Tuesday 6 November 2018

Supernatural Tales 37

David Longhorn (editor)
Supernatural Tales

I've been thoroughly enjoying these quarterly magazines from the Supernatural Tales blog.  They give me a semi regular fix of a Mark Valentine story and have introduced me to a couple of other interesting writers.

I have to say though I was less enamoured of this issue than I usually am.  Mark is here and his 'The Forwarding Agent' is another delicately twisted exploration of odd hobbies and fractured reality but the other stories just didn't really do all that much for me.

C.M. Muller's 'Slattergreen' was an initially intriguing tale of loss and transformation that came to a far too sudden and jarring end that left me wondering what the point was. A feeling magnified tenfold in Jeremy Schlieve's 'Children's Castles'.

'Silver' by Helen Grant was a nicely written werewolf tale that seemed to have been inspired by the author's discovery of an interesting piece of trivia regarding glass-making rather than by the story itself and so I came out of it thinking more about the factoid and the construction of the story than the story itself.

With the exception of a couple of reviews by the editor the book closes with Chloe N Clark's 'Leopard Seals' a really intriguing story wrapped in some padding about a dream. The central idea I thought really promising but the dream stuff just seemed like filler.

A slightly frustrating read this time out but not entirely a bad one although I really could have done without the one about the castle.

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