Cirsova“Tongue of Ash” by Joseph W. Knowles
“The Sapphire Talisman” by Richard Rubin
“Deep-Rooted” by Ken Lizzi
“Book of a Thousand Dreams” by Harold R. Thompson
“Skirt, Snake, and Eggs” by William Drell
“Automaton Anon” by W.E. Wertenberger
“Infinite Alley” by JD Cowan
“Frozen in Time” by Jim Breyfogle
“To Scale the Devil Haunted Sky” by Misha Burnett
“A Bottle of Chambertin” by Mark Mellon
“Voodoo Man’s Curse” by Michael Tierney
“A Necklace of Ghûl Claws” by Tais Teng
“Tango With Samurai” by Rodica Bretin (part of a series, not standalone, not reviewed)
“Corpse Ala Cart” by Teel James Glenn
Reviewed by Malory
This was a big issue with a whole lot of range to its stories. There are two stories that I’d recommend to anybody and they sit well down the running order. My overall frustration, though, was with an issue that kept recurring in multiple stories. Too many of these heroes needed to be rescued rather than find the win themselves. And, oddly, several of the writers allowed their biggest moments to happen offstage.
“Tongue of Ash” by Joseph W. Knowles opens with an earthquake and a body in a dried-up lakebed and no blood to be seen. The sheriff, though, does find a black cylinder nearby that has no language he’s familiar with, although the town’s preacher takes one look at it and starts babbling about… well, Babel. The middle stretch here is some of the best writing in the issue and it starts the whole thing off with a bang. There’s an interesting conceit being explored here, that a shard of the confounded tongue is leaking back into a Western town, but this isn’t exactly Lovecraft with spurs. What I couldn’t get past (and this will be a bit of a theme in these reviews) is how relatively little of the conclusion is due to the sheriff. The preacher supplies the theology, a visiting Dutchman supplies the crisis, and the words that finally count are somebody else’s. There’s a drifter deputy who is set up well, but never turns out to be anything. It’s definitely worth the read for the creeping sense of atmospheric dread, but I wanted the sheriff to earn his own ending.
“The Sapphire Talisman” by Richard Rubin is about Burke Fletcher, a Space Navy lieutenant turned mercenary, who’s stranded in the badlands of Rigel IV after his employer’s air fleet is smashed out of the sky. He walks three days, runs out of water, finds a city that legend says nobody comes back from, drinks at a well, and ends up several centuries in the past. As you do. Rubin can certainly write an action scene and the dogfight that opens is brisk and easy to follow. The trouble, though, is Fletcher wins every fight he could win and gets bailed out of those he couldn’t, first by a coincidence so precise it may as well have been scheduled, and then by a companion who tells him “I forgot to say that I was once an apprentice alchemist.” It means that nothing here ever feels really at risk. He does earn a good last page, and the closing toast is one of the best lines in the collection.
“Deep-Rooted” by Ken Lizzi has a Roman trooper chasing the Gaul who took a dead friend’s ring off him in the night. The chase ends on a headland in Britannia on Samhain, where the thief walks into what had looked like a knoll and turns out to be a tower of standing stones. Shenanigans ensue. There’s the best monster in the issue here as the roots have grown through the bones of the dead they animate, so a sword bites into wood and stops, and our MC has to work out that he needs to break them smaller so the roots can’t use them. Lizzi knows his kit as well, which makes this feel authentic, which is all very well handled. But a long flashback drops in at the moment the supernatural arrives and stalls the whole tale dead at exactly the wrong moment. Still, this is a very good read.
“Book of a Thousand Dreams” by Harold R. Thompson has a retired major looking for a colleague who vanished ten years back. He’s chasing a letter that claims each of the thousand tales in a lost book end up in a working spell. Thompson plays fair with the rules he establishes for himself around all of this, which is more or less the problem here, because the rule gets demonstrated early and from then on the way this is going to end is clear from a long way out. The clockwork birds have some of the best beats in the story, but there are also quite repetitive bits of the hunt. And the ten-year mystery turns out to have very little inside it. Decent enough, though.
“Skirt, Snake, and Eggs” by William Drell is a hardboiled tale set on a space station orbiting a gas giant. Officer Sreether is a seven-foot Ssrthari and there’s a nice detail around a framework stitched into his uniform at the knees and elbows, so he can force himself to move like a human and not frighten everybody. I enjoyed Drell also having the MC’s laser pistol taking too long to clear and having it pay off twice. Outside that, though, the solution to the case underneath is pretty obvious by the halfway mark, with the AI assistant handing over most of the clues. I’m not wild that the finale turns on a piece of kit no one has mentioned until it’s needed. Sreether, himself, though makes the whole thing worth it.
“Automaton Anon” by W.E. Wertenberger has a Texan stranded on an alien world tracking a gang that seems to be stealing body parts back to their hideout. He walks in on thirteen hooligans sitting under hundreds of limbs, empties his revolver into their leader, draws his knife and says “Let’s get to it.” Then there’s a section break followed by “What a mess.” The fight the story spends two thousand words promising just vanishes into a white space…. There’s a good, sad story in the second half about a broken machine that goes on keeping its duties because its master’s death didn’t cancel them, and the frog-people who leave Joe behind on the grounds that he’s at least worthy of the chance at survival are a nice bit of worldbuilding. However, he gets handed “a working theory about Druun” that the narration then declines to tell us, which is a withheld answer dressed up as a mystery. This one was a miss, for me.
