skill by which to say it.
The book itself is an attractive item, by the way, with a marvellously eccentric cover by James Hannah that sums up the story perfectly.
So, recommended for family members everywhere and particularly anyone with a ghost to face.
That’s all of us then.
THE HOUSE OF CANTED STEPS by Gary Fry
Published by PS
Hardback £19.99
ISBN 978-1-848631-02-1
________________________________________________________________________________
From the very first page you know you’re about to have dealings with a malevolent and discomforting pile of bricks and mortar, familiar ground, comforting in its way. I love ghost stories and haunted house stories are the best of them all. Here we have Mark the Estate Agent (an unlikely hero for a 21st Century novel) who is divorced, missing his son, and trying to come to terms with both his feelings and the reality of his situation. There is his girlfriend, an almost impossibly understanding and loving young woman with dark secrets of her own buried deep beneath her gorgeous, sunny exterior. There is also the ex, shallow, materialistic, satisfied, at last, in the arms of her successful and flash new partner. And there’s Lewis, the apple of Mark’s eye, a personable likeable little fella who is soon the centre of the house’s baleful attention.
Ghost stories are often about revenge, redemption or justice. Some supernatural force, seeking to exact recompense from whatever unwitting fool utterly stupid enough to buy that particular property or stay in that particular room in that particular hotel. Sometimes there is a genuine injustice to right, the house was built, for example, on hallowed ground by ruthless moneymen who are uncaring of the souls they have disturbed. With Stephen King it is often what he calls, chillingly, a Bad Place, a building in which evil has occurred then soaked into its very fabric.
But this house, with its strange and instantly unnerving canted staircase, with its big, overgrown garden and sheer, luxurious self-indulgent proportions, has a different problem. It is possessed, not by demons, but by a twisted morality that manifests itself in subtle, all but unnoticeable changes in the hearts and minds of anyone who either lives there or so much as darkens its door.
The House of Canted Steps is a fascinating and unsettling ride. It is well written, perfectly paced, the characters are well drawn, the horrors revealed, not in a blood-soaked, breathless rush but slowly, carefully and convincingly. There are few screams, no spilled blood, although there is blood, in more than one sense of the word. There are revelations and shocks but all of them rooted solidly in reality, in the mundane. The real horrors are quietly spoken and familiar.
There were moments when Fry’s restrained style was, perhaps, a little too restrained, when I wanted a shock, a little breathlessness. However, perhaps, the fact that they were revealed in such a matter of fact way fitted more with the tone of the book, that the supernatural darkness is simply an extension of the corporeal one.
What came through was Fry’s insight and intelligence, that he is saying something worth hearing. Not giving us a morality tale or the Hollywood sledgehammer treatment, but analysing the ties that bind, and sometime strangle, us. He is one of our more thoughtful writers, someone with something to say and the means and skill by which to say it.
The book itself is an attractive item, by the way, with a marvellously eccentric cover by James Hannah that sums up the story perfectly.
So, recommended for family members everywhere and particularly anyone with a ghost to face.
That’s all of us then.
THE HOUSE OF CANTED STEPS by Gary Fry
Published by PS
Hardback £19.99
ISBN 978-1-848631-02-1
________________________________________________________________________________
A TOUR OF BEAUJARDIN by Marc Lowe
Beaujardin is, presumably - nay hopefully, a mythical city straight from the mind of Rhode Island-based author, Marc Lowe. At first glance the place is a little strange, the tall buildings, for example, are all leaning in the same direction in one part of town and in the opposite direction in another. The streets are busy, there is heavy traffic, there a places to eat and drink, but nothing untoward.
Written as the informative narrative of your own personal city guide, A Tour of Beaujardin is one of the most intriguing and satisfying novellae I’ve read for some time. The guide himself is witty, erudite and obviously a long time dweller in the city. He knows is intimately, knows it light and its shade and, if you take the premium tour, can show you dark corners of the place no one could ever find without a little help.
There is, all the way through, a sense of mounting threat, a hinted-at malevolence that manifests itself in extreme versions of the type of shadow that haunts any modern conurbation. What separates this work from so many urban fantasies is the dexterity with which the commonplace is contorted into malevolent strangeness. As we stroll between those oddly bent skyscrapers alongside roads on which citizens die under the wheels of the relentless traffic with alarming regularity, we are assailed by too-close-to-reality horrors of despair, violence and political oppression.
And always, there is the unease of the tour guide, the sense that he is somehow transgressing by revealing certain facts and unveiling certain places. He really shouldn’t be telling you this but…
In 47 short pages you learn and, more importantly, feel this city. You learn about its religion, its social divides, the dangerous and the beautiful. It is all but sentient, all but alive. And in the hands of it author, three-dimensional and real enough to touch, smell and run from.
Parallel and parable of our own sprawling and half-mad metropolises? No doubt, but there is more than a mere mirror-holding here, there is a strange precision, everything is logical, making sense within its context. The threat and darkness are not overdone, but it’s there and it won’t go away. It oppresses and closes in relentlessly. It seems to come from everywhere, from uptown and downtown, creeping in from the clean and shiny, welling up from the dark and dingy.
