Eulogy #10
Adventure in the New World
$4.95 from
Editor Tim Libby
2130 Brown Street
Napa, CA 94559

After an unannounced several-month hiatus, Eulogy has returned -- and the editor writes within these pages that a new format is in the works for upcoming issues. Hopefully, the revised Eulogy will be as good as the old: this full-sized 48-page magazine (with 2-color cover) has long been one of the most enjoyable, unsung small press horror publications. Libby prefers horror with black humor and irreverence to it, and that attitude permeates the magazine, from its continuing Cemetery Plans pictorial feature on cemeteries around the country by Frank Calidonna to its Films A Go-Go video column with Jane Doe which, this issue, looks at "Freaks on Film."

As for fiction, this issue comes off weaker than usual: Sidney Williams starts it off with "The Cherry Meadow Massacre," a "we got lost in the woods and stumbled on a strange bloody cult" story. The one weds Biblical intolerance with a group of genetically twisted inbreds for a fun freak ride in the country.

John B. Rosenman, who often provides small press magazines with their top stories, checks in with "Light of Distant Days," another "ancient Indian ghosts come back from beyond to wreak havoc" story that, unfortunately, does nothing to rise above the cliched theme. D. Niall Wilson offers a vignette about scientists who use all-but-dead human bodies to check theories about nuclear radiation. This time, they're using a coma victim, which makes some of the researchers uncomfortable as the computer controls force the victim's muscles to march into the heart of a radiation blast toward sure incineration. Why they need to watch human vegetables be incinerated as research is never explained, and the fact that the coma victim is going to have some last blast of conscious life is telegraphed at the outset.

The one truly good story in this issue comes at the end. The ever-challenging Charlee Jacob paints a gruesome surrealistic tale of "R.T.M." (rapid tongue movement.) The story follows Daniel, the peeping Tom neighbor of a beautiful amputee who he calls Venus. She'd lost her legs in an auto accident, and Daniel has increasingly vile fantasies about moving his tongue along her recently sewn-up stumps. He alternates between binocular-aided masturbation, and nightly fantasies wherein his tongue actually leaves his body to suckle his tranquilized neighbor. As it turns out, they're not exactly fantasies...

Jacob's story and Eulogy's always fascinating non-fiction make up for the other unusually weak fiction in this issue. Hopefully Libby's announced reformat will not only return the magazine to its usual high quality fiction and then some.

Copyright © 1996 by John Everson. All Rights Reserved.