Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Chiaroscuro, 2005
Chiaroscuro is an quarterly 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, and Paul G. Tremblay. This year issues 23 through 26 appeared. There were 37,000 words of fiction, 16 stories, all short (6 short-short by my definition). The focus is horror or dark fantasy. The writing is generally pretty good, often quite lyrical.
I would say this was a decent year for the fiction there. Highlights: K. Z. Perry's "Five Rivers of Mourning" (January-March), Anil Menon's "Standard Deviation" (April-June), Hannah Wolf Bowen's "That Midnight Train, She'll Take You There" (July-September) (enhanced for me because I've ridden the train the story is based on (the Burlington Northern in the Chicago area) quite often, and perhaps best of all, S. E. Ward's "Sins of the Father" (October-December). This last neatly tells of Islamic ghuls (vampire-like creatures) in a French town, and their uneasy relationship with the also-persecuted Jews.
