Fear in Magazine Form
Jun. 22nd, 2007 01:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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darkling_talesOver the past year or so I've started buying various supernatural fiction magazines - Supernatural Tales, Ghosts and Scholars, Machenalia, Faunus and Wormwood.
Supernatural Tales:
This magazine seems to come out at irregular intervals; I have one labelled '2006' and another (of half the length) from 'Spring 2007'. A one year, three-issue subscription costs £18. I subscribed via the British Fantasy Society website, and I had to wait good and hard for my order to arrive - in fact, my first copy only turned up after I'd had a moan on the subject to someone who turned out to know the editor! (Though that could just be a coincidence.) Anyway, the editor is David Longhorn, and his job is to compile new horror fiction (18 stories for 2006, 11 for Spring 2007) as well as tit-bits like reviews and quizzes.
The quality of the writing varies wildly - one of Joel Lane's urban ghost stories, Still Water, comes closest to achieving greatness, with Peter Bell's Nostalgia, Death and Melancholy and Kathryn Bell's original The Grey Man deserving a special mention. The latter concerns a modern-day church choir who discover and perform an evil musical score by a 16th-century composer , and happily blends Jamesian subject matter into the mundane world of an urban parish. The former is a fun yarn about a Symbolist painter gone over to the darkside, and also serves as a splendid evocation of nostalgia for childhood holidays spent on the scenic Isle Of Man. However, around two-thirds of the tales are damp squibs - arse-clenchingly tedious M R James rip-offs, gratuitous T&A and torture, and even a dreadful story from Dom Tumasonis (one author I would never have believed capable of writing a bad story.)
The mini-book format is quite pleasant to handle and easy to read, but the stories are so stuffed with typos as to impact quite severely on this reader's enjoyment. All in all, I found £18 a bit steep for just three issues, even if it is good to keep abreast of new British and American horror authors.
Faunus And Machenalia: I'm lumping these two together because they both stem from the Friends Of Arthur Machen society. Machenalia is the biannual newsletter, and Faunus is the hardback journal. I may be a bit biased in this review as I joined the society in the Spring and got quite merry at their annual meet-up in Usk. They also sent me loads of Free Stuff, including back issues of both publications and a one-off about the life of Machen biographer John Gawsley. Anyway, I enjoyed the newsletters, with their news of Machenesque manifestations in modern-day art and culture, extracts of his essays and pieces on his work and life. Faunus is similar in theme,but seems to be more centred around original Machen material.
Both publications are nicely printed, with the sleek Faunus being especially elegant. Obviously, both are for die-hard Machen fans, and the author's life is analysed in minute detail! But if you +do+ happen to be a fan, then there's much to enjoy here. Both journals come free with FoAM membership, which has other perks and offers pretty good value.
Ghosts And Scholars: This one is for equally avid fans of M R James, and is a paper newsletter which comes out roughly three times a year; subscription is £8 a year. Content largely consists of articles on the life and work of the author, as well as the writers he influenced directly, the 'James gang'. Sometimes unpublished stories or unfinished drafts of James stories appear. Sections of it are also uploaded to their website. I have an on-and-off relationship with this periodical - while I warmly recommend a trip through the website Archives, which contain many interesting articles and some really cracking short fiction by authors like Steve Duffy and Don Tumasonis, the newsletter itself (which doesn't contain any new fiction) can be irritating at times.Some of the contributors are stuffy sorts who seem to be using James' depictions of Edwardian academia as a means of turning their backs on the modern world. This leads to some tutting, purist pieces, and the line between 'special interest' and rampant pedantry is crossed a bit too often, with James' academic squabbles and hissyfits analyzed as if they had genuine worth.
To me, M R James seems to have been an unpleasant man given to picking fights with other authors seemingly at random; he excelled in bandying unfounded charges of plagiarism and had a special loathing for female academics, scientists and even philosophers. However, to judge from the large majority of the essays in Ghosts & Scholars you'd think he was a saintly old bachelor, preserving the world from the evil forces of progress. There are some exceptions to this rule - including the, erm, remarkable Mike Pincombe essay Homosexual Panic And The English Ghost Story: M R James and Others - but overall the feel of this newsletter is one of excessive fondness for James, which really does seem to skew the essayists' judgement at times. This review about the BBC's recent adaptation of A View From A Hill is typical of much of the content, as is M R James' querulous essay 'Some Remarks On The Head Of John The Baptist' featured in Issue 11. It's interesting to compare all this with the Machen journals - Machen was famously open to new things, and his fans give a fresh, young feel to their work, with many young people paying tribute to Machen in electronic music acts or cinema. Proof that authors get the fans they deserve?
That said, I do seem to keep subscribing to the newsletter, as I mentioned, and it does have a good side! As an ardent James fan I remember being delighted that such a publication existed, and I still enjoy some of the articles. The production values are high - no typos here - and the illustrations enjoyable. You can also buy some delightful James themed postcards and bookmarks from the site, and I spammed everyone I knew with these last Christmas.
Wormwood:
This is another biannual magazine, printed like a slim paperback, with issues costing around £8-9. I have issues 4 and 2 of this, thanks to generous benefactors! Edited by Mark Valentine, it has a definite decadent, magical realist and surrealist flavour (with an occasional nod to more classical authors like Oliver Onions), and features many intriguing pieces on authors I would probably never have heard of otherwise (there's even a Camera Obscura section where Valentine unearths and skilfully polishes long-buried literary treasures.) It's not always a light read, and many of the essays deal with literary concepts and references that were unfamiliar to an engineer like myself, but it's certainly what the Victorians called 'improving', the contributors seem scholarly and fairly even-handed, and it offers a fascinating window onto lesser-known authors and aspects of fantastic fiction. (Note to non-UK readers: £1 is about $2 at the moment.)
