Good fiction magazines aren’t easy to find – heck, even bad ones are off the radar – but look to the small press and you’re more apt to discover one. DARK WISDOM is one of them.
Published quarterly by Elder Signs Press, DARK WISDOM calls itself “the magazine of dark fiction.” Its 10th issue – the first I’ve seen – certainly fits that bill, opening with William C. Dietz’s “Dead Men Talk a Lot,” imagining a time when we can communicate with the recently deceased via telephone.
Other stories are equally dispiriting in mood, but pretty decent in execution, like E. Sedia’s “Yakov and the Crows,” a three-page marvel about, yep, a Russian, some birds and a pitch-black ending. Similar in style is “The Generosity of Strangers,” in which Michael McBride’s thesis-writing grad student tries to save the life of a suicidal stranger over the phone.
Kevin Anderson’s “The Box,” while über-brief at half a page, is a welcome piece of flash fiction built solely upon its twist end, and Christopher Welch supplies the ever-popular zombies in the lengthier “Memories, Red and Wet.”
There’s a nonfiction piece from Richard A. Lupoff (although I must admit, I didn’t realize until halfway through that it wasn’t fiction); four pages of a serialized comic; an interview with bestselling vampire author Chelsea Quinn Yarbro; reviews of books, movies and video games; and even some H.P. Lovecraft-inspired poetry (“Why I Don’t Date Much” by Greg Beatty: “What’s your sign, she asks? / Pisces? No. Yog-Sogoth, with / Cthulhu rising.”).
Nicely illustrated throughout, DARK WISDOM looks more professional than most indie genre mags. I think it could widen its audience if its price would drop – there’s really no need to print full-color on super-slick pages inside – but whoever finds it likely will enjoy it. –Rod Lott
