Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Chiaroscuro, 2004
Chiaroscuro is an e-zine available at www.chizine.com. It publishes quarterly issues to the best of my knowledge. The Fiction editors are Brett Alexander Savory, Michael Kelly, Seth Lindberg, and Paul G. Tremblay (though he is listed as "on hiatus"). I assume that the previous four issues of fiction, which are the only ones I could find in the archive, are the 2004 issues. These are numbers 18 through 21. These issues featured 16 stories, all short (3 "short-short" by my definition), for a total of 43,700 words (about 2700 words average). There is also plenty of poetry, and columns, book review, film reviews.
The focus is definitely dark fantasy -- or not to mince words, horror. There is a slight tendency to gore -- not that by any means all or even most of the stories are gory. Lets just say the 'zine is open to that. Those who have read my reviews over the years will know that I'm not a huge fan of horror, and on those grounds I didn't really enjoy all that much of Chiaroscuro's fiction. In general it is well enough written stuff, and I think it would satisfy horror fans.
Of the stories, I was most impressed with Patrick Lestewka's "Sal Anastasio's Seven Cardinal Rules", a gruesomely funny piece about a man hired to clean up an actor's "mess" -- a dead lover; Chris Leonard's "The Helmet", which suggests a really horrifying method of punishment; and Scott William Carter's "The Woman Coughed Up by the Sea", a nice short-short about what the title says. There was also interesting work by d. g. k. goldberg, Jay Lake, Laura Anne Gilman, and Nick Mamatas.
ADDENDUM:
It appears, and I'm not sure how I did this, that I missed a 2004 issue and replaced it with the last 2003 issue. The issue I missed had one striking story, "Cure for Cancer" by Robert Boyczuk, a nasty but oddly moving story about a cancer researcher's twisted revenge (sort of) against his lover. This might be one of the best pure horror stories I've seen this year.
The numbers change, too: down to 41000 words, same number of stories (16) but one more short-short.
I get complaints every so often that I profess not to like horror much, which is true, so why do I review it? I confess this rather surprises me -- it implies a belief that one ought only to read stuff in your favorite genre. Rather, I say, you ought to read anything that might be interesting. And, indeed, the BEST horror is still striking and worthwhile work. Where the difference comes, for me, is that the mediocre horror either bores or repels me, while the mediocre SF is often still kind of fun -- though I think I still recognize the mediocrity. I dare say that horror fans feel the reverse -- no problem there.
Some complained also that my argument that Chiaroscure has too much gore -- which isn't exactly what I said (I said there was a SLIGHT tendency to gore) -- is unfair. This may be almost a legitimate complaint -- I think I was pushed to mention the gore by one story, that I thought was gratuitously gory and on the whole a bad, pointless, story. But that was just one of 16, and I really can't honestly say that, taken as a whole, Chiaroscuro is excessively gory or violent.