Inventive and clever, vivid and visceral, A Tour of Beaujardin is a tour de force of subtle imagining, laden with wit and sharp observation. Buy your ticket now, but make sure you take a map, because you may have to find your own way out.
A TOUR OF BEAUJARDIN by Marc Lowe
Published by ISMS Press
Paperback £3.00 Sein und Werden, 19 Aidan's Grove, Salford, Lancashire. M7 3TN UK or from
seinundwerden@gmail.com
_________________________________________________________________________________
Written as the informative narrative of your own personal city guide, A Tour of Beaujardin is one of the most intriguing and satisfying novellae I’ve read for some time. The guide himself is witty, erudite and obviously a long time dweller in the city. He knows is intimately, knows it light and its shade and, if you take the premium tour, can show you dark corners of the place no one could ever find without a little help.
There is, all the way through, a sense of mounting threat, a hinted-at malevolence that manifests itself in extreme versions of the type of shadow that haunts any modern conurbation. What separates this work from so many urban fantasies is the dexterity with which the commonplace is contorted into malevolent strangeness. As we stroll between those oddly bent skyscrapers alongside roads on which citizens die under the wheels of the relentless traffic with alarming regularity, we are assailed by too-close-to-reality horrors of despair, violence and political oppression.
And always, there is the unease of the tour guide, the sense that he is somehow transgressing by revealing certain facts and unveiling certain places. He really shouldn’t be telling you this but…
In 47 short pages you learn and, more importantly, feel this city. You learn about its religion, its social divides, the dangerous and the beautiful. It is all but sentient, all but alive. And in the hands of it author, three-dimensional and real enough to touch, smell and run from.
Parallel and parable of our own sprawling and half-mad metropolises? No doubt, but there is more than a mere mirror-holding here, there is a strange precision, everything is logical, making sense within its context. The threat and darkness are not overdone, but it’s there and it won’t go away. It oppresses and closes in relentlessly. It seems to come from everywhere, from uptown and downtown, creeping in from the clean and shiny, welling up from the dark and dingy.
Inventive and clever, vivid and visceral, A Tour of Beaujardin is a tour de force of subtle imagining, laden with wit and sharp observation. Buy your ticket now, but make sure you take a map, because you may have to find your own way out.
A TOUR OF BEAUJARDIN by Marc Lowe
Published by ISMS Press
Paperback £3.00 Sein und Werden, 19 Aidan's Grove, Salford, Lancashire. M7 3TN UK or from
seinundwerden@gmail.com
_________________________________________________________________________________
SEIN UND WERDEN: PHARMACOPOIEA edited by Rachel Kendall.
Sein und Werden is one of those great little magazines that cannot be pigeonholed but is always guaranteed to delight, shock and infuriate. Is it a horror magazine, a very, very dark fantasy publication, literature, avant garde? Well, all of those things and none. And, like a pill that will be good for you, it must be swallowed whole.
One of Sein und Werden's positives as far as I’m concerned is that each issue is themed. This one, Pharmacopoeia, has a medical flavour. Although don’t expect a nice cool compress to be applied to your fevered brow. Pharmacopoeia is a sharp injection, a surgeon approaching you with some bizarre and grisly-looking tool in his gloved hand and with a nasty smile behind his mask.
There are no traditionally evil doctors in these pages, or haunted hospitals and so forth, but there is invention and literary game-playing. Pills by Willie Smith is a fine example, a brief monologue of pill taking, of “black beauties" and “christmas trees" shaken from a bottle that enhance and protect from the world around us. Smith also gives us the equally brief Love Drugs which is a syringe-sharp prose-poem in praise of, well, you guessed it… Pockets by Zachary Scott Hamilton has a scavenger unearthing a very strange medicine bottle indeed, in a place where time doesn't seem as trustworthy as it should. Untitled #22 by Michael Mc Aloran is a walk in the dark with someone who claims to be dead - and may well be.
There is also mischief, a fine example of this being Noel Slobada’s Pluck. Black comedy this, and a warning to leave any so-called blemish alone. A visit to Dr Joe from New Mexico in the company of Michael Eastbrook sounds as if it is to be avoided, especially if you have a bad back.
Mark Howard Jones brings us Karas d’Cacasse, a dark tale set in post war Vienna. Someone is distributing infected penicillin with nightmarish results. Major Calloway needs to find the culprit fast. An intriguing tale of identity and medical horror, I wish it was a novel.
Poetry intersperses the prose and is no less dark and redolent of the threatening face of the medical, Marching Feet by Shannon Quinn has disease as “a thin voiced storyteller”, where the victim is “chemically chained to the ocean floor" but what by, the disease or the cure? Wet-suited doctors complete the surreal menace inherent in the piece. D H Sutherland warns us in Schizophrenia that “The pills never work…” This is a poem rife with imagery, and the wonderful line “future’s wicked price was time’s lot.” In Friday Night With a Pen Janann Dawkins introduces us to another type of chemical comfort and takes us on a headlong ride through an vivid and dizzying account of its effects, all mixed up in with a heady cocktail of science and jazz, all beautifully imagined by Zachary Scott Hamilton’s accompanying drawing, Palpitategraohic.
