Murky Depths sinks beneath the waves…

Sad to read that the last issue of Murky Depths has been published, as announced here by the editor, Terry Martin. Previous entries on the blog had tended to paint a pretty bleak and sometimes angry picture, so it doesn’t come as much of a shock, but it’s still a shame.

It was an interesting attempt to merge comics and fiction, one of its most attractive features being double page art spreads to introduce stories. We had quite a few contributors in common with them, including David Tallerman, Alison Littlewood, Zachary Jernigan and Jeff Crook.

Withdrawing TQF from the British Fantasy Awards

We were delighted to be on the shortlist of the British Fantasy Award for Best Magazine/Periodical this year, and I'm impossibly grateful to every one of the silly, lovely people who voted for the magazine in the first and second rounds of voting.

But as the administrator of those awards I only left it in because (a) I assumed it wouldn't get any votes and (b) a constitutional glitch meant that I couldn't ignore the votes that did come in. That glitch was all sorted out at the AGM of the British Fantasy Society – and now BFS members know why I wanted to fix it!

The winner of the award for best magazine was Murky Depths.

The BFS is now taking recommendations for next year's awards, and I've decided to withdraw Theaker's Quarterly Fiction from the Best Magazine/Periodical award for as long as I'm the awards administrator, or as long as I'm the editor of the magazine – whichever tenure comes to an end first. (Individual contributions will still be eligible, in the same way that stories from BFS publications are.)

That's partly because I'd have been profoundly embarrassed to win the award over a shortlist that included for example Black Static and Interzone, magazines to whom, for all our good qualities, we can't hold a candle. But also because a win for us in that category would have cast not just my integrity into doubt, but the integrity of the entire awards.

Of course, now I can sit back every year and say, we'd have won that. So in a sense, by withdrawing, I get to win every year... ;-)

Perils and Pitfalls

Terry Martin, editor and publisher of the BFA-nominated magazine Murky Depths, has blogged about the pitfalls that await anyone launching a small press magazine.

I'd pretty much agree with all of that, especially his first point. The amount of work involved – or skipping crucial parts of that work – does seem to put paid to a lot of new magazines.

The only thing I'd add to Terry's points is that, from my experience, anyone planning to launch a small press mag needs to decide right at the beginning whether it's a business or a hobby – to make a profit or just for fun – because that has to inform everything else: the payscale, format, frequency, distribution, ad rates, publicity, etc.

Futile Flame, by Sam Stone | review by Stephen Theaker

Gabriele Caccini, "Italian by birth and vampire by nature", is on the road with great-many times over-granddaughter and lover Lilly. Pursued by a mysterious being with the ability to sap their strength from a distance, they search out another of their kind, Lucrezia Borgia, whose death in 1519 is revealed to have been the moment her brother, Caesare Borgia, turned her into a vampire. Most of the book is then given over to an account of Lucrezia's seduction and rape by Caesare, and the consequences of his actions. For the most part this is quite literally a bodice-ripper, with more rape than a Richard Laymon novel, though the last quarter takes a detour into wholly unexpected territory.

Stone’s vampires are very tough. They are described as eternal, and, while not invulnerable, regenerate quickly enough to survive immolation. They are pained by sunlight, but not destroyed, and have chameleon powers. Visible in mirrors, they use their lungs to breathe air and blood flows through their bodies. Their bites tend to produce instant orgasms in their victims, and though they feel slightly bad about eating people they don't let it stop them. Three quarters of the way into the book it’s revealed that Gabriele and Lilly can fly, though I’m guessing this wouldn’t have surprised me had I read Killing Kiss, the previous novel in the series. Their advantages over other literary vampires are balanced by their reproductive difficulties, with, it seems, only those possessing a certain gene being able to survive the transformation.

That, and the notion of Lucrezia using her fangs to rape others as she has been raped, are the only slivers of originality in the book, though admittedly that wouldn't matter so much if this was the kind of thing I really loved to read. There's nothing here that you won't have seen a hundred times before. Even the final part of Lucrezia's story, though surprising in this context, offers little that's new when considered in isolation. Unfortunately the clichés extend from the plot to the prose: skin is generally olive (apart from one man who is "arrogant and shifty and of mixed race, though I can’t tell what mix"), tears are salty fluid, waves crash gently, bodies ache with desire, breasts are full and pert, and the frequent sex is all "soft folds", "pulsing warmth", "female moisture" and gushing orgasms.

Written in the first person present tense (aside from the flashbacks, which are in first person past tense), the book takes itself very seriously, and like its central figure is completely humourless. There's also a tendency to overdescribe everything. For example one typical passage reads:

"Here there is another television at the bottom of the bed on a rich mahogany unit with a DVD player and stereo: all the media conveniences any visitor could want. The bed is plush, covered in rich brown and cream cloth, with cushions resting on the brown velvet-covered headboard. Either side of the bed are two mahogany side tables. To my left is another mahogany unit, bigger than the one holding the television. I open it to find a fridge and safe. As I close it I spot two more doors, one leading to a full sized bathroom, again in black and white, which contains a bath as well as separate double shower cubicle."

The layout of these rooms never becomes an issue in the story. Later we learn that Gabriele "has OCD", which is the "curse of the vampire brain", something that's been suggested in other vampire stories. Though this curse isn't apparent from his actions, perhaps the over-description is a deliberate reflection of his character, as in Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho. If so, it never goes on quite long enough to become funny, but does go on long enough to make the book a bit of a plod at times. On the other hand, some things could perhaps have been described better; I reached p. 43 before realising with a shock that Gabriele was male, which had the unfortunate consequence of making an interesting relationship (between two female vampires, one brooding, one giggly) much more conventional (brooding bloke, giggly girl).

For a small press book the number of errors isn’t unusual, but there are more than you'd expect in a book that credits three editors: may for might, laid for lay, complimentary for complementary, incongrous, obsurd, too lapse in my duties, chaise lounges, bi-product and so on. But they wouldn’t have affected my enjoyment of the book, had I been enjoying it. If you were disappointed by Anne Rice's decision to “write only for the Lord", this may fill the gap. If Anne Rice bored you to tears, best stay clear.

Futile Flame, by Sam Stone. Murky Depths, pb, 220pp. Amazon US. Amazon UK.