NEWS

CHANGES OF ADDRESS

CIGARETTE BOY, c/o Darick Chamberlin, 1629 Harvard Avenue #202, Seattle, Washington 98122, USA (e-mail: drogue@eskimo.com).

COLD TONNAGE BOOKS, Andy Richards, 22 Kings Lane, Windlesham, Surrey GU20 6JQ.

DARK CARNIVAL DISTRIBUTION, Steve, 17 Cottage Beck Road, Scunthorpe, South Humberside DN16 1LQ.

FREELANCE WRITING & PHOTOGRAPHY, Weavers Press Publishing Ltd, 113 Abbotts Ann Down, Andover, Hampshire SP11 7BX.

NOT ONE OF US, John Benson, 12 Curtis Road, Natick, MA 01760, USA.

PSYCHOTROPE, Flat 6, 17 Droitwich Road, Barbourne, Worcester WR3 7LG.

TRASH CITY, Jim McLennan, 34 Perran Road, Tulse Hill, London SW2 3DL.

TTBA, Cambridge University Science Fiction Society, c/o Richard Kettlewell, Churchill College, Storeys Way, Cambridge.

UNDERGROUND, P.O. Box 3285, London SW2 3NN.

CLOSED OR MISSING

ANSIBLE
#78 (Jan 94)-#109 (Aug 96): A4, 2pp each, available for one SAE per issue from Dave Langford, 94 London Road, Reading, Berkshire RG1 5AU (e-mail: ansible@cix.compulink.co.uk; also available via listserv and www). Undeniably the best source of all the latest SF news and gossip, laced with Langford's characteristic wit. The successive episodes of Charles Platt's Victims of Ellison have rivalled SF Eye's epic Peter Lamborn Wilson/Orson Scott Card clash, and all the ingredients of a classic soap opera are to be found in the ongoing drama of the Encyclopaedia of SF's CD-ROM version. Looking back over some two years' worth of issues, it's been startling how many losses the SF field has suffered lately – Bob Shaw, John Brunner, editor Richard Evans and publisher Charles Monteith are just some of the personalities and fans fondly remembered in its pages. The most apt comment on this comes from Terry Pratchett: "I think I liked it better when I was in the age group that went to each other's weddings."

AUSLANDER
#1 and #2: 135x175mm, 60pp spiral bound, £3 each (4/£10; r.o.w. 4/£14) from Auslander Press, 33 Alexandra Road, Gloucester GL1 3DR. A small magazine that generates a big presence, due in no small part to the glossy colour covers that grace each issue. The editors have selected a different theme for each issue, and the series kicks off with 'Sin' and continues with 'Phobia'. While most of the fiction in #1 struggles to rise above familiar tropes, in #2 there's notable work from Jason Gould, W. Dean Richards and Rhys Hughes. Theme issues are notoriously difficult to keep rolling, but the Auslander crew seem to have the schedule taped well into 1997. Add to that a healthy dose of 90s cynicism and you have a magazine that's well worth keeping an eye on.

BLACK TEARS
#2: A5, 60pp, and #3: A5, 48pp, £1:75 each (4/£6:75) from Adam Bradley, 28 Treaty Street, Islington, London N1 0SY. Horror and dark fantasy from the likes of Mark Samuels, David Logan, Nicholas Royle and William Meikle is well written if uninspired, whilst the inclusion in the 'Slipstream' section of one story per issue which defies traditional genre typecasting gives the impression of publishing by quota rather than quality. Of the two issues, 'The Bubble Time' by Simon Kerr in #2 and Chris Fretwell's 'Tainted Rose' in #3 provide the most rewarding read.

CARESS NEWSLETTER
#4, #8-#10: A4, 8pp, £3 each (5/£12; Europe 5/£15; USA 5/$25 cash) from The Write Solution, Flat 1, 11 Holland Road, Hove, East Sussex BN3 1JF. Market news, publishers' guidelines, classified ads and pertinent reviews make Caress Newsletter the essential companion for any writer interested in the specialist field of erotica. The only blemish to its editorial objectivity is the intrusive plugging of new sister publication Caress Magazine ... the erotic experience. Hmm.