There are two stories I haven't mentioned. Song of the Impure: A Love Story by A A Garrison and Brauner’s Vision by Marc Lowe. The former is the longest work in the magazine. It is the futuristic story of Luke, a lonely euthanasiacist who uses the juices of his clients to feed a tank full of unappealing yet joy-giving creatures he keeps in his apartment. The world is collapsing in on itself around him, the city dissolving into violent anarchy, death on the streets but the creatures and their narcotic delights are Luke’s escape. A parable of our own, war-torn world, ourselves made comfortably numb by our televisions while the world is being torn apart? A totally engaging, original mix and one that left me wanting to read more of Garrison's work.
The latter is my favourite. Brauner is on his way to a Chinese pharmacy to pick up his wife's regular order of medicine when he himself is struck with a malady. The doctor at the clinic claims to be able to help him but the cure is as frightening as it is bizarre. A deft, odd story delivered in Lowe’s unique and intensely engaging style.
All this then, wrapped beneath a stylish, very attractive cover, and only £4! If you haven’t taken a Sein und Werden before, start now, with Pharmacopoeia, but please, stick to the dose.
SEIN UND WERDEN: PHARMACOPOIEA edited by Rachel Kendall
Published by ISMS Press
Paperback £4.00 Sein und Werden, 19 Aidan's Grove, Salford, Lancashire. M7 3TN UK or
from seinundwerden@gmail.com
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
One of Sein und Werden's positives as far as I’m concerned is that each issue is themed. This one, Pharmacopoeia, has a medical flavour. Although don’t expect a nice cool compress to be applied to your fevered brow. Pharmacopoeia is a sharp injection, a surgeon approaching you with some bizarre and grisly-looking tool in his gloved hand and with a nasty smile behind his mask.
There are no traditionally evil doctors in these pages, or haunted hospitals and so forth, but there is invention and literary game-playing. Pills by Willie Smith is a fine example, a brief monologue of pill taking, of “black beauties" and “christmas trees" shaken from a bottle that enhance and protect from the world around us. Smith also gives us the equally brief Love Drugs which is a syringe-sharp prose-poem in praise of, well, you guessed it… Pockets by Zachary Scott Hamilton has a scavenger unearthing a very strange medicine bottle indeed, in a place where time doesn't seem as trustworthy as it should. Untitled #22 by Michael Mc Aloran is a walk in the dark with someone who claims to be dead - and may well be.
There is also mischief, a fine example of this being Noel Slobada’s Pluck. Black comedy this, and a warning to leave any so-called blemish alone. A visit to Dr Joe from New Mexico in the company of Michael Eastbrook sounds as if it is to be avoided, especially if you have a bad back.
Mark Howard Jones brings us Karas d’Cacasse, a dark tale set in post war Vienna. Someone is distributing infected penicillin with nightmarish results. Major Calloway needs to find the culprit fast. An intriguing tale of identity and medical horror, I wish it was a novel.
Poetry intersperses the prose and is no less dark and redolent of the threatening face of the medical, Marching Feet by Shannon Quinn has disease as “a thin voiced storyteller”, where the victim is “chemically chained to the ocean floor" but what by, the disease or the cure? Wet-suited doctors complete the surreal menace inherent in the piece. D H Sutherland warns us in Schizophrenia that “The pills never work…” This is a poem rife with imagery, and the wonderful line “future’s wicked price was time’s lot.” In Friday Night With a Pen Janann Dawkins introduces us to another type of chemical comfort and takes us on a headlong ride through an vivid and dizzying account of its effects, all mixed up in with a heady cocktail of science and jazz, all beautifully imagined by Zachary Scott Hamilton’s accompanying drawing, Palpitategraohic.
There are two stories I haven't mentioned. Song of the Impure: A Love Story by A A Garrison and Brauner’s Vision by Marc Lowe. The former is the longest work in the magazine. It is the futuristic story of Luke, a lonely euthanasiacist who uses the juices of his clients to feed a tank full of unappealing yet joy-giving creatures he keeps in his apartment. The world is collapsing in on itself around him, the city dissolving into violent anarchy, death on the streets but the creatures and their narcotic delights are Luke’s escape. A parable of our own, war-torn world, ourselves made comfortably numb by our televisions while the world is being torn apart? A totally engaging, original mix and one that left me wanting to read more of Garrison's work.
The latter is my favourite. Brauner is on his way to a Chinese pharmacy to pick up his wife's regular order of medicine when he himself is struck with a malady. The doctor at the clinic claims to be able to help him but the cure is as frightening as it is bizarre. A deft, odd story delivered in Lowe’s unique and intensely engaging style.
All this then, wrapped beneath a stylish, very attractive cover, and only £4! If you haven’t taken a Sein und Werden before, start now, with Pharmacopoeia, but please, stick to the dose.
SEIN UND WERDEN: PHARMACOPOIEA edited by Rachel Kendall
Published by ISMS Press
Paperback £4.00 Sein und Werden, 19 Aidan's Grove, Salford, Lancashire. M7 3TN UK or
from seinundwerden@gmail.com
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