How about you? Do you get any supernatural/horror magazines, and if so, which ones? Any recommendations or warnings?
Supernatural Tales:
This magazine seems to come out at irregular intervals; I have one labelled '2006' and another (of half the length) from 'Spring 2007'. A one year, three-issue subscription costs £18. I subscribed via the British Fantasy Society website, and I had to wait good and hard for my order to arrive - in fact, my first copy only turned up after I'd had a moan on the subject to someone who turned out to know the editor! (Though that could just be a coincidence.) Anyway, the editor is David Longhorn, and his job is to compile new horror fiction (18 stories for 2006, 11 for Spring 2007) as well as tit-bits like reviews and quizzes.
The quality of the writing varies wildly - one of Joel Lane's urban ghost stories, Still Water, comes closest to achieving greatness, with Peter Bell's Nostalgia, Death and Melancholy and Kathryn Bell's original The Grey Man deserving a special mention. The latter concerns a modern-day church choir who discover and perform an evil musical score by a 16th-century composer , and happily blends Jamesian subject matter into the mundane world of an urban parish. The former is a fun yarn about a Symbolist painter gone over to the darkside, and also serves as a splendid evocation of nostalgia for childhood holidays spent on the scenic Isle Of Man. However, around two-thirds of the tales are damp squibs - arse-clenchingly tedious M R James rip-offs, gratuitous T&A and torture, and even a dreadful story from Dom Tumasonis (one author I would never have believed capable of writing a bad story.)
The mini-book format is quite pleasant to handle and easy to read, but the stories are so stuffed with typos as to impact quite severely on this reader's enjoyment. All in all, I found £18 a bit steep for just three issues, even if it is good to keep abreast of new British and American horror authors.
Faunus And Machenalia: I'm lumping these two together because they both stem from the Friends Of Arthur Machen society. Machenalia is the biannual newsletter, and Faunus is the hardback journal. I may be a bit biased in this review as I joined the society in the Spring and got quite merry at their annual meet-up in Usk. They also sent me loads of Free Stuff, including back issues of both publications and a one-off about the life of Machen biographer John Gawsley. Anyway, I enjoyed the newsletters, with their news of Machenesque manifestations in modern-day art and culture, extracts of his essays and pieces on his work and life. Faunus is similar in theme,but seems to be more centred around original Machen material.
Both publications are nicely printed, with the sleek Faunus being especially elegant. Obviously, both are for die-hard Machen fans, and the author's life is analysed in minute detail! But if you +do+ happen to be a fan, then there's much to enjoy here. Both journals come free with FoAM membership, which has other perks and offers pretty good value.
Ghosts And Scholars: This one is for equally avid fans of M R James, and is a paper newsletter which comes out roughly three times a year; subscription is £8 a year. Content largely consists of articles on the life and work of the author, as well as the writers he influenced directly, the 'James gang'. Sometimes unpublished stories or unfinished drafts of James stories appear. Sections of it are also uploaded to their website. I have an on-and-off relationship with this periodical - while I warmly recommend a trip through the website Archives, which contain many interesting articles and some really cracking short fiction by authors like Steve Duffy and Don Tumasonis, the newsletter itself (which doesn't contain any new fiction) can be irritating at times.Some of the contributors are stuffy sorts who seem to be using James' depictions of Edwardian academia as a means of turning their backs on the modern world. This leads to some tutting, purist pieces, and the line between 'special interest' and rampant pedantry is crossed a bit too often, with James' academic squabbles and hissyfits analyzed as if they had genuine worth.
To me, M R James seems to have been an unpleasant man given to picking fights with other authors seemingly at random; he excelled in bandying unfounded charges of plagiarism and had a special loathing for female academics, scientists and even philosophers. However, to judge from the large majority of the essays in Ghosts & Scholars you'd think he was a saintly old bachelor, preserving the world from the evil forces of progress. There are some exceptions to this rule - including the, erm, remarkable Mike Pincombe essay Homosexual Panic And The English Ghost Story: M R James and Others - but overall the feel of this newsletter is one of excessive fondness for James, which really does seem to skew the essayists' judgement at times. This review about the BBC's recent adaptation of A View From A Hill is typical of much of the content, as is M R James' querulous essay 'Some Remarks On The Head Of John The Baptist' featured in Issue 11. It's interesting to compare all this with the Machen journals - Machen was famously open to new things, and his fans give a fresh, young feel to their work, with many young people paying tribute to Machen in electronic music acts or cinema. Proof that authors get the fans they deserve?
That said, I do seem to keep subscribing to the newsletter, as I mentioned, and it does have a good side! As an ardent James fan I remember being delighted that such a publication existed, and I still enjoy some of the articles. The production values are high - no typos here - and the illustrations enjoyable. You can also buy some delightful James themed postcards and bookmarks from the site, and I spammed everyone I knew with these last Christmas.
Wormwood:
This is another biannual magazine, printed like a slim paperback, with issues costing around £8-9. I have issues 4 and 2 of this, thanks to generous benefactors! Edited by Mark Valentine, it has a definite decadent, magical realist and surrealist flavour (with an occasional nod to more classical authors like Oliver Onions), and features many intriguing pieces on authors I would probably never have heard of otherwise (there's even a Camera Obscura section where Valentine unearths and skilfully polishes long-buried literary treasures.) It's not always a light read, and many of the essays deal with literary concepts and references that were unfamiliar to an engineer like myself, but it's certainly what the Victorians called 'improving', the contributors seem scholarly and fairly even-handed, and it offers a fascinating window onto lesser-known authors and aspects of fantastic fiction. (Note to non-UK readers: £1 is about $2 at the moment.)
How about you? Do you get any supernatural/horror magazines, and if so, which ones? Any recommendations or warnings?
