Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Lovecraft EZine, Rachel Swirsky, and More

 There;s some good Lovecraftian horror, a pair of Rachel Swirsky stories, and more great free fiction.











Fiction
• At Apex Magazine: "If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love" by Rachel Swirsky.
     "If you were a dinosaur, my love, then you would be a T-Rex. You’d be a small one, only five feet, ten inches, the same height as human-you. You’d be fragile-boned and you’d walk with as delicate and polite a gait as you could manage on massive talons. Your eyes would gaze gently from beneath your bony brow-ridge."

• At Lightspeed: "Biographical Fragments of the Life of Julian Prince" by Jake Kerr. Science Fiction.
     "Julian Samuel Prince (March 18, 1989 – August 20, 2057) was an American novelist, essayist, journalist, and political activist. His best works are widely considered to be the post-Impact novels The Grey Sunset (2027) and Rhythms of Decline (2029), both of which won the Pulitzer Prize. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2031."

• At Lightspeed: "Lily Red" by Karen Joy Fowler. Fantasy.
       "One day Lily decided to be someone else. Someone with a past. It was an affliction of hers, wanting this. The desire was seldom triggered by any actual incident or complaint but seemed instead to be related to the act or prospect of lateral movement. She felt it every time a train passed."

• At Nightmare Magazine: "The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins" by Molly Tanzer. Horror.
        "Concerning the life and death of St. John Fitzroy, Lord Calipash—the suffering of the Lady

 • At Paizo: "Bastard, Sword - Chapter One: Ill Met by Torchlight" by Tim Pratt. Fantasy.
    "Rodrick—pragmatist, opportunist, and occasional outright thief—groaned and tried to sit up, but only managed to half-lean against the wall of a lightless cavern. His head had felt like this many times before, but usually only after a night of drinking and wenching. His memories of the prior hours were fuzzy, but they didn't involve taverns and winsome (or buxom, or both; he wasn't picky) maids."

• At Tor.com: "Terrain" by Genevieve Valentine. Western. Steampunk
     "The trains carved into land that wasn’t theirs, and swallowed the men who laid their iron roads—the tracks like threads to draw white men closer together—monsters belching smoke across a land they meant to conquer."

Now Posted: Lovecraft EZine #22.
"The Dance" by Robin Spriggs.
     "The Passage of Comings and Goings is unknown to all but him, who knows it all too well. Up and down it he has gone for aeons beyond counting. Up and down, up and down, up and down, down, down, every day downer than the down the day before."
"Maybe the Stars" by Samantha Henderson
     "Sometimes she had a flash of memory where she was somewhere quite different, where the light wasn’t a blinding glare off choppy water, where the ground was still under her feet and there wasn’t the constant hum of engines and smell of salt water"
"The Pyramid Spider" by Simon Kurt Unsworth.
     "Well, it’s as bad here as you said it might be. This place reminds me a little of what you said about Mexico – it’s very colourful and not a little desperate; you’d hate it. The poverty’s fairly extreme, and it’d offend your delicate socialist sensibilities"
"Powers of Air and Darkness" by Don Webb
     "The Balmoral flew around the world every two weeks. Paris, Chicago, Victoria, Tokyo, Peking, Moscow, Paris. A heady mix for a young man from Overland Park. Ernest had spent time in each of these cities. He had hoped for love and for adventure. Only at the very end did he receive the latter."
"Verbapeutic" by Joe Nazare
      "As if the situation weren’t frustrating enough, Serena couldn’t even text Nicole to find out if she was stuck in traffic or had just flaked out on her. The manicurist didn’t believe in cell phones, refusing to expose herself to the 'harmful aura.'"
"The Masked Messenger" by David Conyers & John Goodrich
     "Harrison Peel counted the dead as more covered corpses rolled into the Marrakech morgue. They weren’t really humans, rather the dissected remains of their flesh, bloody in leaking body bags. The sharp, coppery smell of blood filled the room, reminding Peel of an abattoir."
Audio Fiction
• At Lightspeed: "Lily Red" by Karen Joy Fowler. Fantasy.
       Described above

• At Nightmare Magazine: "The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins" by Molly Tanzer. Horror.
        Described above
 
• At StarShipSofa: “A Taste of Promise” by Rachel Swirsky.
      No description found

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