Dark horse/'därk '?hôrs/noun1. a candidate or competitor about whom little is known but who unexpectedly wins or succeeds."a dark-horse candidate"Join us for a monthly tour of writers who give as good as they get. From hard science-fiction to stark, melancholic apocalypses; from Lovecraftian horror to zombies and horror comedy; from whimsical interludes to tales of unlikely compassion--whatever it is, if it's weird, it's here. So grab a seat before the starting gun fires, pour yourself a glass of strange wine, and get ready for the running of the dark horses. In this issue:A RESPONSIBLE MANCarol WillisBOTTLENECKDouglas GwilymCORNPLANTER O'BAILGary EveryINTO THE POTRon J. CruzPECKWayne Kyle SpitzerPRETTY ON THE INSIDEDiana OlneyWHERE FASNET MET SPACE NETMary Jo RabeSORRY, WRONG ARTIFACTMark MellonTHE BURDEN OF DAMASCUSJames B. PepeTHE TROUBLE WITH AI-NineChad Gayle

Dark Horses: The Magazine of Weird Fiction No. 20 | September 2023 - Dark Horses Magazine, #20

Jonesing for a drive-in theater and a hotrod El Camino?It's the dawn of the 1970s and everything is changing. The war in Vietnam is winding down. So is the Apollo Space Program. The tiny northwestern city of Spokane is about to host a World's Fair. But the Watergate Hearings and the re-entry of Skylab and the eruption of Mount Saint Helens are coming.as are killer bees and Ronald Reagan. Enter 'The Kid, ' a panic-prone, hyper-imaginative boy whose life changes drastically when his father brings home an astronaut-white El Camino. As the car's deep-seated rumbling becomes a catalyst for the Kid's curiosity, his ailing, over-protective mother finds herself fending off questions she doesn't want to answer. But her attempt to redirect him on his birthday only arms him with the tool he needs to penetrate deeper-a pair of novelty X-Ray Specs-and as the Camino muscles them through a decade of economic and cultural turmoil, the Kid comes to believe he can see through metal, clothing, skin-to the center of the universe itself, where he imagines something monstrous growing, spreading, reaching across time and space to threaten his very world. Using the iconography of 20th century trash Americana-drive-in monster movies, cancelled TV shows, vintage comic books-Spitzer has written an unconventional memoir which recalls J. M. Coetzee's Boyhood and Youth. More than a literal character, 'The Kid' is both the child and the adult. By eschewing the technique of traditional autobiography, Spitzer creates a spherical narrative in which the past lives on in an eternal present while retrospection penetrates the edges. X-Ray Rider is not so much a memoir as it is a retro prequel to a postmodern life-a cinematized "reboot" of what Stephen King calls the "fogged out landscape" of youth. Want to go for a ride?

X-Ray Rider 2: Mileposts on the road to childhood's end - The X-Ray Rider Trilogy, #2

"Take the fatal shot, " said Horseshoe. He must have laid down his rifle because I remember him helping to steady my own. "Easy now, you'll own this forever-" I stared the thing in the eye and squeezed the trigger. It threw back its head, rising up. It gasped for breath, spitting more blood. It barked at the sky. Then it fell, head thumping against the deck. Its serpentine neck slumped. The rest of its blood spread over the boards and rolled around our boots and flowed between the planks. I was the first to step forward, looking down at the thing through drifting smoke. Its remaining eye seemed to look right back. I got down on my knees to look closer. The thing exhaled, causing the breathing holes at the top of its head, behind its eyes, to bubble. I waited for it to inhale, staring into its eye-I could see myself there as well as the others, could see the sky and the scattered clouds. The whole world seemed contained in that moist little ball. Then the eye rolled around white-it shrunk, drying, and the thing's neck constricted. And it died. Horseshoe slapped my back, massaged my neck. "How's it feel, little buddy?"But I didn't know what I felt. I could only stare at the eye, now empty.

