While I was examining PS Publishing’s website a few weeks ago, I decided to subscribe to their flagship quarterly publication, Postscripts. A keen reader of horror as a teenager, I’m pretty out of touch with what’s happening in the genre today, and their magazine seemed like a good way to take a refresher course. Frankly, after some rather dry days under the general fiction sun, I also needed a bit of fun. As a result, it was a slow couple of weeks waiting for my first issue to arrive.
I say “magazine”, but in fact Postscripts #18: This is the Summer of Love marks a turning point for the quarterly. With this issue, Postscripts has beefed up its word count, taken the trade edition from paperback to hardback (retaining the limited signed edition), dropped the old two-column layout, and become a full-fledged anthology of new horror, science fiction, and fantasy: there are ten stories here, along with a handful of illustrations.
Of the three stories set in (more or less) alternate worlds, Livia Llewellyn’s presentation of an apocalypse in ‘Horses’ is strangely irksome and unconvincingly harsh, as is Monica J. O’Rourke’s contribution, ‘Cell’. Both seem a little too keen to prove how dark their writers’ imaginations can be, but they don’t quite ring true, like forced swearing. Of the stories that ain’t set in nowhere roun’ here, the only one where the author is content just to tell the story is Deborah Kalin’s ‘The Wages of Salt’; as a result, this is the most interesting of the three, if not necessarily the most striking.
By and large, I was less interested in the stories that venture to alternate worlds than in those that present rum goings-on in this one—an entirely subjective taste, but one I’m likely to stand by for as long as I’m me. Here we have stories like James Cooper’s ‘The Family Face’, a fun tale of a writer who chooses the wrong backwoods for his retreat, which would be even better if it didn’t have a denouement so old you can hear it rattling in its shell. Opener ‘In the Porches of My Ears’ by Norman Prentiss is a great tale, charming until the very end, when it delivers a swift kick to tender parts; and R.B. Russell’s ‘Literary Remains’ has something of M.R. James to it, which is always a good thing.
Perhaps there’s also an echo of M.R. James (or more so, Lovecraft) in Clive Johnson’s ‘Pieland’s Dream’, which has a very interesting premise, but rushes itself through; it feels as though it needs a good ironing out, at which point I suspect it would reveal itself to be not a crumpled short story, but rather a novella, and possibly a rather good one.
PS Publishing
Formed in 1997, PS Publishing have been putting out science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels and novellas since 1999.
As well as new and unknown writers, PS publishes the likes of Ramsey Campbell and Joe Hill, and special editions of work by Ray Bradbury and Tim Powers.
All PS titles are published in a selection of limited editions, including signed and slipcased editions, along with the odd real rarity, and they collect industry awards the way their readers collect their books.
For more information, see about PS Publishing on their site.
Neil Grimmett’s story of obsessive angling, ‘A Hard Water’, is nice and punchy, and there’s a good whiff of eau-de-spook in Chris Bell’s ‘Shem-El-Nessim’.
The final story, the one that lends its name to the collection, is ‘This is the Summer of Love’ by Rio Youers. Youers is an interesting writer: I was initially sceptical about the story, but he largely won me over. The clichés are meant to be there, more or less, but perhaps Youers could do with developing a slightly terser style. He has a tendency to over-describe things, and I kept wanting to edit him down.
While I wouldn’t necessarily say that ‘This is the Summer of Love’ is the high point of Postscripts #18, it certainly doesn’t do a bad job of rounding out what must be one of the most satisfying anthologies I’ve read in a long time (although that’s not a huge list, especially since the trudge through Granta’s dreary Best of Young American Novelists 2 damn near put me off anthologies for life). I liked some of the stories more than others, a few had shaky endings, and there were one or two that I felt might have been better executed a little differently in general, but this kind of cavilling is really part of the pleasure of reading a good anthology.
I’ve now got three months to wait for Postscripts #19. I have plenty of other books to read in the meantime, but I suspect I might revisit a few of these stories as well, or better yet, start looking at PS Publishing’s stock of back issues.
