The Silver Web #12
A Magazine of the Surreal
($4.95 from Buzzcity Press, P.O. Box 38190, Tallahassee, FL 32315)

The Web has been hit and miss with me since they went from a straight horror format to "surreal." Too often surreal fiction includes fine snippets of writing that, when strung together by surrealism, read like pretentious literary drivel, or, simply leave the reader saying "yeah, so what?" (one of my pet peeves in short fiction). The latest issue of The Web, I'm happy to report, staggers into the latter category less often than previous "surreal" issues, though I found Alan M. Clark's and Peteso's "Antag/Protag" completely incomprehensible.

Jeffrey Thomas leads off the issue with one of its best tales -- a cloning story gone mad in "The Reflections of Ghosts." Thomas proves a master of setting and mood as he sets up a future where clones can be grown -- and altered -- as easily as a work of art. The story centers on how a nearly vegetative female clone of clone "artist" teaches him the horror of his career. It's a completely bizarre and emotionally touching piece. The most successful story in this issue was Alan Casey's "The Bee Keepers." Truly a joy to read, Casey's story moves from a standard urban scene to a weird world of bees. Amber Rose (a very deliberate name) trips while jogging and takes a queen bee into her mouth as she falls. Upon dislodging the insect, she hurries home, but the queen trails her back to her apartment that night with an army behind her, and forces her way back down Amber's throat. Amber can't get rid of the bees in her belly, and goes into a kind of trance while all her hair falls out: "It was while examining the seamless robe her flesh had become that she first noticed the geometrical patterning taking shape just above her bald pubis...within a couple of hours they were visible, the hexagonal growths forming a supple honeycomb that spread to all portions of her body." The beautiful and unexpected denouement of this story is worth buying the issue for all on its own. This is a story you'll remember for months, not merely hours after reading.

Ian Compton's "Absolutely Normal" is, of course, nothing like normal -- it's a strange but sometimes poetic and amusing piece about the collapse of the world. The lead character (never named) tells of his father, an actor/taxidermist and mother, a snake-charming accountant. As the world outside becomes a mess of race riots and flesh-eating bacteria, the parents continued to delve deeper into their hobbies. But eventually "mom finally resurrected grandpa" and the father stuffs him. It ends with a good twist and a dose of toxin.

Other stories include a tale of the screwed up psyches of hitchikers, a short-short about a museum that charges people so they DON'T have to view its contents, a story about a writer bouncing back and forth from reality to her creations. There's a good twist of the surreal in R.L. Rummel's "Pieces of the Moon," a tale of a train -- and the man who finds that salvation exists in the toenail clippings of a passenger. If you like your fiction to have weird twists -- sometimes incomprehensible but intriquing ones -- check out this issue of The Web. If you insist on your fiction having strong beginnings and ends, not to mention characters with names, circumvent.

--John Everson

Copyright © 1996 by John Everson. All Rights Reserved.