The Urbanite #6 Strange Fascinations
surreal & lively & bizarre
$5 from
Editor Mark McLaughlin
Urban Legend Press
P.O. Box 4737
Davenport, Iowa 52808

This is one magazine that really lives up to its subhead. McLaughlin mixes up everything from weird surrealism to humorous fantasy to bizarre horror. It's all quite lively and almost unanimously enjoyable. This issue is really a "seven deadly sins" issue, and the contents breaks the stories down accordingly. Poppy Z. Brite opens things with "His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood," a dirty little tale of extreme sexual exploration that ranges from orgies to homosexuality to necrophiliac perversions. This, appropriately, fills the Lust category. It's a story not for the squeamish, but the grueishly inclined will love it. P.D. Cacek also offers an entry in the Lust category, in a completely opposite vein. One of my favorite stories of the issue, "Seat of Inspiration" unveils the hysterical secret behind a romance writer's inspiration. Rounding out that category and displaying yet another type of fiction, Terri Willits' "S.O.S." explores the desire of a model to be made famous by posing for an up-and-coming artist, and her disappointment in that artist's choice of rendering. This is really straight fiction with a slight twist that could have appeared in any number of literary magazines; it's not horror or surreal genre fiction at all. But it's worth reading.

M.R. Scofidio, a Deathrealm staffer, provides a splintered, bit of mental horror fiction in "In the Bleak Mid-Winter, Long Ago," that throws together genetic mental illness with a child's Anger (sin #2) at her parents impending divorce. A good twist on this one, if told in an annoyingly splintered narrative style. Jeffrey Thomas' "A Woman's Scream" is the sort of understated horror we see too little of in these days of graphic serial killer fare. It opens with a lonely male narrator being awakened by a phone call. All he hears is a woman's scream. As he tries to figure out who it could have been, calling several of the possibilities, we discover a variety of dysfunctional relationships he (and all of us) has knowledge of, as well as experiencing his anger that so many violent males can find mates, but he, a mild-mannered, unthreatening guy, can't get a date. This is a deft bit of social commentary, horrible in its realism.

For the sin of Pride, Diana Kolpak offers a version of the Rumpelstiltskin story in "Bedtime Story." Gluttony is covered by featured poet Rhonda Eikamp, while Avarice turns up in a surreal tale of "The Numismatist" by Charles M. Saplak. The title character gets caught up in the strange punishment of a World War II looter, who must try to sell a coin for "its absolute value." Hugh B. Cave offers an SF-horror piece covering the same theme in "Forever is a Long Long Time," which traces the steps of a man who poisoned and killed an entire town via his industrial waste disposal, and gets his just desserts when he can't leave the town die with his next money-making scheme.

Scott Thomas turns up with "Lightning Bugs," a tale of Envy and jealousy. When a lucky husband allows his jealousy to be stoked by a conniving workmate, he ends up not-so-lucky. You can see this ending coming a mile away, but it will still make you cringe and scream "no, c'mon. Don't do it!"

There are a bunch of other tales that fit into "wants" and "needs" categories, many of which are surreal in tone. The best of these is Greg Bartholomew's "To Marry Peters," a weird shotgun wedding scenario for two gay men, and Thomas Wiloch's "My Father's Business," a short vignette about a man who makes very specialized artificial limbs.

The Urbanite 6 is one of the best collections of varied horror and surreal fiction that I've read this year. Check it out.

Copyright © 1996 by John Everson. All Rights Reserved.