Terminal Fright #11 (Spring 1996)
Editor/Publisher Ken Abner
$5 fromTerminal Fright Publications,
P.O. Box 100, Black River, NY 13612-0100

I've been a fan of TF since issue #1, and judging from the number of stories from the first 10 issues that received Honorable Mentions in the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror collection (18!) I'm not alone. So it is not lightly that I say that this issue is one of TF's best ever.

It leads off with a dark fantasy/horror piece by Transversions editor Dale L. Sproule called "Razorwings" Sproule brings to life a wonderfully twisted world of body-stealing Barrow Imps. Gallowrat, an imp who procrastinates about bringing back the body of his stolen human host to the Barrow King manages to escape a sudden and sustained massacre of his fellow imps by a razorwinged female. Why? Well that's the fun catch of the story. Donald R. Burleson turns "Hopscotch" into a deadly game of risk with a creature from "elsewhere" and Charles M. Saplak's "The Crux" puts a faithless priest on a new road of belief and restitution.

Ken Goldman offers a class in "Poe 103" wherein the studied would like to replace the studier. Terry McGarry's "Taibhse" unsettles the ghosts of the suicides and murders who have been dredged up from a river's silt which was used as ground filler. And Bill Scheinman's "Remember For Me, My Sweet" takes the magician's assistant bit to a weirdly horrific plateau when an "expelled" researcher uses his invention (a device which allows the cells of the body to remember and mirror--like a TV-- the events of the past) for a sideshow act. Of course, things go frighteningly wrong with the magician's assistant... There's also a tale of possession by A.M. Dellamonica and a surreal mix of horror, incest and redemption in "The Jaded Rose" by Gene KoKayKo & Craig Strickland.

Editor Ken Abner has put together a mix of stories for this issue rich in twisted imagination. Don't miss it!

--John Everson

Copyright © 1996 by John Everson. All Rights Reserved.