Seven Tales of Blood and Beauty

The race is on to get out of post-apocalypse New York in an all-new Flashback thriller. Welcome to the world of the Flashback, a world in which man's cities have become overgrown jungles and extinct animals wander the ruins. You can survive here, if you're lucky, and if you're not in the wrong place at the wrong time--which is everywhere, all the time. But what you'll never do is remain the same, for this is a world whose very purpose is to challenge you, a world where anything can and will happen. So take a deep dive into these loosely connected tales of the Dinosaur Apocalypse (each of which can be read individually or as a part of the greater saga): tales of wonder and terror, death and survival, blood and beauty. Do it today, before the apocalypse comes. From The Ghosts in Their Boroughs:She loosed her hair and shook her head, allowing the locks to spill down her shoulder-and I zoomed in on them to get a focus."Do I look any different?" she hollered."Yeah . you shine."Which she did, like a candelabra, as the lights reflected off her hair, her skin, her beaded jacket. As the music played and she reached for the brass ring-and got it. As she circled and laughed and gripped the pole and the camera went click, click, click. That's when I saw them; or thought I did. The shapes. Gathered beyond the farthest poles (I'd zoomed up on the opposite side whilst waiting for her to come back around); gathered like outsized crows. That's when I focused through and saw their eyes; their awful, red, vertically slit eyes, before dropping the camera and unslinging my rifle-pointing it directly at them . and finding them gone. That's when I realized that I was starting to lose it-to slip, as the writer Hugo Eagleton once said. That the terror and uncertainty of what had happened-the sky, the missing people, the remaining people who seemed intent on burning the city down-had affected me more than I realized. Sylvia, for her part, only looked at me like I was insane. And I would have agreed with her; had I not looked behind her and saw them again. Had I not seen with my own eyes their black bodies and crimson snouts as they weaved between horses and slowly closed the gap; as they stalked her like panthers and the carousel went around, the music like a carnival, the horses rising and falling. As they closed to within about twelve feet of her and I fired-causing them to stop and to crouch and to look around-only to inch forward again as I resumed shooting (missing, it seemed, every time). Until there was an ear-piercing pulse which I recognized as coming from Madsen's sound cannon (he'd demonstrated it for us before we set out) and the animals scattered-even as Sylvia crouched and covered (from the excruciating noise) and I did the same; paralyzed, debilitated.

The Ghosts in Their Boroughs

And then we waited, watching the trucks with their billowing flags slowly move along the ridge, watching them go. Last night I saw Lester Maddox on a TV show / With some smart-ass New York Jew / The Jew laughed at Lester Maddox / And the audience laughed at Lester Maddox too . I heard gunshots-nothing major, just some idiot in the Tucker train shooting at the sky. So I went to the park and I took some paper along / And that's where I made this song . And then it started, the Apache firing two Hellfire missiles which hit a group of pickups at the start of the train and instantly blew them to pieces, glass and shrapnel flying, a body tumbling in the air. We talk real funny down here / We drink too much, we laugh too loud / We're too dumb to make it in no northern town . Two more missiles fired, this time at the other end of the train, blowing pickups and blue flags into the air, sending a cab higher than anything else-like the turrets of those Iraqi tanks in the first Gulf War-hurling a Rugged Terrain tire along the ridge, which eventually rolled down the hill. We're keeping the niggers down . More missiles, like scaled-up bottle rockets: hitting the column like hammers, making fireballs of King Cabs and beds of people; spitting from the chopper's hardpoints like fireworks, like flairs, incinerating skin and catching hair on fire, I knew, and didn't care, obliterating pennants and banners. We're rednecks, we're rednecks / We don't know our ass from a hole in the ground . Until he'd finally fired everything: Hellfires and Hydras, Stingers and Spikes, all of them hissing and screaming, finding their targets; all of them lighting the ridge up like the Fourth of July, or maybe the volcano at The Mirage, in Las Vegas, each making our world safer and saner and more secure-more righteous, more lost. Each bringing smoke and silence and peace-like the lights in the sky themselves-to the war-torn hills of Earth.

The Once and Future Kings

First came the time-storm, which erased half the population. Then came the Dinosaur Apocalypse .How did it all begin? That depends on where you were and who you ask. In some places it started with the weather-which quickly became unstable and began behaving in impossible ways. In still others it started with the lights in the sky, which shifted and pulsed and could not be explained. Elsewhere it started with the disappearances: one here, a few there, but increasing in occurrence until fully three quarters of the population had vanished. Either way, there is one thing on which everyone agrees-it didn't take long for the prehistoric flora and fauna to start showing up (often appearing right where someone was standing, in which case the two were fused, spliced, amalgamated). It didn't take long for the great Time-displacement called the Flashback-which was brief but had aftershocks, like an earthquake-to change the face of the earth. Nor for the stories, some long and others short, some from before the maelstrom (and resulting societal collapse) and others after, to be recorded. These are the stories of a group of experienced survivors and their incredible machine, Gargantua: How they came to possess it, and what they did with it after. This is the recounting of a heist in Seattle in which they barely escaped with their lives ... and a journey to Lost Angeles to find their forever home--which just happened to be occupied when they got there. These are their Travels With Gargantua ...

