Talebones
Fiction on the Dark Edge
Issue #4 Summer 1996
60 pages/$4.50 from 10531 SE 250th Pl. #104
Kent, WA 98031
Publisher/Co-Editor Patrick J. Swenson

This small press digest seems determined to get better with each issue (justifying its recent Best New Magazine award from the Genre Writers Association.)

This issue's cover features a striking, haunting black and white illustration overlaid with purple and white text. It's as sharp as the fiction within. Don D'Ammassa opens things with "Translation Station" a mystical-leaning hyperspace adventure about death and "translation." James S. Dorr offers a darkly humorous bit of siren-SF in "Kites," which finds a crashed spacer being nursed back to health by a mother and her just-ripe daughter. What are the kites for, you ask? The spacer should have asked that question, too.

The best piece in the issue has to be Beverly Heinze's "Mystic Mandrake." Talk about your weird worlds: this one postulates a future earth which has been struck by an asteroid, apparently snuffing out most of society. Our heroine is a nun named Beatrice, who lives with a convent of horticulturist sisters, just down the street from the scientific brothers who call the old observatory home. The story details the "flowering" relationship between Beatrice and an apparently intelligent "great lavendar tuber" which has a strong interest in making people feel good. The morning after she allows the creature to lay beside her in bed, she awakes to exclaim "My goodness...A cold shower seems to be in order." Of course, the other plants in the greenhouse get jealous, and the brothers up the road have an interest and...oh heck, buy the magazine!

Nina Kiriki Hoffman turns in an offbeat tale of "Cookies with a Killer." As usual for Hoffman, this piece revolves around a teen who has had family problems (in this case, her mother is a classic case for DCFS and her step-father wants to sleep with her). She discovers that the neighbor down the block appears to be killing women late at night in his house. Often. So naturally, she gets close to the killer...the story ends on a chillingly ambiguous note uncharacteristic of Hoffman's usual lightness.

Ken Rand's "With Forked Tongue" kept me hooked right up to a flat cliched ending. It's got great dialogue throughout, as a presidential candidate's PR man picks up a hitchhiking Indian who, in amusingly circular fashion, offers that one of the candidates truly has a forked tongue (thanks to an old Indian curse). If the ending had packed the punch the author was driving for, this would have been a great read. As it is, the reader isn't given any reason to fear the outcome which scares the PR guy to completely alter his life.

Bruce Taylor closes out the issue with "Spiders," an amusing bit of surreal psychotherapy. There are also the usual surfing the web and book review columns by J.C. and Barb Hendee, respectively, editor Patrick J. Swenson's SF music column, and more.

Copyright © 1996 by John Everson. All Rights Reserved.