The story has good character interaction between Malcolm and the American, and the image of an empty city is a haunting one. But for me there seemed to be a problem in Malcolm’s experience of the drug versus the American’s. The latter is older than he looks, moved to Amsterdam in the ‘70s, knows everything that has occurred since he started smoking the herb, is familiar with modern pop culture, and yet Malcolm seems locked within the same time period, never moving on. Malcolm does consume his entire stock of the drug quickly which might explain the more extreme circumstances he finds himself in.

Richards’ second story, ‘Skin Two’, is about a world of cosmetic surgery, where a new technique, Skynth, allows everyone to appear ageless. The story is split into separate narratives, with the first and last featuring the same character, one of the first people to undergo the procedure. Her face was badly burned in a childhood fire, and at the age of 27 she finally gets a new face. The problem for her, is that after nineteen years, the rest of her body has aged, while her face has not. The other characters have skynth for various reasons: a black man shocks his lover by turning up with white skin; a young girl is pressured into having the procedure in order to fit in with a cosmetically enhanced world; a man chatting up a beautiful woman cannot stop wondering how old she really is - 28, 48, 58, or even older? Skynth is only skin deep, however. Underneath the beauty and the apparent youth, everyone is slowly decaying.

‘Evil Monsters’ by Paul Finch has an unfortunate title, which implies something very different from what the story actually contains. It is in fact one of the best stories in this issue, and deals with two English television researchers looking for stories about mythical monsters on the Gaelic-speaking West Coast of Scotland. They meet an old man who tells them about fuathan, spirits or demons including the kelpie, and the nuckelavee, both mythical Celtic creatures linked to horses. After hearing about a real life encounter with a nuckelavee on a nearby islet, the two young men decide to drive out and have a look for themselves. Of course, they get more than they bargained for. ‘Evil Monsters’ is extremely well written and engrossing, a strong piece of myth-based fiction, with flashes of humour. The highlanders are perhaps slightly stereotypical in a kind of Wicker Man way, but it doesn’t detract at all from the story.

‘Daddy’s Girl’ by Gary Couzens is the other standout story of this issue. The main character’s sister, Mary, has committed suicide and he has to sort out her flat and possessions. He thinks on the past, her increasing obesity, which even his young daughter commented on. But it’s only when he comes to read Mary’s diaries that he realises their father abused her. Putting on weight was her way to deter his advances. ‘Daddy always did like thin girls,’ she told her brother once when they looked at one of their father’s paintings. Only later, when it’s too late, does he understand the significance of the comment. ‘Daddy’s Girl’ is a fine piece of writing, and Couzens successfully conveys the poignancy of Mary’s life and death, and the helplessness of the brother who finds out the truth too late.

‘The Grass is Always Greener’ by Jerry Oltion follows a man who is meeting up with 49 other versions of himself, from 49 parallel worlds. In some worlds, he married one woman, in others another. The meeting has been set up by the billionaire version of himself who, it transpires, is looking to do a life swap. The narrator is the one selected, and wakes to find himself in the billionaire’s world, while the billionaire is now living with his wife. The story follows his attempts to get back to his own life. Oltion’s narrative moves along nicely, though the wife is so unsympathetic I wondered why he was bothering. He’d met a perfectly nice woman in the new life. Since his wife is into threesomes, he takes this new woman back with him. It’s difficult to believe she’d like the wife either. Another problem related to one of the parallel selves being a transsexual woman - the reasons for the sex change were unconvincing, though Oltion certainly treats the character sympathetically. Otherwise, this is an entertaining story.

A man is entering the execution chamber at the beginning of ‘Fifteen Minutes in Huntsville, Texas’ by Michael Beeman. He’s been condemned to death for the rape and murder of a young girl, though he remembers nothing of the episode himself, having been drunk on the night of the murder. The method of execution is lethal injection. In his conscious state, the condemned man shows no remorse, but as the anaesthetic is administered and he slips into dreams, we’re taken back to a childhood episode which starts innocently enough, but turns darker when his father, tossing him up in his arms, begins to hit him off the ceiling with more and more force. The cruelty of the father and the likely cruelty of the condemned man on the night of the rape when the girl was pushed from his car, are matched by the whole execution procedure, and the man in charge of carrying it out. ‘Fifteen Minutes in Huntsville, Texas’ is another strong story.

There are three shorter works in the magazine: ‘Fleece’ by Nina Allan is a subtle piece of dark fantasy, with a somewhat thoughtful, reflective tone; ‘Mole’ by William I Lengeman III is a poetically executed flash fiction. ‘Shouting at the Shadow People’ by SA Tranter gets off to a darkly humorous start when someone tells the narrator, ‘I’ll fight you for your trousers.’ The narrator is someone isolated from real people, and finds himself in the company of shadow people. These people turn out to be famous figures of the past and present, and the narrator’s relationship with them is stronger than the one floundering relationship he has in the real world, with a woman called Claire. In the end, even Claire has joined the ranks of the shadow people. Tranter does a good job of creating a sympathetic character who is losing his grip on reality. In many ways, the narrator is just an extreme version of many people who live inside their heads.

The poetry in Midnight Street tends to be well above the standards of some other genre magazines I’ve seen, and this issue is no exception. Cathy Buburuz’s ‘Caged’ is a dark little narrative, accompanied by a rather appropriate piece of artwork by Charles S Fallis. I also liked Lee Clark Zumpe’s three poems, especially ‘Balsam Mountain Road’. In addition to all of this there’s the regular Mystic Bard column, artwork from Liz Clarke and Alfred R Klosterman, and Tony Mileman’s interesting interview with Cajun horror writer, Deborah LeBlanc, a writer whose work I look forward to reading sometime.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.