COLD PRINT
#1: A5, 44pp, £1:95 (4/£7) from Simon Barnard, 32 Boundary Road, Cheadle, Cheshire SK8 2EN. I wouldn't quite go so far as to say that each page is indeed "a sleepless night", but what this opening issue does demonstrate is some bloody good non-fiction. Starting with an interview with actor Guy Henry – the man behind the mask of Doctor Terror – and continuing with features on Georges Bataille, rogues and villains in horror movies, and of course the interview with Ramsey Campbell, the articles are tight, informative, and entertaining. By comparison, the three pieces of fiction that conclude the magazine come as a disappointment, including – somewhat surprisingly – the extract from Ramsey Campbell's forthcoming novel The House on Nazareth Hill. Nonetheless, Cold Print should be a magazine to look out for and, coming from someone who can't see why the world needs yet another horror fanzine, that's praise indeed.

CRITICAL WAVE
#42: A4, 32pp, £2:45 (5/£11:50; Europe 5/£13; r.o.w. 5/£160 from Critical Wave Publications, 845 Alum Rock Road, Ward End, Birmingham B8 2AG (USA 5/$25 air, 5/$20 surface from Mary Burns, 23 Kensington Court, Hempstead, NY 11550). Here you'll find Peter F. Hamilton discussing life as a pro writer, Kari Maund explaining how the film First Knight retells the Arthurian legend specifically for the 1990s, Tony Chester and Jonathan Cowie proposing an alternative to fan funds, and Mike Siddall taking on the latest crop of fanzines. Critical Wave is always dependable for news and views from all walks of SF life, and so the only quibble with this issue is the patchy print quality.

DRAGON'S BREATH
#3 (Feb 94)-#33 (Aug/Sept 96): A4, 2pp each, available for one SAE per issue (12/£2:50; EC 12/£3:50; rest of Europe 12/£4; r.o.w. 12/£5.50) from Tony Lee, Pigasus Press, 13 Hazely Combe, Arreton, Isle of Wight PO30 3AJ. As you can see from the horde of issues published since last time we looked at Dragon's Breath, this international small press reviewsheet goes from strength to strength. Concentrating on SF/F/H publications, with some poetry, marginalia and big press material to keep the mix spicy, the compact reviews are densely packed with a swift content overview and Zine Kat's wry observations. Up-to-date too!

FANS ACROSS THE WORLD
#34 (Feb 94)-#55 (Jun/Jul 96): A4, 2pp each, available for one SAE per issue from Bridget Wilkinson, Ground Floor Flat, 8 West Avenue Road, Walthamstow E17 9SE (e-mail: bjw@cix.compulink.co.uk; also distributed with Ansible). A monthly international SF newsletter with a primarily European focus. Convention reports, winners of SF awards in various countries, and other fan-related news, together with up-to-date contact details for many overseas conventions, make FATW essential homework for any aficionado preparing to sally forth across the English Channel.

GLOBAL MAIL
#6: A4, 8pp, free for 2 x 29¢ stamps (overseas 2 IRCs) from Ashley Parker Owens, P.O. Box 597996, Chicago, IL 60659, USA (e-mail: soapbox@well.sf.ca.us or 72162.1573@compuserve.com). Over 470 listings from more than 35 countries are crammed into just 8 pages – no reviews or analysis, just details and deadlines for mail art shows, zine exchanges, anarchism, e-mail activities, art projects, eroticism and gender matters, and every kind of audio, video and printed publications. An excellent complement to the Covert Culture Sourcebook.

