Michael Matheson

It’s Week 2 of April’s Shitty Poetry Month! Enjoy the terrible musings of Robert Runte, Matt Moore, Stephen Graham Jones, Michael Matheson, and Michèle Laframboise.

Featured Book Challenge: Are YOU a shitty Poet? Prove it! Go to the ChiZine Publications Facebook Page and SHARE your own short-shitty poem, and enter a chance to win this week’s featured book Goldenland Past Dark and last week’s featured book The Inner City!

Serious as a fucking heart attack, Kameron Hurley’s Bel Dame Apocrypha books (God’s War, Infidel, and Rapture) are a bold, brutal sojourn through blood-soaked streets, war-torn countries, and the battered maps of her characters’ lives, bodies and proverbial souls. And ladies and gents, this series is a god-damned masterpiece.

With her duology of Anna Dressed in Blood and Girl of Nightmares, Kendare Blake has created an intelligent, thoughtful, and sensitive portrayal of how, and why, the dead maintain their hold on the living, literally and figuratively. It doesn’t hurt that Blake has crafted a deeply appealing YA love story in the process.

Dark Duet, a collaborative collection of poetry from Linda D. Addison and Stephen M. Wilson, is an exquisite work of interwoven voices blending seamlessly into something greater than the whole of their already excellent parts. Creating narrative through harmony and discord, call and response spirals of imagery and prose, and poems both new and culled from other sources, Dark Duet is an extraordinary achievement.

Six parts whimsy mixed with a dash of humour and a healthy dollop of dreamlike disjointed light horror-fantasy, Eric Orchard’s comic book Marrowbones is an absolute delight.

Dan Wells' The Hollow City is something of an oddity. The novel should work, except it doesn't. The Hollow City follows in the tradition of the kind of stories The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and Night Gallery used to run. And the construction of the story mimics the structure those programs commonly employed: an interesting premise that plays off the audience's uncertainty, keeps the audience guessing during the build-up, and then dumps the reveal in the audience's lap at the close.

Perfection is a rare quality in an anthology. But even coming back to Poe's Lighthouse in its Wicker Park Press re-release (it was originally put out in limited edition by Cemetery Dance Publications back in 2006), Christopher Conlon's startlingly diverse homage to the works of Poe—using an exploration of Poe's (in)famously unfinished "Lighthouse" fragment as the crux (literal or figurative at the choice of the author) of each story—is still unabashedly pitch-perfect.

So, first things first, an open apology to Nathan Shumate, because I wish I had better things to say about Arcane. Especially since the idea behind Arcane—create an anthology without theme, centred instead around the excellence of the stories themselves, creating as much variety as possible—is a great concept; unfortunately, Arcane's stories are not, except in a few instances, written well enough to support Shumate's goal.

So why review a book that came out two years ago; a book that was reviewed―with exemplary accolades, and a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly―by any number of excellent publications and individuals; a book that won the Ditmar, Australian Shadows, and Canberra Critics Awards, and was shortlisted for the Aurealis?

Like most things in life, fiction is a mixed bag. Weird fiction even more so.

I've never really understood why the term "bizarro" fiction took hold when discussing weird fiction, but there you have it. Maybe the genre hit puberty and decided it needed a new name. Seems appropriate enough given that a lot of bizarro fiction is rooted in the deeply sexual―by way of Dadaist storytelling (if you can't just go with a title like Carlton Mellick III's "The Haunted Vagina" you're just not having enough fun with your life).