"Jack's Masterpiece" by Kendall Evans
"Dance Therapeutic" by Darren Speegle
"Trick Candles" by Stephen D. Rogers
"The Samhain Incident" by Michael Greenhut
"Familiar Faces" by Kealan-Patrick Burke
"The Endless Hunt" by Richard Dysinger
"Purity" by Spencer Allen

I'm sure the small size of Wicked Hollow (just about the right size to tuck in a hip pocket) makes it easy to lose behind larger magazines, but I like it. It feels intimate, and the clean layout and high quality paper makes me feel like I've gotten hold of something special. Editor Jon Hodges clearly has both wide-ranging tastes, and a feel for the stylish. While Wicked Hollow is technically a semi-pro/small press publication, I found the contents of this issue to be well above some professional horror magazines I've read.

"Jack's Masterpiece" by Kendall Evans
"Jack's Masterpiece" is a work of flash fiction; it is less than a page long, even one of Wicked Hollow's pages, which are about one fourth the size of a piece of notebook paper. Given the length, it's hard to say anything about the story without tipping its effects, so let me say a bit about it as an example of the strengths and weaknesses of flash fiction. Like many examples of flash, "Jack's Masterpiece" is well-written. Evans sets the stage well, and nearly instantly, and describes the action in vivid, stylized prose. However, there is almost no plot, and given the title and the fact that this is a Halloween issue, almost no suspense. If you think of this as a brief prose poem, it works quiet well.

"Dance Therapeutic" by Darren Speegle
Many of the illustrations in Wicked Hollow catch the eye, and some are striking in themselves (the illustration for "The Samhain Incident," for example, is quite disturbing). The illustration that opens "Dance Therapeutic," unfortunately, distracts. The organs hanging from the ceiling are too cartoonish, and don't really fit the ambition of the story. Yes, the story opens with Domino, a police officer, entering a room festooned with human internal organs, but it is meant to be both a step into hell, and a step into the origins of his psyche. Speegle does a nice job of capturing how the attention adults turn on children can seem like dissection, and of sketching Domino's childhood pain as his parents try to make him into a special person. This being a horror story, they succeed, but not in the ways they planned—or, frankly, in the way I expected. While Speegle spent too much of the story in a series of flashbacks, the ending fell nicely in the sanity vs. supernatural gap, and was eerie.

"Trick Candles" by Stephen D. Rogers
In between the first time I read it, and when I wrote this review, "Trick Candles" has already been recommended for a Stoker Award. Needless to say, I returned to the story with heightened interest. When I reread it, I found my initial impression confirmed: it is a good story that does a number of things well, but I'm not sure I see why it earned this recommendation. Of course, you'll want to read it for yourself, but let me tell you what I see in the story. The trick candles from which the story takes its title are found on Shellac's birthday cake. Shellac is Phil and Mary's teenage daughter, and the triangle of tension between the ex-spouses, and between each of them and Shellac, is nicely drawn. Speegle stays mostly in the present moment, but evokes the past through fleeting memories, or, more often, irritations and resentments that trail memories after them as justification. The tension mounts as Phil and Shellac try to make it through what is clearly yet another uncomfortable day together; their inability to extinguish their frustrations is symbolized, and fed, by the inability to blow out the trick candles on the cake. Then suddenly, the story springs (lurches?) into the surreal or supernatural, as first the two of them, and then Mary, catch fire, and make patterns of light and flame. This works symbolically, but I found it frustrating on the level of story logic.

"The Samhain Incident" by Michael Greenhut
Greenhut's prose is clean and strong in this story. A series of images flash into the reader's consciousness, striking home and then being replaced by the next. A historical piece, set in a stylized tenth century AD, "The Samhain Incident" does a good job of evoking the sense of distance and difference between that time and our own, and the paganism in the story feels right—disturbing, visceral. On the other hand, while I respect the bravery involved in telling a story backwards, in a series of dated entries, this moved my reading experience into the purely intellectual realm; I admired the story, but felt little as I read it, because the structure loomed so large in it.

"Familiar Faces" by Kealan-Patrick Burke
Several themes run through the work of Philip K. Dick. One of them is a diffuse anxiety over what's real, and what isn't. In "Familiar Faces," Burke tackles a similar fear, accelerated to the pace of the urban horror story he's writing. The description of the city works well, as do the moments in which the narrator seems to recognize someone, and has that recognition slip away. Burke captures that dance of recognition well. And it would be disturbing to have the identity of everyone in the world blur, until they all seem (or, perhaps, are) faceless mannequins. However, there are two things missing from this story that keep it from being deeply disturbing. One is the length/pace of the story; we simply don't know Grant (the main character) for long enough to care about him. The second is closely related; there's no reason in what we are given for this to happen to Grant, and it would be much more disturbing if we had that cause.

"The Endless Hunt" by Richard Dysinger
There's a good twist on an old idea in "The Endless Hunt," and some pretty good characterization, but in the end, the story is overlong for either, despite the plot twists Dysinger builds into the story. "The Endless Hunt" starts with some vivid description, first of what seems to be the American Southwest, then of the first person narrator's brother. The brother seems like a monster in those opening paragraphs, but those retreat, and he seems only a metaphorical monster, and the story a non-supernatural one of kidnapping. Eventually, the opening turns out to dominate: the family is supernatural, some variant on vampires who can change the nature of their addiction to blood, and some of their physical characteristics, if they prey on their family members. The carnage is pretty well done, but most of the plot simply takes too long to unravel.

"Purity" by Spencer Allen
This is a nicely sick story. I mean it. In "Purity" Allen dug in and asked, "What disturbs people?" and then answered it, in several overlapping directions. The images of the all-white animals, crawling over their owner and creeping the listening visitor out, work. They move the story deep into the realm of the gothic, where anything can happen, because it's the unlit portion of the psyche. The voice of the older man telling stories, half confession, half brag, about past crimes and sexual indiscretions, has the feel of spoken language, like we've been trapped in a room with a sick uncle. The supernatural or goddamn disturbed parts don't completely fit, on the level of emotional logic—I wasn't convinced the character cleansing himself of sin had shown a strong enough grasp on power and reality for it to feel real—but I liked the attempt. All in all, this story was a good, gross read.

Greg Beatty was most of the way through a PhD in English at the University of Iowa when his advisors agreed that letting him go to Clarion West 2000 would be a good idea. Bad idea. He finished his dissertation on serial killer novels, then gave up on traditional academia and returned to his original dream of writing fiction. He's had roughly thirty stories accepted since September 2001, with acceptances by SCI FICTION, 3SF, Palace of Reason, The Fortean Bureau, Ideomancer Would That It Were, deathlings.com, and several anthologies. Greg's non-fiction has appeared in the Raleigh News and Observer, Future Orbits, Audiofile, Science-Fiction Studies, Strange Horizons, the New York Review of Science Fiction and numerous other venues.