Magazines Read: Subterranean #7
Sep. 21st, 2007 01:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yendiAs I noted in my last post, I'm a sucker for free stuff. So when ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ellen_datlow offered the first five commenters free copies of her guest-edited issue of Subterranean magazine in exchange for a promise to review it, I jumped at the chance.
Like most magazines, it's inconsistent. Let's start at the bottom and work our way up:
The only genuinely bad story here is Terry Bisson's laughably terrible "Pirates of the Somali Coast," which trangresses too much to tell a good story, while not transgressing enough to be transgressive. It also shows an almost complete ignorance of how email works, how teenagers work, and how teens use email. Combine that with mediocre, cliched writing (enough to make a violence and gore-filled tale boring), and you've got the weak link in the chain. Fortunately, it's also the fastest read of the bunch.
That's the only true lemon of the bunch. The next two, while sub-par for the magazine (or for a Datlow anthology), are still perfectly readable.
Joel Lane and John Pelan's "City of Night" wants so badly to be a Michael Marshall Smith story (back when MMS was writing those stories, at least). Alas, this story of a man inadvertently pulled into a dreaming world is not written by Smith, and Pelan, I'm convinced, is a much better editor than writer. Nothing awful here, and there are some nice turns of phrase, but for the most part, you've read this story before.
Lisa Tuttle's "Old Mr. Boudreaux," doesn't break any new ground, either. But Tuttle is a much better writer than Bisson (at least based on these examples) Pelan, or Lane, and manages to meet the ungodly challenge she sets for herself (finding magic in Houston). Unfortunately, the story ends where it should begin, with the narrator finally realizing that there's magic in the world, etc. It's something we've seen a million times before, and I need something more before I can call it much of a real story.
The rest of the magazine is all good:
Anna Tambour's "The Jeweller of Second-Hand Roe*" is a genuinely nifty tale about family and business politics surrounding a second-hand food merchant. Really.
"The King of the Big Night Hours," by Richard Bowes, didn't blow me away like his Minions of the Moon did, but the story takes a nice stylistic shift from both that novel and the Time Rangers stories, telling a tale of suicides, nostalgia, and libraries. It's subtlety haunting, never forcing too much on the reader, simply letting the reader be drawn in on his or her own.
"Under the Bottom of the Lake" is by Jeffrey Ford is, well, a Jeffrey Ford short story. I love the narrative voice Ford uses in this one, approaching the tale as an author discovering his own characters, not always certain if he's commanding them, or if they're off doing stuff without his permission. It's a gimmick that will only work once or twice, but it's nicely done here. Ford's story tells a tale of two teens exploring a crypt, and somehow manages to meander without ever losing focus. I expect to see it in at least one of the eight-seven "Year's Best" anthologies next year.
On the other hand, Datlow has already stated that she's using M. Rickert's Holiday in her "Year's Best Horror," and it certainly deserves to be there (Ford's tale, for all the dark elements, probably belongs in a fantasy anthology). Ricket's story, dealing with a writer visited by the ghost of a child beauty queen (never actually referred to as JonBenet in the story), is haunting and powerful, with an interesting narrator.
Not surprisingly, the best of the lot is Lucius Shepard's "Vacancy." This novella deals with a retired C-movie actor working as a used-car salesman, and the past that comes back to haunt him. It's fast-paced, brilliantly written, and worth the price of the magazine by itself. Which you probably suspected from seeing the words "Lucius Shepard." Datlow mentions in the intro that Shepard stepped in when someone else failed to meet a deadline. That unnamed person is an accidental hero.
Overall, Subterranean #7 has more than enough good stuff (especially when compared to the good/suck ratio in some other magazines), and is definitely worth reading.
*I'm writing this from work, and my copy of the magazine is at home, so I'm assuming that the misspelling in the title, quoted from the Sub Press web page, is accurate.
ellen_datlow offered the first five commenters free copies of her guest-edited issue of Subterranean magazine in exchange for a promise to review it, I jumped at the chance.Like most magazines, it's inconsistent. Let's start at the bottom and work our way up:
The only genuinely bad story here is Terry Bisson's laughably terrible "Pirates of the Somali Coast," which trangresses too much to tell a good story, while not transgressing enough to be transgressive. It also shows an almost complete ignorance of how email works, how teenagers work, and how teens use email. Combine that with mediocre, cliched writing (enough to make a violence and gore-filled tale boring), and you've got the weak link in the chain. Fortunately, it's also the fastest read of the bunch.
That's the only true lemon of the bunch. The next two, while sub-par for the magazine (or for a Datlow anthology), are still perfectly readable.
Joel Lane and John Pelan's "City of Night" wants so badly to be a Michael Marshall Smith story (back when MMS was writing those stories, at least). Alas, this story of a man inadvertently pulled into a dreaming world is not written by Smith, and Pelan, I'm convinced, is a much better editor than writer. Nothing awful here, and there are some nice turns of phrase, but for the most part, you've read this story before.
Lisa Tuttle's "Old Mr. Boudreaux," doesn't break any new ground, either. But Tuttle is a much better writer than Bisson (at least based on these examples) Pelan, or Lane, and manages to meet the ungodly challenge she sets for herself (finding magic in Houston). Unfortunately, the story ends where it should begin, with the narrator finally realizing that there's magic in the world, etc. It's something we've seen a million times before, and I need something more before I can call it much of a real story.
The rest of the magazine is all good:
Anna Tambour's "The Jeweller of Second-Hand Roe*" is a genuinely nifty tale about family and business politics surrounding a second-hand food merchant. Really.
"The King of the Big Night Hours," by Richard Bowes, didn't blow me away like his Minions of the Moon did, but the story takes a nice stylistic shift from both that novel and the Time Rangers stories, telling a tale of suicides, nostalgia, and libraries. It's subtlety haunting, never forcing too much on the reader, simply letting the reader be drawn in on his or her own.
"Under the Bottom of the Lake" is by Jeffrey Ford is, well, a Jeffrey Ford short story. I love the narrative voice Ford uses in this one, approaching the tale as an author discovering his own characters, not always certain if he's commanding them, or if they're off doing stuff without his permission. It's a gimmick that will only work once or twice, but it's nicely done here. Ford's story tells a tale of two teens exploring a crypt, and somehow manages to meander without ever losing focus. I expect to see it in at least one of the eight-seven "Year's Best" anthologies next year.
On the other hand, Datlow has already stated that she's using M. Rickert's Holiday in her "Year's Best Horror," and it certainly deserves to be there (Ford's tale, for all the dark elements, probably belongs in a fantasy anthology). Ricket's story, dealing with a writer visited by the ghost of a child beauty queen (never actually referred to as JonBenet in the story), is haunting and powerful, with an interesting narrator.
Not surprisingly, the best of the lot is Lucius Shepard's "Vacancy." This novella deals with a retired C-movie actor working as a used-car salesman, and the past that comes back to haunt him. It's fast-paced, brilliantly written, and worth the price of the magazine by itself. Which you probably suspected from seeing the words "Lucius Shepard." Datlow mentions in the intro that Shepard stepped in when someone else failed to meet a deadline. That unnamed person is an accidental hero.
Overall, Subterranean #7 has more than enough good stuff (especially when compared to the good/suck ratio in some other magazines), and is definitely worth reading.
*I'm writing this from work, and my copy of the magazine is at home, so I'm assuming that the misspelling in the title, quoted from the Sub Press web page, is accurate.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-21 06:08 pm (UTC)it's absolutely fantastic.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-21 08:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-21 08:30 pm (UTC)