002: Spain, Subscriptions, & Saurophaster
STP Issue #11 is out!
Hola ghasts and ghouls. I (Jonny) have just got back from a week in sunny Seville, Spain and am juiced to get STP #11 into your hands. The cover for this one is in the running for best STP cover of all time for me; artist sarcoma and designer JR Bolt teaming up for another knock out.
The stuff inside is cracking too.
“Blue Movies” by Ian Kappos is a reality-warping weird…horror(?) set amidst a state of opioid dependency and an addiction to semi-cursed media. I don’t know what genre bucket to throw this one in to be honest but it untethered me when I read it and I hope it fucks you up too.
“Waystations Lost” by Andrew Kozma. Described by Andrew himself as channelling Jeff VanderMeer and, while doing something different, instilling that same sense of ‘knife’s-edge-on the edge of oblivion’ vibe. Andrew is an STP second timer, and if you haven’t read his biblically horrific angelic cosmic horror noir “Claimed for a Higher Purpose in the True Glory of the Universe for Our Lord”, get on that. It’s very Roadside Picnic-esque in its centering of a normal guy trying to eke out a weird living in a world that’s been irrevocably changed beyond recognition, because in that world people still have to scrabble together the money for rent.
“A History of the Avodion Through Five Artists” by Eric Horwitz, described by Kyle Marquis as having ‘weird alt-history alt-science vibes, unsettling in that cool and sophisticated way that good sci-fi describes wonders and horrors at the edge of comprehension’.
“These Are His Memories” by another returning author, Joe Koch, who first sullied the pages of Issue #1 with the surreal, nightmarish, apian fever dream “Eating Bees From The Ass Of God”. In this one we go on a disturbing night time drive to nowhere for reasons you’d rather not contemplate but will be forced to.
The fiction for this issue is rounded off by “This Movie Theater Sits on a Leyline” by a third STP second-timer Maxine Sophia Wolff, a deranged workplace horror in which we’re introduced to the worst cinema you ever visited. As a Brit, I’d never heard of Buncha Crunch, and now I never want to hear of it again. You can also read Maxine’s dark sci-fi “You Forever” from Issue #7
Non-fiction in this issue includes a genuinely wonderful interview with The Devourers and The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar author Indra Das; an article on how censorship affected the work of master of Italian horror film Dario Argento by Vivana De Cecco; guest reviewer Jake Casella Brookins of Ancillary Review of Books fame gives us his take on Seth Dickinson’s sci-fi novel Exordia; and resident opinion haver Zachary Gillan reviews H. Pueyo’s dual language collection A Study in Ugliness & Outras Historias and Thomas Kendall’s destabalising postcyberpunk noir How I Killed the Universal Man.
A heartfelt word on subscriptions
I very rarely devote any actual space to this cos I’m notoriously terrible at plugging our Patreon, and if you feel the urge to skip this part I don’t blame you, but I just wanted to take a moment to say that if you enjoy Seize The Press Magazine and want to see it continue, please seriously do consider giving us your money. Likely you hear shit like this all the time; magazines and small presses exist on a financial knife edge and there’s always this or that Kickstarter running, mags are always asking for your support, directing you to a Ko-Fi page you can give to or whatever, and we’re not qualitatively any different really. Except that you’re interested enough in us and care enough about us specifically that you clicked on or subscribed to a newsletter, so I assume if you’re reading this you’re at least on the margins of enjoying the specific kind of stories and non-fiction we put out into the world. And it’s 100% the case that without people subscribing we literally just would not exist. We need money to pay the people who write the stories, essays, and reviews we publish; to pay the artists and cover designer; and also the boring shit that goes on in the background like website hosting and other assorted publishing costs. The independent short fiction magazine scene is honestly a big old mess and places are going under and cutting back left, right, and centre. It’s not something we’re in any imminent danger of, so don’t worry, but having subscribers means we’re gonna be more stable and don’t have to live in fear of being another cautionary tale of a short fiction magazine going down the toilet.
I’m told these things need to end with a ‘call to action’, so I’m calling on you to go and subscribe to the mag here. Thanks to all of you who ensure we can exist.
This month’s short story recommendation comes from Rebecca Summerling and it’s the mind-shattering “Saurophaster in Oculus” by J F Gleeson, published in ergot.
Cosmic horror is about scale. The universe is too big to comprehend, rendering our tiny lives utterly insignificant. It’s enough to drive us to madness. We are just a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam, as Carl Sagan said. Yet Saurophaster in Oculus is a tale of cosmic horror in miniscule.
The story opens with Philip Karras, who is unable to make eye contact with other humans, because he believes that doing so will cause others harm. He seeks medical help and thus triggers a series of events that reveal to us that Saurophaster, the bug star, is lodged in his eye and Philip is the host. Should his vision overlap with another, terrible things will, and do, happen.
Gleeson employs several different modes of storytelling, shifting point of view in a way that feels purposefully distancing. Much of the horror in this story happens off the page, leaving us just as unsettled as if it had been described. I love when fiction leaves a void between the reader and the story. Terrible things happen in that void and we only get a glimpse of them. A brief glance up at the catastrophic.
The last section of the story centres on Amanda, a scientist we are introduced to earlier when she provides some vital information about Karras’s case with her own experience with another patient. Her knowledge of Saurophaster weighs on her, it is a punishment in itself and she is left waiting her own destruction. Gleeson’s prose is laced with a dread-inducing beauty as the story draws to a close;
“...the graced rolling of oneself over leaves of evening amid pinked stars tiny and immolating, fleas and flakes and paper bags and suns obsessing, and gardens and cemeteries in a place of promontories unreasonable…”
The universe is cold, remote and what waits out there is all-consuming.
That’s all for now; adiós morboses.
Jonny & Karlo