Jingle bells, Santa smells, happy Halloween.
Oh what fun it is to ride in a German submarine.
—traditional
Six Vincents
“Now it says here that you used to eat your paints? Can this be true?” Graham Norton asks his guest with a hint of amused disgust as he shuffles through…
Larry Blamire Interview
Larry Blamire is an artist, author, actor, director, and independent filmmaker, best known for The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, a meticulous send-up of grade B Science Fiction films from the…
Outmatched: a Jagged Steel Creek Chronicle
Rico rode for months before he picked up the Tinker’s trail. He rode through woods in the South populated by ancient giants, cybernetic dwarves, and trees that grew higher than…
The Mischief Maker
Children shall I tell you the story of Maggie and the tiniest banshee? Well gather round and don’t interrupt. A very long time ago, long, long before our kind had…
The Judgment of Cambyses
It was August 2075 in Brussels. A dying arts and antiquities dealer needed an heir – a suitable one, one that wouldn’t squander and ruin the business he had spent…
The Greatest Gift
The stockings were up, the tree was strung, and the night was aging quickly, when John saw Matty sit up in bed and stare wide-eyed at the ceiling. “He’s here,”…
Reviews of Jean Lorrain’s “Nightmares of an Ether Drinker,” Michael Gibson’s “Symbolism,” Thom Metzger’s “Big Noise on the Astral Plane”
Nightmares of an Ether Drinker was the most enthralling book to cross our desk in months and months. The translator, Brian Stableford, a venerated elder of the SF community, begat…
The Strange Voyage of Annabel Lee
(a spoondrift, a flickering filmstrip, even a dream) Distant cities may or may not exist; they are only real in imagination—until you visit one, causing it to collapse into brick…
The Traffic Cone
Leo ran his pawnshop out of a brick storefront he rented in a strip mall just outside of town. It had a Cut-Rate Vacuum on one side and on the…
Nocturama
“I don’t see why you’re so upset,” she said, tapping the ash from her cigarette. They were sitting outside on the back porch. It was August, still warm in the…
Fast Times at San Guo High: a Visit to Erica Friedman of Yuricon
There’s a high probability you have seen Guan Yu, the hero from the classic Chinese novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms in a Chinese restaurant, on a shelf over…
Fast Times at San Guo High: a Visit to Erica Friedman of Yuricon Read More »
Rainshadow
I was never one of those people who hates the rain. Some people—most, I suppose—see the gray clouds rolling in like fluffy waves and feel the first few drops tap…
Who Put the Coke in Coca-Cola?
Coke is it: the best-known commercial product in human history. Uh huh! It’s the real thing. And – for the first 15 years of its life – it contained the…
Silent Josefa
I was just a kid from Saragossa, in Aragon. Christian Spain at its most honest and authentic. Bad soil, tough meat, sour wine, sparse firewood . . .