GRUE
#16-#17: A5, 100pp p/b, $4:50, #18: A5, 100pp, $5 (3/$14; overseas 3/$20) from Hell's Kitchen Productions, P.O. Box 370, Times Square Station, New York, NY 10108-0370, USA.
   Grue has built a reputation for being a stalwart of the horror small press, and the three most recent issues do nothing to deny that. It's perhaps not as 'cutting edge' in content as the cover blurbs suggest, with the young adult point of view being an over-played card for this reader's taste. That seems to be a characteristic of US horror, but there's only so much you can do when Little Johnny finds something strange in the cellar, or his folks start fighting again; maybe North American culture creates a greater sense of childhood lost – a more comprehensive shattering of innocence – that UK readers can't so readily associate with.
   Vagrants and low-lives are another well-used but more flexible trope, bringing the hooker in Lisa Lepovetsky's 'Forced Entries' (#17) face-to-face with her past in an alarmingly sticky fashion, or using a street bum's near-psychic relationship with his performing monkey to deliver him to a brighter, happier afterlife in Howard N. Kaplan's 'Food for Monkey's Brain' (#17). No psychological or supernatural effects are needed to make 'The Evictors' by Rick Kleffel (#18) a success – just a gritty realism and appeciation of this unenviable profession.
   Other stories are nearer to science fiction than horror. D.R. McBride describes how an ominous outcrop of black rock slowly obliterates a small country town in 'Walking Hills' (#16), and experimental pollution-control microbes effectively turn roads into rivers of black acid, creating a somewhat Ballardian post-Disaster urban landscape in Boomer Murphy's 'Road Eater' (#17).
   There are also stories to defy even the most generalised pigeon-holes. Emily Newland's 'Who Will Love the River God?' (#16), deservedly reprinted in Datlow/Windling's Year's Best, portrays a woman now dying of cancer who is forced to choose between her health and the bizarre waterbaby she found and raised to be her lover. Jay R. Bonansinga introduces a sex toy that prolongs a man's performance with frightening side-effects in 'Necrotica' (#17), and the tables are turned on Kevin Roice's psychic grave-robber in 'Screaming From Beneath The Headstones' (#18). Rounding off #18, Michael Ryan Zimmerman's 'Borne Limb From Limb' is a powerful evocation of a discorporeal man buffeted by the unseeing crowd in a nightclub, until he is ensnared and taken home by a predatory female to be transformed into her familiar. As you'd expect, it's these more off-the-wall stories that stay with you long after the more conventional pieces have faded to grey, and which justify Grue's place at the head of the horror magazine pack.

HARDBOILED
#17: A5, 108pp, $6 (6/$30, overseas surface 6/$36) from Gryphon Publications, P.O. Box 280-209, Brooklyn, NY 11228-0209, USA. Streetwise detective and mystery fiction of the 'hardboiled' variety gives this magazine its name. Although the genre is relatively unknown to this reviewer, contributors such as Joe R. Lansdale and Ardath Mayhar are more familiar. A horror connection also emerges in the fiction itself, with a familiar use of gorey violence and sexual encounters to help the plot along as Good battles against Evil. In fact, there's not a great deal to distinguish some of Hardboiled's fiction from psychological (as opposed to supernatural) horror, for David Gianatasio's 'Simply Horrible' and Harold D. Kaiser's 'The Mumpher Man' would be equally at home in the pages of Bizarre Bazaar, for example. There also some faults in common with horror fiction, such as the way Lansdale's 'The Job' bottles out at the climax instead of confronting the issues it raises, but on the whole Hardboiled's stories acquit themselves well. And with its smart full-colour cover, a lively letters page and intelligent reviews and comment, Hardboiled is a magazine I'll be looking out for again in the future.

INTERFERENCE ON THE BRAIN SCREEN
A5, 28pp, $2 from Patrick Clark, P.O. Box 2761, St Paul, MN 55102, USA. In amongst the personal comment and interesting snippets, this issue features a candid and personal view of an audience with Bill Gibson during his Virtual Light tour, and a visitor's view of Japan. Refreshing and recommended.

KIMOTA
#3: A5, 60pp, £2 (4/£7) from Graeme Hurry, 52 Cadley Causeway, Preston, Lancs PR2 3RX. Kimota is the magazine of the Preston SF Group, but there's no way I'd describe it as a fanzine. Rather, it displays an impressive maturity of content and editorial control for a magazine so young, combining the best talent from with the Group – such as Bryan Talbot, Stephen Gallagher and Dave Windett – with material from the wider small press community. Consequently you'll find a previously unpublished Alan Moore/Bryan Talbot comic strip rubbing shoulders with fiction from Willaim Meikle, Caroline Dunford, Peter Tennant and Kim Padgett-Clarke; top of the credits in this issue come Caroline Dunford's surreal restaurant encounter in 'Eating Out with Mr Benn' and Kim Padgett-Clarke's vampirical 'The Grateful Dead'. With poetry by Steve Bowkett, an interview with Jeff Noon, and an imaginative two-colour overlay cover, Kimota succeeds in fulfilling its chosen brief of stretching across genre boundaries to create a more rounded and satisfying reader experience.

LORE
#1: A5, 76pp, $4 (4/$15) from Rod Heather, P.O. Box 672, Middletown, New Jersey 07748, USA. A new American horror magazine that's already sporting a fine combination of new and established writers: Mr Big Name is none other than Harlan Ellison, with an archaeological expedition in the depths of the Sahara that unearths immortal questions and timeless answers. Meanwhile, Ken Abner's thoughtful and eloquent exploration of old age and life's end lifts 'Stops Along The Way' above the rest of the contents, which are otherwise average with occasional slips into horror cliché.

NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW
Vol. 17 #3: A5, 44pp, and Vol. 17 #5: A5, 40pp, £2 ($5) each, and Vol. 18 #5: A5, 48pp, £3 (non-UK £4) from Gerald England, 20 Werneth Avenue, Gee Cross, Hyde, Cheshire SK14 5NL. With short reviews of over 300 small press items per issue, NHIR is similar in format to the BBR Directory, with sections for magazines, books, CDs, software and mail order catalogues. It places a far greater emphasis on poetry and related material, however, and the wide range of reviewers creates a positive feeling of diversity; the section on magazines is especially comprehensive.

NOISE FILTER
#1: 260x170mm, 56pp, £2:50, and #2: 260x170mm, 40pp, £1:50 from Chris Flynn, 22 Folly Lane, Stroud, Glos GL5 1SD. A comic-horror tale of incompetent alien abductions, body-part theft and zombie creation, but the atrocious spelling and crudely drawn panels make this comic strip hard to enjoy.

QUARTOS
#40: A4, 28pp, £2:00 (6/£14; Europe 6/£18; r.o.w. 6/£20) from Quartos Magazine, BCM-Writer, 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3XX. As well as providing a dependable news service for markets and competitions, Quartos is full of practical advice on self-publishing your work, using questions to develop a story, and exploiting the new openness of the European market. You'll also find tips for boosting creativity, choosing the right word-processing software, and writing your autobiography. A useful and practical writers' magazine.

RAW NERVE
#2: A4, 28pp, £2:20 (7/£13:20) from Darren Floyd, 186 Railway Street, Splott, Cardiff CF2 2NH. "Tales of sex, obsession and death" runs the subtitle of this new magazine, though in truth it's pretty run-of-the-mill psychological horror fare: a failing artist takes desperate steps to revive her career with the ultimate masterpiece in Julia Jones's 'The Feather and the Flick Knife', Tim Lebbon portrays inner and outer views of a seriously mixed-up Trekkie modelmaker in 'Odd', while Frank Swannack adds a new dimension to marital strife with 'Litter Bugs'. More rewarding were 'The Cat', Rhys Hughes's new spin on the neutering of pets, and 'The Archimedes Principle' by D. Sinclair, a tad heavy-handed in its narration but easily holding the reader's attention better than any other piece here. With its full-colour cover and full-page photo-quality illustrations Raw Nerve can't be faulted for its ambition, but the horrendous typos that pepper the stories suggest the magazine's long-term success might benefit best from more care at the basic stages of production.

SCAR TISSUE
#1-#9: A5, 4pp each, available for one SAE per issue from Tony Lee, Pigasus Press, 13 Hazely Combe, Arreton, Isle of Wight PO30 3AJ. An irregular, make-of-it-what-you-want-to flysheet of poetry, fiction, artwork, reviews and small press adverts – in fact anything goes so long as you can say it in less than 500 words. Brian Maycock, John Light and William L. Ramseyer feature among the contributors.