Travels With Gargantua: A Post-Apocalyptic Road Trip

He refocused on Blotto just as the smile faded from the man's lips and his mouth drew tightly closed, as if he were desperately trying to stifle a belch. His eyes shown suddenly wide and intense, yet their expression had not changed so much as become frozen in stasis. His shapeless body jerked once, his flesh seemed to roll as does water in a boat's wake, and then his fat lips were parted by what first seemed his tongue, but was revealed to be a budding red rose, which emerged into the fire-light and blossomed its pedals, spilling blood onto the gangplank and filling the air with scent. Glancing to the hand with which the man gripped Rosethorn, Dravidian saw that she'd sprouted thorn-studded rose stems, which had penetrated Blotto's beefy wrist and chewed their way through his body. His heel lifted off the wood and his ankle seemed to lock with paralysis, and then his body listed to the right and he began to fall. The rose imploded as if growing in reverse, retracting into his mouth which fell shut with the clacking of teeth, and an instant later Rosethorn fell to the plank and Dravidian stooped to snatch her up. Blotto's body fell into the void.

To the End of Ursathrax - The Ferryman Pentalogy, #5

Dark horse/'därk '?hôrs/noun1. a candidate or competitor about whom little is known but who unexpectedly wins or succeeds."a dark-horse candidate"Join us for a monthly tour of writers who give as good as they get. From hard science-fiction to stark, melancholic apocalypses; from Lovecraftian horror to zombies and horror comedy; from whimsical interludes to tales of unlikely compassion--whatever it is, if it's weird, it's here. So grab a seat before the starting gun fires, pour yourself a glass of strange wine, and get ready for the running of the dark horses. In this issue:COYOTE AND HUNTERBrenden PontzTHE GREEN WORLDTerry SanvilleTHE LEVIATHANHarold HossHOMING PIGEONMehitabel ShapiroTHE EULOGYMax RissmanMINTStephen McQuigganSÉ DO BHEATHA 'BHAILEDerek Alan JonesTHE APBRocky BoudreausTHE TERROR IN LAKE MICHIGANKelly PiggottTHE PRIMEVAL WORLDWayne Kyle Spitzer

Dark Horses: The Magazine of Weird Fiction No. 11 December 2022 - Dark Horses Magazine, #11

After breaking their sworn oaths in a fit of forbidden passion, a sacrificial bride (Shekalane) and her fearsome escort (the ferryman Dravidian) find themselves alone and on the run in the subterranean river-world of Ursathrax."Do you know what it is?" he said at last. She studied it, nodding slowly. "I think so. It's a doorway, of sorts. It's what awaits on the other side of death."Dravidian nodded. "It is what Montair speaks of. Not death-but transition. For what winks out in one place winks on in another, always." He stared at the fountain, his eyes seeming to dream. "If I were to step through that door ..." He turned to face her. "Would you come with me?"She looked at him longingly-at his fearsome mask-but hesitated. She trusted him, and yet, was this not how death would come? As a whispering seduction?"I don't know yet, " she said. There was a soft hiss as he depressed the pad at his temple and swung the mask around to his back, then moved his lips to within a few centimeters of her own and paused, breathing slowly, seeming to draw her own breaths from her. "But you would consider it .""But, Dravidian, where would we go? How would we survive?"He cupped her face in his hands. And though he was too close for her to see his face clearly, his beautiful eyes with their golden irises and Stygian pupils drew her in inexorably, like black holes with golden linings, if such a thing were even possible, and she whispered, "I would step through it ..."He took her in his arms and drew her slowly against him. "And would you find the strength within yourself to persevere even when the world turns its cold face against us?""Yes, " she rasped."Then run with me, Shekalane. To the end of Ursathrax and beyond ." And he gently but firmly locked his lips with her own.

Dark Horses: The Magazine of Weird Fiction No. 20 | September 2023 - Dark Horses Magazine, #20

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