Supernatural Tales 45

David Longhorn (ed)
Supernatural Tales

Now this is a rarity, I'm actually up to date with issues of Supernatural Tales thanks mostly to wanting to catch up on all my unread zines, chapbooks and the like over this second lockdown.  Happily this one was the best issue in a while helped in no small part by stories by three authors I really like.

Carrie Vacaro Nelkin gets things off to a strong start with 'Stricken' a fun little story about the monster under the bed before the very excellent Charles Wilkinson gives a characteristically strange story about starlings and music in 'The Harmony of the Stares'.  This is followed by Rosalie Parker's 'The Decision' which is written with her customary eye for the odd and the unsettling but I must admit to being a tad confused by the ending.

Mark Valentine is on fine form here taking a turn as a football pundit and if only all match reports were like this then maybe I'd read the back pages of the newspaper.  I wasn't particularly taken with Malcolm Laughton's story which melded 'Kidnapped' with a rose tinted slavery subplot and a vengeful spirit.

I liked William Curnow's 'The Round-About' which came across like a sentimental Aickman and Iain Rowan's 'The Wildness' was a brief but interesting tale of madness before the book ends with Tim Foley's rather obvious ghost story.

Like all compilations Supernatural tales can often be a little patchy but it's always worth a read as there's usually a good story or two or three or, like here, six.

Buy it at the link above.

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Supernatural Tales 36

David Longhorn (ed)
suptales.blogspot.com

I'm a bit late to this one as I completely forgot about it until I got a mailout mentioning #37 so I grabbed both and I'm very glad I did.  7 stories and a couple of reviews for a couple of quid makes this a very good investment of both time and money.

Opening the book is scriptwriter and novelist Paul Lewis who I had come across a few years back through his contribution to a pretty good Doctor Who book.  His story here 'The Templar Cup' is a fairly old fashioned tale of familial obligations of the supernatural kind and the penalties for breaking with those obligations.  As said it's quite old school and if you've read much Edwardian / Victorian supernatural fiction  then you've read a story or three very much like this one but it's still an enjoyable take on the trope.

Tom Johnstone's 'The Chiromancer' is a gratifyingly frightful tale told over drinks in the great tradition of these things and concerns forgery, guilt, family and fortune. Again it has the feel of the classics about it and again that's no bad thing.

Distinctly less satisfying is 'Sacred Ground' by Nancy Cole Silverman which left me cold with it's ugly little tale of greed and retribution via the co-opting of Native American lore and it all feels a bit 80s horror movie level tacky.

'In The Rigging' by Jane Jakeman gives us a teeny tale of a teeny boat with a gruesome cargo before Gary Fry tidies things up with his fun new riff on the ghostly tale featuring a spectral butler in 'The Tidier'.

In the previous issue there was part one of Michael Chislett's ' The Subliminals' which I skipped at the time but having now read both parts it's an oddly underwritten piece.  It feels like we've been dropped into a much longer and heavily edited piece that suddenly crashes to a deeply unsatisfying ending.

With the exception of a couple of reviews from the editor the book ends with a quick weird take from Malcolm Laughton in 'Long-Haired and Sickly Beautiful' that tells a story of an intersection between the ordinary and the extraordinary worlds.

Anthologies are almost always patchy affairs and this was so but happily very much weighted to the good and as such very recommended.

Supernatural Tales is available from the blog address at the top of this review.

Supernatural Tales 35

David Longhorn (editor)

I've been planning to pick up a copy of Supernatural Tales for a while now but things kept getting in the way and I'd forget about it.  This time when I got a mailout from Mark Valentine detailing his very intriguing contribution I straight way grabbed myself a copy.  Turns out it was worth every penny and I really should have started buying these sooner.

The magazine consists of 6 and half (possibly) stories and a couple of reviews.  The latter are of a book, a film and a comic, none of which I'm familiar with although the comic is an adaptation of Arthur Machen's superlative 'The White People'.  If you've read Longhorn's blog - http://suptales.blogspot.co.uk/ - then you'll know his reviewing style is eminently readable and he makes all three sound very enticing.

The first of the stories, 'Absolute Possession' by Charles Wilkinson is a hugely intriguing but ultimately frustrating prospect that sets up a mystery only to suddenly bring the whole thing to a crashing halt.  I really wanted this to be much longer to give Wilkinson the opportunity to develop and tease out and fully realise the really interesting premise.  Indeed, I was so taken by Wilkinson's writing that I tracked down a copy of his collection published by Egaeus Press.

Mark Valentine (photo by R.B. Russell)

Mark Valentine's story, 'The Scarlet Door' did everything his mailout promised it would with a story of the unexpected perils of book collecting. Andrew Alford's 'A Russian Nesting Demon' struck me as a very glib story about body dysmorphia and I skipped past Micheal Chislett's, 'The Subliminals' as it was part 1 of a story to be continued in the next issue when, if it concludes there, I'll read both parts together - it's also the reason for that 'possibly' you may have noticed back there.

Matt Joiner's paean to the buildings of our past and the remnants of their existence that inhabits our memories takes literal form in his 'The Utter Dust' which set me to quietly remembering those places that meant much but are now lost in all but memory.

John Howard is an author we've encountered here at Wyrd Britain before on a number of occasions and have always been delighted to do so.  His contribution 'The House at Twilight' also deals with place, memory and loss in a bittersweet tale of love broken, lives parted and the brutality of loneliness.

The beauty and the power of Howard's story does no favours to Helen Grant as her story of Midas' curse and the greed of selfish venal men seems rather empty after it.  A re-read a few days later helped me enjoy it more as a fun tale but I think it needed to be otherwise positioned in the magazine as anything would have struggled in the emotional backwash of Howard's piece.

As I said at that top of this I've long been meaning to dip a toe into S.T. and it seems I chose the most opportune moment as for the most part this was a very fine collection that I heartily recommend.

Buy it here - http://suptales.blogspot.co.uk/p/buy-supernatural-tales.html