SF EYE
#13: A4, 124pp, and #14: A4, 116pp, $5 each (3/$12:50; overseas 3/$20) from SF Eye, P.O. Box 18539, Asheville, NC 28814, USA. Science Fiction Eye has always been about so much more than just science fiction, and now with issue #14 Steve Brown has dropped the '-cience -iction' from the title, leaving readers to come up with new meanings for the two letters. "Make up your own," he exhorts, "they are all correct." The S and the F might easily stand for 'socio-cultural formation', with an eye cast over past, present and future issues and developments. In SF Eye #13, for example, Paul Di Filippo explores the theory and practice of last century's North American communes in 'The World a Department Store', Steve Kelner sets the ideas of the mind portrayed in SF against modern psychological science, while two articles about the future shape of humanity will have all Darwinists on the edge of their seats. In the first, Charles Platt talks to Max More, co-founder of the Extropy Institute, who believes that enhancement and augmentation of the human form through technology is not the stuff of science fiction, but can actually be made to happen. There's enough reference to Nietzche's übermensch (carefully stripped of its subsequent Nazi appropriation) to make you realise that this technology will come to pass, but only for a wealthy WASP elite. For the rest of us, Ken Jopp's 'Cyberfetus Rising' suggests, awaits an equally technological future that, instead of expanding our potential, retains us in a permanent state of childhood. This infantilisation results from technology progressively taking over the functions of the human body: at the most basic level food processors make our large teeth, the grinders and millers in our heads, superfluous and unable to repay the metabolic investments they require. Extrapolate that through the womb-like protection of motor cars, and modern home entertainment, and you can start to see how we'll all be living in a state of arrested adolescence. There's more to keep Darwinists happy in issue #14, as Nancy Collins takes up the baton of technology and childhood in a rant about the social implications of fertility treatment and neonatal technology. But that's only five articles out of two issues of SF Eye. In #13 you'll also find an interview with WAX creator David Blair, Gary Westfahl's manifesto for teaching science fiction, and an essay on the mysterious from Don Webb (though the bedrock of his argument seems identical to the basic tenets of small press publishing – I guess I must have missed something these past ten years), and in #14 Charles Platt explores the auctioning off of Soviet space memorabilia, Stepan Chapman eulogises the illustrations of John R. Neill, the artist who brought Frank Baum's Oz its definitive visualisation, and there's a previously unpublished interview with Philip K. Dick. Add the dependably opinionated letters, reviews and columns to the mix, and you'll soon see what I mean about the Eye being more than just a science fiction magazine.

SILVER WOLF AND LITTLE PEOPLE
#2: A5, 44pp + 4pp 'Wolf Cubs' insert, enquire to John St John, 46 Balbutcher Lane, Ballymun, Dublin 11, Ireland. An enthusiastic if unsophisticated writers' magazine primarily featuring poetry and short stories, together with some tips and reviews. Although drawing on contributors from both sides of the Irish Sea (including Rhys H. Hughes, Geoff Jackson and Geoff Stevens), Silver Wolf has the homespun feel of a magazine put together by your local writers' circle, and has its own short story competition; the 'Wolf Cubs' insert is a lighthearted pull-out section for younger readers.

TOUCHPAPER
#1-#2: A4, 2pp each, 5/£1:50 from Tony Lee, Pigasus Press, 13 Hazely Combe, Arreton, Isle of Wight PO30 3AJ. "An irregular newsletter of commentary, review and other stuff of interest to anybody concerned about/with the SF genre" says the editorial, though commentary and opinion take centre stage so far. Sample soapbox rants include Rhys Hughes on being a Welsh writer, Peter Schilling on horror hacks v. SF scribes, and Ivan Millett on what we should expect from first contact with aliens.

THE UNIVERSAL MIND
#1: A4, 52pp, £2:50 (2/£4:50) from Carl Thomas, 4 Baptist Street, Rhos, Wrexham LL14 1RH. With its first issue, this new horror magazine has a distinctly Deathrealm-like feel. Although British writers like Nicholas Royle, Simon Clark and Paul Pinn abound, there's a heavy presence from the American TAL stable in the form of S. Darnbrook Colson, Deirdra Cox and Edward Lee, and Colson's 1994 interview with Poppy Z. Brite; the general middle-of-the-road nature of the fiction and layout reinforces the Deathrealm sensation.

THE URBANITE
#5: A4, 96pp p/b, and #6: A4, 68pp, $5 each (3/$13:50) from Urban Legend Press, P.O. Box 4737, Davenport, Iowa 52808, USA. Lively and bizarre, The Urbanite features fiction and poetry with a sense of sophisticated surrealism. With contributors like Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Thomas Ligotti, Melanie Tem and Nina Kiriki Hoffman, you'd expect the magazine to be over there with horror titles such as Not One Of Us and Nøctulpa, but its calm sophistication and offbeat experimentalism actually gives The Urbanite more in common with British magazines like Dreams from the Strangers Café and The Third Alternative. Talking of which, issue #6 sees stories from TTA's very own Andy Cox, together with Joel Lane who's promised as featured author in #7. However, the real star of this issue is Scott Thomas, whose 'Lightning Bugs' must be the most chillingly evil manipulation of a husband and wife relationship that I've ever read. This is closely followed by 'A Woman's Scream' by his brother Jeffrey Thomas (yes, really), a late night phone call that progressively deadens the pit of your stomach with dread anticipation. At 96 pages for $5 The Urbanite #5 is unbeatable value, and though the pagecount drops for issue #6, the type is also smaller so you get even more for your money. If you like the British so-called 'slipstream' magazines, The Urbanite is definitely worth a closer look.