“Infinite Alley” by JD Cowan drops a young psychic into an alley following a girl who wants her to come and meet Mama. But the alley doesn’t end and the loop rots instead of repeating. The woman beating a rug on the balcony becomes a bloody arm hanging over the rail next to a burning carpet, the growling dog becomes a maggot pile that’s been dead a long while, and the crying baby turns into whispers. This is a super way to use a repeated set piece. However, Dana dies twice and learns nothing from either, though, her psychic power switches back on at the point the plot needs it to, and most of what she feels is about people and places out of a novel I haven’t read, which the magazine footnotes for us. This is… not ideal.
“Frozen in Time” by Jim Breyfogle is the best thing in the issue by some distance. An engineer is driving back to a dead town fifty miles away with his nine-year-old, to see his father who is dying, and who’s spent the last sixty years since his brother vanished poking around the desert looking for him. Then he spots a film canister which can only have come from the abandoned studio the family was forbidden on pain of damnation to go near, and he drives out there. What he finds is a sound stage, a camera that puts him in mind of a meat grinder, and a reel of the missing uncle in a foil spacesuit and a mutilated bucket helmet, silently screaming. What I loved was that Breyfogle never cheats the reader. Every clue is up on the screen and available, and when Bob works out what he’s looking at, it’s a jolt I didn’t see coming and should have. On the down side, I think the back half explains itself more than it needed to, but the last two pages are as good as short horror gets because of how carefully the ground has been laid. The final line has stayed with me. Superb.
“To Scale the Devil Haunted Sky” by Misha Burnett opens with a horse team pulling an engineless 1972 Blazer down what’s left of Interstate 15 with the rubble of Los Angeles behind and the glass of Las Vegas ahead. Oh, and there’s a rogue planetoid three times the size of the moon sitting over all of it. That’s about as good as pulp SF openings get, and it’s delivered with class. The man in the Blazer turns out to be the acting President (because why not) promoted by attrition up from Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, and he wants a burned-out rocket pilot for the one surviving experimental plane and that’s a great setup. But close to half of the story is people explaining the setting, and then the Macguffin the whole story exists to deliver goes off in one sentence when it’d set up something much bigger for itself. I wanted to love this, but it didn’t quite land.
“A Bottle of Chambertin” by Mark Mellon is the tightest-built thing here, under four thousand words with not one of them spare. We meet a sugar magnate in Havana who is neglecting his plantations, his wife and his accountants in favour of his Napoleana collection. Then he is brought a lead-sealed bottle out of Bonaparte’s own cellar, notices it doesn’t slosh about, and is told the wine turned to dust long ago. That night, though, he hears scratching inside it… what is within is a lovely creation and the way he works on our MC’s vanity is properly engaging. Mellon isn’t sentimental about Adriano either, and lets him damn himself in his own diary inside a couple of lines, so the ruin when it comes is deserved. Where it loses me a little is that the last two hundred words spend everything the thing had built on a historical wink that doesn’t quite honour the preceding four thousand. Cut the coda and I’d have said this was the jewel of the collection.
“Voodoo Man’s Curse” by Michael Tierney is a secret history of the fifteenth of December, 1799, in which Washington’s former valet rides out through the snow to find out about the chickens the general was carrying home the day before he took his chill. The way of this sort of thing is to reverse-engineer a story out of the history, and Tierney does it well. We know Martha really did burn the letters and shut the room up and Washington really was bled nearly dry. It strikes me though that the story surely stages the wrong scene. What we watch is an arthritic old man fighting a zombie in a shed, while the scene we actually wanted to watch reaches us secondhand and after the fact, from somebody who wasn’t there either!!! Also, the villain does everything three times over in two thousand words. Didn’t do much for me.
“A Necklace of Ghûl Claws” by Tais Teng looks like a monster hunt but actually isn’t one. We have a canal dredger who herds nine bear-sized beavers which are the product of a centuries-long Iroquois breeding programme. Then a ghûl hunter wearing a necklace of black claws vaults down in front of his lead beaver, and his brother waves her aboard for the trip. The job they’re sailing to is a kraken that has already eaten a sloop full of soldiers. Teng builds his world with plenty of throwaway clauses and never stops once to explain any of it, so krakens turn out to be giant swimming clams, there are hill-sized armoured turtles walking ahead of the caravan, storm birds guarding the warehouses, and a port called, “with a great lack of imagination,” Alexandria, one of ten the general named after himself. This is all a lot of fun. Even though the kraken goes down too easily for what it’s been built into the closing pages are first-rate, and the ending is about as cruel as anything I’ve read in a while. This is right up there as the best in the issue.
“Corpse Ala Cart” by Teel James Glenn starts with a man trying to have dinner when a dying Elf falls out of the sky and onto his table. Solid opening. Jack Silence is a licensed ParaFey eliminator in a New York where the Fey world has merged with ours and, for reasons, internal combustion has stopped working. The world runs on carpets and gryphons. Glenn introduces everything on arrival and asks nothing of prior reading, which (others take note) is how a series character ought to be run in a magazine. Against that, though, the hero wins his one real crisis with strokes of luck, and the Shakespeare quoting comes round about once every five hundred words which is… a lot. But this was fun, I’d have just liked the ending to cost something.
Taken as a whole, this is a strong, varied issue, and a good showcase for what Cirsova does, which is pulp adventure that ranges freely across science fiction, fantasy and horror and is happy to blend all three inside a single story. The recurring weakness I keep coming back to runs through a fair few of these: a hero who gets rescued rather than earning the win, or a climax that lands just out of shot. But the range on offer is real, and when it works, as with Breyfogle and Teng especially, it really works. Even the near-misses tend to miss because they reached for something, and I’ll take that over safe and forgettable most days. Worth picking up.