December 'Zines — Lions In The Fog

The Dark, Issue 91, December 2022, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, ed.

This is a compact volume, featuring four stories and a beautifully foreboding piece of cover art from Tithi Luadthong. The star for me was the first story, James Bennett’s Sulta. Every photographer has experienced a bit of the dreaded “GAS”: Gear Acquisition Syndrome. But how often is it that the gear is acquiring you? Belly-Slitter, by H. Pueyo, makes the bloody point that sometimes you might want to ignore the old wives tales but they may not ignore you. Y is for Yesterday from Steve Rasnic Tem brings a piece of Yiddish folklore to life -- if “life” is the right word. Finally, Morana Violeta’s The Cat is spare story which brought out my inner ailurophobe. All good stuff. This is aimed at readers with a subtler taste in SFF/horror, but when the stories land, they land on you with both feet.

Smirk factor: All clear: 2 pts (No smirks given.)

Immersion factor: Shallow water: 1 pt

Writing quality: Above-average: 1.5 pts

Character/plot development: Average: 1 pt

Innovative/interesting: Above-average: 1.5 pts

Total: 7/10

Nightmare Magazine, Issue 121, October 2022, Wendy Wagner, Ed.

“These are the kind of people who probably won’t learn their lesson.

They’ll grieve for a while, they’ll hurt, maybe things will briefly get better, but then they’ll sink back into their bad habits.

They’ll forget, tell themselves it was an aberration, and go back to pretending that everything is okay and they live in a happy place where nothing really bad could happen.”

--A.C. Wise on the townspeople in “Sharp Things, Killing Things”

Previous reviews had featured Nightmare 120 and 122. 121 makes an appearance here plugging the gap. These were excellent stories, selected for the magazine’s tenth anniversary. Sharp Things, Killing Things is a tale of death and revenge set in a small town, but author A.C. Wise pulls in so much nuance that this is much, much more than just that. Tiny Little Wounds by Carlie St. George packs an incredible amount of suffering into 784 vividly uncomfortable words. The star, though, was The Ghost Eaters. This appealed to me as a dog person, but writer Spencer Ellsworth really shines in this tale of a good, good boy.

Not normally a poetry fan, I also loved Okwudili Nebeolisa’s Ritual, which brought back memories of traditional African healers from my time on the Continent. Rounding out a uniformly strong selection of fiction was an excerpt from Desert Creatures, Kay Chronister’s bleak tale of a barren and unforgiving post-apocalyptic world. This month’s “The H Word” wsa a meditation on lycanthropy and didn’t resonate--YMMV. The magazine is rounded out by book reviews and the usual author spotlights.

Smirk factor: All clear: 2 pts (As ever--?--no smirks.)

Immersion factor: Chest-high: 1.5pts

Writing quality: Above-average: 1.5 pts

Character/plot development: Average: 1 pt

Innovative/interesting: High: Above-average: 1.5 pts

Total: 7.5/10

Nightmare Magazine, Issue 123, December 2022, Wendy Wagner, Ed.

Another issue of this multi-threaded magazine. In fiction, this month we get two stories. The issue opens with the hard to describe story Break the Skin If You Have To from Emma Osborne, Jess Essey, and Caldwell Turnbull. Zombie love in a house that hates when you leave it? That and much, much more including flashes of what could be humor leaving the darkness of this beautifully-crafted story. Mari Ness’ Wallers is a bizarre look into the life--or non-life--of a girl who literally fades into the wallpaper.

Poetry is represented by Angela Liu’s Three Symptoms of a Disaster--345 words of beauty and heartbreak. The book excerpt, from Erika T. Wurth’s White Horse offered a snapshot of the novel which was long enough to highlight Wurth’s flowing writing style but too short to sell me on the book. Maybe the single most interesting piece was Chris DiLeo’s thoughtful contribution to the “Creative Nonfiction” section, a meditation on death titled Still Breathing. This issue was fine, but suffered from reversion to the mean, since I read it after Issue 121, which I thought was above and beyond.

Smirk factor: All clear: 2 pts (No smirking, generally well-crafted and carefully edited words.)

Immersion factor: Shallow water: 1 pt

Writing quality: Above-average: 1.5 pts

Character/plot development: Average: 1 pt

Innovative/interesting: Average: 1 pt

Total: 6.5/10

May 31, 2021

Are We Biased Against Hard Work?

The naturalness bias may push us away from fairly evaluating people who have had to work hard for success and towards people who seem like “natural” successes — even when we say we value the things the strivers are living.

August 4, 2020

What Business Are You In?

Change is a given in life and work, but we frequently anchor our identity in the past or to things we cannot control. There is a huge difference between being attached to a durable, lasting sense of mission (“what” and “why” we do things) rather than our business models (“how” and “where”). Getting the two confused can have a terrible price.

July 30, 2020

Pace Yourself

Ever been told “it’s a marathon, not a sprint?” Most people intuitively understand the suggestion that we should start slow and conserve our energy. Even if you’re someone who only runs when being chased, we can still learn from this.

July 28, 2020

Falling Off The Path

All of us have ambitions, and all of those come with a list of things that need to be done to see them through. But there are always temptations to do things which don’t help advance our cause. We unpack advice on dealing with the real source of our issues.

Advanced Leadership: Trust and Responsibility

High-performing organizations choose to empower and trust their employees to do the right thing. They also enforce accountability for those standards. The alternative is to try to micro-manage each individual, which creates oppressive organizational cultures and environments, and eventually saps the employees and the organization of vitality.

July 27, 2020

Do We Crawl, Walk or Run?

There is plenty of glittering advice that promises to catapult us and our work into the next realm of performance. Before we embrace this advice, we should be sure that we and our organizations are ready for it.

July 15, 2020

Don't Forget Context When Offering Advice

The Harvard Business Review article, “Look to Military History for Lessons in Crisis Leadership” offers Covid-era leaders advice drawn from throughout military history. Much of the advice, though, needs more nuance and context to be fully applicable to modern leaders.

June 29, 2020

And Then What?

Slogans capture and channel our dreams. Iteration, adaptation, and the hard work of implementation make them real. Pausing to ask “And then what?” isn’t an admission of defeat. It’s a sign of wisdom and maturity, a willingness to at least start trying to think more deeply about complex and troubling problems.

June 23, 2020

Are You Sabotaging Your Own Strategy?

Change is in the air. As we enter mid-2020, organizations and populations everywhere are grappling with a series of powerful social, economic and political shocks. There has never been safety in clinging to the status quo, but it is even less of an option now.

May 21, 2020

When Is It Okay to Quit?

It’s said that quitters never win and winners never quit, but is this true? For highly motivated people, the drive to achieve can be a direct line to accomplishment or into a dead end. The key is the ability to discern when our goals no longer suit us. Ironically, this can be hardest for the best-motivated.