ZINE ZONE
#13: A5, 36pp, £1 or 4 first class stamps (12/£10; Europe 12/£14/$21; r.o.w. 12/£18/$27) from T. Curtis, 47 Retreat Place, London E9 6RH. A ballsy and anarchic fanzine that pokes a stick at the hypocritical establishment in the no-bullshit chaotically pasted-up style of the best punk fanzines. Mussolini and the Fat Controller discussing obesity, the fashion 'stylee' of the average London punter, and the last Mike Hammer thriller – ever – all shout for your attention among the topical press cuttings, bizarre Japanese montage/collage, ads and reviews. The tip about redirecting mail overseas is worth the price of admission alone ...

BLACK ANGELS
by Andrew Derrett
ISBN 1-85756-064-7, A5, 112pp p/b, £4:95 from Janus Publishing Company, Duke House, 37 Duke Street, London W1M 5DF. Andrew Derrett blends fantasy and the macabre with everyday life to produce a collection of short stories which range from the simple human problems of relationships to studies in pure evil. Neither end of the spectrum gives us spectacular writing: the mainstream material displays a tendency to sentimentality and twee twist-in-the-tale resolutions, whilst the horror relies on the most elementary tropes and shows little understanding of the psychology of the genre. Reading this collection you get the feeling that Derrett still needs to broaden his horizons before he can properly hit his stride.

SYSTEMS OF ROMANCE
by Paul Evenblij & Paul Harland
ISBN 90-73730-27-9, 294pp p/b, F16,- (UK £5:99; USA $7:99) from Babel Publications, Caan van Necklaan 63, 2281 BB Rijswijk (ZH), The Netherlands. Regular readers will recall our praise for the Dutch anthology The Mound in BBR #21, and especially for Paul Harland's story 'The Winter Garden'. Now from the same publisher comes this new English-language collection by Harland and fellow Dutchman Paul Evenblij, Holland's two foremost SF writers; there are three solo pieces from each, plus one collaboration. Witness how a terrorist attempts to destroy a virtual cathedral ... consumed by his need for love, one of the Last Boys creates life too hastily and has to face the consequences ... in a Paris plagued by the parrots which once saved it, an aging sculptor and a bullet poet chase the elusive secret of space flight – the wealth of ideas on display in this collection is dazzling. The stories are so thought-provoking and refreshingly different, the descriptions of other cultures and alternative sexualities so utterly convincing and – in these years of negative equity and zero feelgood factor – so positive and uplifting in the face of overwhelming adversity, that Systems of Romance easily stands head and shoulders above any other fiction I've read for years. We may complain how jaded British 'big press' publishers have become, but it takes this independent publisher from continental Europe to show just how boring and self-absorbed our small press has become too.

RECLUSE
by Derek M. Fox
ISBN 0-9527183-0-8, A5, 92pp p/b, £3:50 from Tanjen Novellas, 52 Denman Lane, Huncote, Leicester LE9 3BS. Although Derek Fox has over 30 stories and articles in print, including one in the horror anthology Cold Cuts 2, this novella to inaugurate the new Tanjen series gives us a much better idea of what to expect from his novel-length material currently doing the rounds. Following the death of his father, a letter leads Daniel Lees from his home in Devon to the London apartment of one Elizabeth Swann, a mysterious woman he has never met before. The flat is empty but immaculately furnished, but is the body on the bed really there, or just a figment of Daniel's imagination? Not exactly what you'd call a blinder of an opening, but it lets Fox get the story moving quickly. Similarly there's nothing new in the imminent failure of Daniel's marriage, but here it works to the author's advantage to measure the gravity of subsequent events once Daniel returns to Devon. This is perhaps the outstanding feature of Recluse, for although these individual elements might appear mundane in isolation, Fox applies them adroitly and only for the purpose of progressing the story. I've no wish to spoil it by revealing any more of the plot, but suffice to say that Fox combines classic supernatural horror and psychological disintegration with the darkest elements of Devonian folklore, whilst maintaining a cracking pace and an iron grip on the reader's attention. I rarely find longer fiction as captivating as short stories, but Recluse is a big exception that totally justifies the demands to be read in one sitting, and leaves me tingling in anticipation for the novels in progress.

