“And so, faithful readers, read on if you dare and see what horror lurks within our pages.” So ends the little “Welcome” on page 3 of this issue of imelod (page 1 is the front cover, which makes me love these people who make this magazine, who in their right mind makes the front cover page 1? it’s just too good to be true). There’s nothing all that horrible in here, except for a couple of the poems, which are pretty damn horrible. Otherwise, there’s some great stuff — it just isn’t what I would classify as horror. Before I get to the good stuff, though, let me just say that this issue provides a great example of why it isn’t a good idea for the editors of a magazine to put their own stuff in their magazine. The weakest stuff in here is by imelod editors McGowan and Fischer. The worst part is, they put their own stuff right up front, which will discourage readers from carrying on to the better stuff further along. What you get in the best stuff here are little moments that verge on meaningful, but don’t quite get there. There’s always a little something missing, some piece of the picture not given, which is what keeps you reading, and the writing is good enough that you don’t feel pissed off at the end that you kept reading to see what happens (although you never see what happens, mostly). The weakest version of this read-on-if-you-want to-find-out-what-happens melange of stuff is editor Fischer’s story which quite literally leaves you hanging with a “Con’t next issue!” (I don’t think “con’t” is the British version of “can’t” — I think he means “continued”). A much more interesting investigation of this genre comes in D. Ian Rogers “Blue Night and C Flat” where just about every paragraph raises questions that never get answered. And definitely the most subtle incarnation occurs in “Shadow” by Laura Klaehn, the story of a woman who becomes enamoured of the man she is shadowing, but never finds out why the people who hired her to shadow him wanted him shadowed. Following orders, she kills him at the end, and stops just long enough to touch his dead face before disappearing into the ether.
litzine / 23 pages / Main Creators: M.E. McGowan, Todd H.C. Fischer (editors) / $2 / 401 Maplewood Dr., Oshawa, ON, L1G 5R7, email: [email protected]