Issue 10 opens with an editorial detailing the forthcoming changes, followed by great artwork from Carole Humphreys (also the cover artist) and a poem, ‘Dream of Death’, by Gavin Salisbury. This is definitely one of the best poems I’ve seen in a genre mag. I especially liked the line “mania like a warm bath of mercury” and the image of blue flamingos. The poem ends well too.

The story ‘She Came in the Night’ by Stephen Lee Cummings sees an older man bereaved and longing to be reunited with his dead wife. He gets his wish, though not the way he would have wanted. This is a story that uses very sparse prose. Paragraphs are often one sentence long, even one line long. It means the story moves quickly and looks longer than it actually is. The sparseness of the prose also led to the story seeming to lack substance a bit, but from a positive angle the technique focused the images more. There’s a beautifully executed illustration by Carole Humphrey’s accompanying this story, specifically on page 9.

One of the other artists in issue 10 is Chris Cartwright, whose illustrations have a CGI look. They’re like frames from a computer animation, and the illustrations seem like they’re about to come alive any minute. One of his works accompanies Peter Tennant’s story, ‘Success… and How to Achieve it’, a darkly humorous tale where Tennant takes pot shots at an increasingly shallow publishing industry. A writer is sitting in an editor’s office. The editor tells him: “‘It doesn’t matter how good the book is… You’re not photogenic… You have no fashion sense. You haven’t slept with anybody famous. You’ve not been on Big Brother.” The writer decides to get famous and get his revenge on the editor at the same time. This is a very short story, a kind of twist in the tale.

Gary McMahon’s ‘Making Room’ is another twist in the tale story. The male character meets a woman in a cinema and wonders if she might be “the one”. The story reflects elements of the first piece of fiction ‘She Came in the Night’. The character in ‘Making Room’ has also lost his wife and wants her back. He’s prepared to go to any lengths to achieve this. This is one of the longer and better stories in issue 10.

’Scarecrow’ by Colin O’Sullivan is a long poem that runs to three pages. It is to some extent a prose poem, and might have worked as a piece of prose. A scarecrow stands in a field, and over the years sees all kinds of things: the little boy who tells him about the monsters that stalk him at night; locals having sex in the field; the man who dug a hole and dumped the body of a girl in it. This poem could have done with cutting down. Arranged into blocks of prose, it would work as it is. Set out poetically, it seems too loose. I’d like to have read it laid out as prose, with paragraph breaks used judiciously to bring out the poetic quality of the piece.

’What’s In The Box, Fox?’ by Neil Ayres is a more surreal story, set mostly in a New York bookshop, full of strange clients and anthropomorphic main characters. The story has a different atmosphere to the other pieces of fiction in this issue. Although there were small problems - for example, dialogue by the same character on two consecutive lines without it being indicated the same person is speaking - the story did seem to have more depth than some of the others. This might be due in part to the more detailed description of the environment, which draws a stronger picture in the reader’s mind. The ending might be rather enigmatic for some readers, but rabidwire has provided an explanatory illustration. A few small editorial changes would sharpen this story further, but otherwise it was the most imaginative piece of work in issue 10, along with Gavin Salisbury’s poem, ‘Dream of Death’.

There were a few typos and small mistakes in the magazine. The formatting of prose, in common with a small number of other magazines I’ve come across recently, is variable, sometimes with no paragraph indents, just a blank line in between; other times with no blank line and no indents. The latter is a more problematic style of formatting, because paragraphs ending in long lines merge automatically into the next paragraph. Since paragraphing affects pace, and can be used to focus a particular sentence, image, subject, etc, no indents and no blank line is a style best avoided. Both Peter Tennant’s and Neil Ayres’ stories were formatted this way (possibly by the editor or proof-reader, or alternatively the authors themselves), and Ayres’ story in particular would have been better off with a more conventional layout.

On the whole, while the fiction in issue 10 of Whispers of Wickedness is not up to the standards of the better Midnight Street 4 stories, there’s a considerable difference in size between the two magazines, and the changes at Whispers of Wickedness might allow for longer fiction. I certainly hope so. The full page illustrations are one of the magazine’s strengths. The news and soapbox items in the pink pages of the centrefold are also a nice touch.

Kara Kellar Bell is a film and media graduate from the West of Scotland, with a passion for European novels, French films, silent cinema, and Brazilian music (everything from Daniela Mercury and other pop stars through to bossa nova). As a writer, she likes to have room to move around creatively, so she’s not located in one genre. She writes realism and also stories of a more fantastic nature, usually grounded to some extent in the real world. She also takes delight in writing across the sexual spectrum, and as a bisexual, considers it important to remind people that things are not always black and white, either/or, in sexuality or in gender. For a selection of Kara’s writing on the Showcase section of this site, click here

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.