EROS LANE
by Gary Graham
ISBN 0-9512746-1-9, A5, 56pp, enquire for current price to Crushed Anna Books, 34 Rupert Street, Glasgow G4 9AR. To paraphrase the back cover blurb, Willy and Fanny, the Throb twins, live in a white house beyond the wood of suicides. They play out their lives in a bizarre round of sexual ritual, until one day an albino and her talking dog arrive and the repetitive cycle of their lives is irrevocably broken. A clear enough summary of the storyline, but one which does no justice to the complexity of the narrative: think of D.F. Lewis, but at novelette length, and you'll get a good idea of where Eros Lane is coming from. It displays all the torturous logic and disjointed sleights of mind of Des at his best, but also a similar sense that content sometimes suffers at the hand of self-conscious form.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD #1
by Noel Hannan & Rik Rawling
260x170mm, 36pp, enquire to Noel K. Hannan, 18 Lansdowne Road, Sydney, Crewe, Cheshire CW1 5JY.
STREETMEAT Book 1
by Noel Hannan & Rik Rawling
A4, 48pp, £1:50 from Noel K. Hannan as above. If you've been wondering what Noel Hannan's been up to since Nightfall went the way of all flesh, then here's your answer. His long-running collaboration with popular small press artist Rik Rawling resulted in work on the comic adaptation of Night of the Living Dead for USA publisher Fantaco. Noel's script is taut but also humorous, with more than a nod in the direction of Bill and Ted and Wayne's World, and well complemented by Rik's sure lines and sense of caricature. However, after finding the relationship with Fantaco less than satisfactory, Rik and Noel went back to their small press roots to set up their own 'Bad to the Bone' imprint. Streetmeat is their first offering, set in a 21st-century Seattle where a displaced Japanese community controls the street scene. Though Rik's artwork is much coarser than in NLD, this two-part graphic novel has a more complex storyline, with extra depth and texture provided by short fiction and mock adverts to complement the main comic – a nice touch that whets the appetite for Book 2.

THE MUSEUM AFTER DARK
by Martin A. Hibbert
ISBN 0-9516800-3-9, A5, 72pp, £4:50/$9 from The Phlebas Press, 2 The Stables, High Park, Oxenholme, Kendal, Cumbria LA9 7RE. Johnson the 'swamp detective' is tracking the perpetrator of the Secret Sex Crimes, but the trail is formed of words, rather than footprints in mud. Using surrealism, cut-up divination and flasher-mac wanking fantasy, Hibbert accordingly immerses the reader in both the story and the clue-texts themselves to create a complex and multi-stranded narrative. Sometimes it's truly entertaining, but at other times it's so profound it disappears up its own backside. More annoying, however, was that Hibbert ultimately lacked the self-confidence to see it through to the finish, and instead felt the need to info-dump his narrative technique ten pages from the end.

DRADIN, IN LOVE
by Jeff VanderMeer
ISBN 0-9652200-0-1, A5, 112pp, $9:95 from Buzzcity Press, P.O. Box 38190, Tallahassee, FL 32315, USA.
   Returning to the city of Ambergris to seek new employment, the missionary Dradin catches sight of a girl in an office window, and falls hopelessly in love. His naive efforts to woo this beauty lead him into a string of encounters and adventures, featuring such bizarre characters as a tattooed dwarf named Dvorak, the nocturnal mushroom dwellers, and a Living Saint ejaculating into a rose bush. Everything comes to a violent climax during the city's Festival of the Freshwater Squid, when Dradin finally comes face to face with his love.
   In the hands of anyone less, Dradin might be nothing more than a hopelessly sickly tale of unrequited love, but under VanderMeer's control any sentimentality remains firmly peripheral. Nor is Dradin's pursuit of the girl merely a vehicle for the author's imagination to run riot with bizarre characters and situations. Although written in the third person, we are tied to Dradin's point of view, and almost caught napping by the subjectivity of his viewpoint: right on the opening page, when he first catches sight of the girl, just how can Dradin be "struck dumb and dumber by the seraphim blue of her eyes" when her face is "masked by the reflection of the graying sky above", especially as the window is three stories up? His tendency to daydream, and the aftereffects of his recent jungle fever, further call his reliability into question. We learn that he is a murderer too, so perhaps like Camus' L'Etranger Dradin is also seeking to influence the reader's opinion of his character. Nonetheless, just to compare the bizarrely disorienting nature of the narrative with Borges or Gogol would be simplistic in the extreme.
   That Dradin works on so many levels is an indication of VanderMeer's mastery of the longer narrative form, and an impressive indication of his growing maturity as a writer. The considerable critical interest that Dradin generates should in itself justify VanderMeer's recent Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, and provide a valuable stepping stone to future success.

