Worlds of Strangeness #5 - available now.

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Friend Nigel has a new one out, the first Worlds of Strangeness since 2021.


Nigel Taylor [ed.] - Worlds of Strangeness #5 July 2024

Nigel Taylor

The Stranger Speaks: Editorial

C. D. Fleetway - Situation Vacant
The Stranger - A String of Garlic
Keith Mansion - Vanity Project
Graham Andrews - A Little Latin, and Less
'Doc' Clancy - Beast of Vasquez Rocks
The Stranger - A Weighty Problem
Beverly M. Collins - Shiver Claims
Algernon Haskin - Aqua Mortis [verse]
The Stranger - O Life and Gerry Anderson!
Mister Gogue - It's a Strange, Strange, Strange, Strange World
MICRONICLES
The Stranger - No. 13: Doomed Youth
The Stranger - No. 14: The Poet and the Vampire
The Stranger - No. 15: The First Sane Man

Avaliable via:

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Review - circumstances permitting - over next few days ...

[dem bones]

Here goes;

C. D. Fleetway - Situation Vacant: "What must it be like, one might wonder, to be attendant at the autopsy of one's own personality? To see every flaw and meanness in one's nature methodically uncovered and catalogued. To observe the most suppressed of secret desires be ruthlessly exposed. To relive the devastation of every regret that one had ever known, and the agony of all remorse. To revisit the shame of each intolerance one had ever exhibited. And suffer again the grief of every loss."

The issue's lengthiest piece reads like the launch episode of a weird adventure series. Driving home in a snowstorm from a non-assignment on Teeside, Ms. Jemima Straux, Metropolitan magazine journalist, is deliberately forced over an embankment by something stood in the road. Stunned, Jemima heads off through the woods, quickening her pace as she senses pursuit by whatever it was caused her to crash. She arrives at a mansion, pounds desperately on the door, too terrified to look behind ....

Jemima regains consciousness in a chair before a log fire, safe and warm wrapped in a man's dressing gown. And nothing beneath. Who could have stripped her? Did he, they ... why is that cuttlefish leering at her like that from the aquarium? A voice from the shadows. Her host introduces himself, Jasper Jellicoe, last of an illustrious line, a man, alas, bereft of domestic staff, let alone a personal assistant now the faithful Angus is no more. It is so hard to get suitable staff.

Jemima's gratitude to the man is tempered by his unwillingness to believe her story. There is no way he could not have seen the creature at her heels. With no mechanic available at this late hour, Jellicoe shows her to a guest room. She awakens to find a repulsive tumor-like entity gloating from the foot of her bed ...

My hopeless way with synopses has made Situation Vacant sound like a conventional horror story when there's so much more to it than that - SF elements, guest appearance by a Grimm's fairytale superstar, finishing school flagellation flashbacks, Alice Cooper and Slade on the radio (author evidently big on a glam rock; Jemima wears a T. Rex t-shirt). Mr. Stranger tells us "from now on, I'm hoping to publish WoS at least once a year," so I'm hoping we see more of Jasper and Jemima in # 6.

Graham Andrews - A Little Latin, and Less: Prof. Ichabod Avenal of Peskatonic University adopts Time Reflection Symmetry to transport a famous historical personage from the past to the present, ultimately resolving a centuries old literary controversy in the process. [Being thick, I couldn't identify the contemporary great he sent back 425 years in exchange].

'Doc' Clancy - Beast of Vasquez Rocks: Panic during filming of the latest El Sterno blockbuster as Lucia the script girl is abducted by a real life scaly, multi-tentacled monster from Hell! Can the masked wrestler deliver her from a fate worse than a fate worse than death?

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The Stranger - A String of Garlic: Romania, late nineteenth century. Marietta, stranded on a stretch of beach, a vampire having forced the coach over a cliff, killing the driver, bolting both horses. Her only sustenance, a flask of Holy Water and the seven garlic bulbs father strung around her neck. The vampire can afford patience, and doesn't mind telling her so.

The Stranger - No. 13: Doomed Youth: Major Grimthorpe, battle hardened army veteran, has raised his son, David, a pacifist. The Major regards the campaign on the Western Front just the latest senseless waste of young lives. Thank God, David is too engrossed in scholarly pursuits to realise there's a war in progress. Or is he?

The Stranger - No. 14: The Poet and the Vampire: As the undead drains his blood, Algernon Haskin, Poète maudit in his own brain, ponders the big one.

The Stranger - No. 15: The First Sane Man: A major scientific breakthrough. A first birth utilizing molecular teleportation, delivering baby direct from womb to crib, bypassing the traumatic squeeze through Mrs. Dawson's birth canal. Best of all, the doctor assures her, nothing can go wrong!

Mister Gogue - It's a Strange, Strange, Strange, Strange World: Requires mild reader participation so you'll need a banana.

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Keith Mansion - Vanity Project: "Was it my fault that I was born too late, after the best seams in the mine of music had been exhausted?" Dr. Orpheus, frustrated composer, invents the Reattributor, a hypnotic device which, for a limited period, empowers one with an unshakable conviction that they alone wrote/ painted/ directed or otherwise created the masterpiece of their choice. He must stress, however, that living artists are taboo. There was that nasty business involving Calvin Denbeigh, contemporary bestselling author, and a dangerously deluded client.

Beverly M. Collins - Shiver Claims : Trade secrets of a Trad female vampire. Mary Shiver was attacked and turned while returning home from a Glee Club Christmas performance on 21st December 1946. Here she shares sound survival tips for the living: keep clear of the men's room and give up jogging.

Algernon Haskin - Aqua Mortis: [verse] Grave rot poetry by "a young poet of promise whose disappearance/ demise has never been satisfactorily explained."

The Stranger - O Life and Gerry Anderson!: Celebrating the genius of the master of Supermarionation. "PHILIP Larkin once cynically observed that jazz had taken only a few decades to arrive at the same cacophony that classical music had required several centuries to reach, proof of jazz's innate superiority. Even more remarkable than this, Gerry Anderson managed to compress the entire history of western drama — several millennia in duration — into the brief compass of a single career span, moving from extreme stylisation to realism in barely a couple of decades."

And that's WoS #5 gone direct to the 'Best of 2024' listing. Please don't keep us waiting so bloody long for the next one!