Supernatural Tales

I was a mite tetchy in my last post. So, to make up for it, I'm adding a link to a very good literary site. All those who love Gothic fiction (and poetry) should take a peek.

My witty title refers to the Robert Aickman story, in which a honeymoon goes horribly wrong. Not that I'm planning on having a honeymoon, disastrous or otherwise. But changes are on the cards re: Supernatural Tales. The problem is money. I can't cover the costs of printing the high-quality ST covers any more. I have the options of simply killing the magazine, raising subscriptions by several hundred per cent, or returning to the original, cheaper stapled booklet format. I favour the latter - I don't want to stop yet and I don't think readers will bear a huge hike in prices. But what do other people think?

I recently read a horror story. I was struck by how familiar it all seemed. The plot, the characters, the inevitable conspiracy, and the violence. Especially the violence, which has an off-the-shelf feel to it. Am I alone in being disappointed by horror, as a genre? I'd like to know what people who read more widely think of the field these days.

This is a sort of 'emergency review' I'll never wedge into ST. So here goes... 'Thoroughly Evil'. It's not often you come across that phrase on the blurb of a DVD box set. It's a quote from the late Mary Whitehouse, who for many years was the self-appointed voice of decent God-fearing folk, and every bit as humourless and narrow-minded as the phrase suggests. Mrs Whitehouse didn't like The Omega Factor because one episode featured spiritualism, hypnotic regression and the like. But does the disapproval of the (now defunct) Mrs Whitehouse mean it was any good? TOF was produced by BBC Scotland, broadcast in 1979, then disappeared without trace. It was never repeated and never released on VHS, nor did it crop up on cable or satellite. This explains why many fans of sci-fi, horror and general spookery missed it when it first aired. Seen for the first time, The Omega Factor is not half bad, albeit very much of its time. The series opener, 'The Undiscover...

I'm heartened by the amount of enthusiasm for the Mike Chislett special issue. With a bit of luck I'll have most of the work done within a month or so. It remains to proof it and then get it printed. And, of course, I'm also working on ST12, but again I'm making good progress. I've uploaded the basic cover art - a variation on the ST format.

Just checking the likely page count for ST12. Oh, how hilarious it would be if it turned out to rival Ulysses. No, not quite. Eighty-four pages of fiction. Throw in about ten pages of reviews and a bit of marzipan, and I should be able to offer exactly 100 fun-packed pages. I like the idea of offering exactly 100 pages every time, for completely infantile reasons. Anyway, the point is that ST12 is on course. Yay! I feel terrible, though - a head cold I can't shake off. I bought a bottle of Bells and intend to give it a right old hammering this weekend. Oh, and why Rod Serling? Well, one of the reviews concerns Mr Serling's post-Twilight Zone antics.

Mike Chislett, so far as I know, doesn't have internet. So I can express my admiration for him without making him go all red and flustered. He's a remarkable writer, and perhaps one of the true originals - someone who, while widely read and keenly interested in the greats, still goes his own way. I've just been correcting the proofs of his story 'Blood and Glass', which rounds off his Devil's Mirror sequence. It's quite long - thirty-odd pages - and it was a marathon job to type it up. Needless to say I made plenty of errors, some profoundly stupid. Tiredness does it to you every time. But the story itself is wonderful, not least for the way it suggests - not too explicitly - a story behind the story that maybe-explains it all. Or maybe not. I've still got to sort out 'A Game of Ghosts', the title story of the forthcoming special issue. I'm spending a lot of time in Mike's head at the moment, as I've also been checking through his sto...