THE BESTSELLER AND OTHER TALES
by Don Webb
ISBN 0-936055-61-8, A5, 52pp, $3 from Chris Drumm Books, P.O. Box 445, Polk City, Iowa 50226, USA. Hot on the heels of The Seventh Day and After comes a new collection of Don Webb stories, this time from Chris Drumm. Don is again on good form, with work – such as 'Suppose' and 'Instruments of Precision' – that beguiles you with its normality before taking you on a sudden tangent to reality. In the title story, an author populates an empty motel with the characters of his historical novel, but my favourite is 'My Hometown', in which a street of houses is demolished by mysterious skull-like features which emerge from the ground one September morning.

REX MILLER: THE COMPLETE REVELATIONS
by t. Winter-Damon
A5, 108pp, $10:95 ($13 overseas) from Tal Publications, P.O. Box 1837, Leesburg, Virginia 22075, USA. Rex Miller has ridden the splatter bandwagon to his advantage with his peculiar mix of sex, slaughter and insanity, and this interview/biopic sets out to discover the man behind the 'legend'. Two problems with this become immediately apparent. First, it's clear from his previous career in radio and other media that Miller knows all about self-promotion. Secondly, Damon – a hardcore fan of Miller's work – is too awestruck to be the least bit objective, and in this context his uniquely vivid prose becomes embarrassingly gushing. In fact, all we learn about Miller is that behind all the gore, he's really showing how abused children themselves go on to become abusers: "if you fuck with kids you make monsters". That may well be the case, but at best this message ranks only number 3 in his priorities behind personal fame and fortune – sadly there's not a hint that Miller donated all his royalties to childcare foundations, for example, to convince us otherwise.

BIZARRE SEX AND OTHER CRIMES OF PASSION II
A4, 116pp, $9:50 (overseas $11:50 surface, $15:50 air) from Tal Publications, P.O. Box 1837, Leesburg, Virginia 22075, USA. More tales of weird sex and passionate revenge with Wayne Allen Sallee's 'Family Fiction' in pole position. Sallee's matter-of-fact police investigation is a very hard piece to follow, though Brad Boucher and H. Andrew Lynch turn in very good work. Weak and predictable stories by P.D. Cacek, Michael C. McPherson and Lauren Fitzgerald stand out even more prominantly by running one after the other, but Garry Bowen's 'Wannafuck' and Ron Dee's 'Dick Thing' bring this collection to a rousing conclusion. Excellent illustration is provided throughout by Robert Gregory Griffith's disturbing photo-montages.

CHRIS DRUMM BOOKS
#76: A6, 48pp, 12/$10 (overseas air 12/$20, surface 12/$15) from Chris Drumm Books, P.O. Box 445, Polk City, Iowa 50226, USA. Chris Drumm is one of the best and most respected mail order book dealers in the States, carrying all the big book lines as well as a comprehensive range of secondhand and small press titles. For unbeatable value, subscribe to this catalogue and get discounts of up to 30% on new book prices.

CREATIVE ARTS COURSES
1996: A5, 36pp, enquire to Creative Arts Courses, The Indian King Arts Centre, Fore Street, Camelford, Cornwall PL32 9PG (tel: 01840 212161). Whether you've been writing for years or you're just starting out, there's bound to be a course to interest you from the 49 on offer in this year's catalogue. As well as the usual introductions to writing, there's a comprehensive range aimed at specialist markets and genres, plus techniques for boosting your creativity and self-awareness – even a course for creative writing tutors; the SF/F/H session is run by horror novellist Ben Leech. Both weekend and full-week courses are available, with groups strictly limited to eight people to ensure full participation and individual attention.

OCEAN VIEW BOOKS
A5, 16pp, from Ocean View Books, P.O. Box 102650, Denver, CO 80250, USA (e-mail: probook@csn.net). One of the USA's most important independent publishers of poetry and fiction to challenge the definitions of speculative and science fiction, genre fiction, and the avant-garde, with major new titles from Steve Rasnic Tem and Bruce Boston. In addition, their new series The Documents of Colorado Art breaks ground with each new title, exploring not cowboy art as you might at first assume, but the rich history of modernism in the West.

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