Specialising in dark fiction, poetry, and artwork, with a strong thread of black humour, Whispers continues to be an entertaining read. Non-fiction is well represented in Aliya Whiteley’s regular and amusing column, The Blue Pootle, which can also be read at the Whispers of Wickedness website. Rachel Kendall offers an interesting article, ‘Prague: A City of Ghosts’, where she explores the sights, history, and myths of this beautiful eastern European city. And Pete Tennant interviews (or interrogates) the author of ‘Digging up Donald’, Steven Pirie.

The black and white artwork in the Spring issue is by Carole Humphreys, Marcia Borell, Sheridan Morgan, and there are two lovely photos of Prague by Elias (apparently more photos can be viewed at the Whispers website).

There are six fiction/prose pieces and one poem. There’s a repetition of themes and images throughout issue 12: supermarkets, abused women, fathers and sons. Steve Redwood kicks things off in his inimitable tongue in cheek way with ‘Two Legs Bad’. A man standing in a supermarket sees a woman who strikes him as odd, and somewhat unnerving. In fact both she and he are aliens disguised as humans. The Martians normally have tentacles and three legs, but these have been disposed of for the purpose of hiding out on Earth disguised as bipeds in the hopes of avoiding Martian religious fanatics and their fatwahs and counter-fatwahs. Redwood takes the opportunity have a little fun with the narrator and his two marriages - the Martian marriage where his wife unfortunately bit off one of his tentacles, and his human wife, who dumps him on hearing that he has just laid an egg. The strange woman in the supermarket, suspected of being an assassin, in fact turns out to be someone else entirely.

’Deliver Us’ by Aaron Callow is a darker tale, focusing on an abusive marriage. The husband has been living off his more ambitious and successful wife, but he’s a controlling character, fearful, and the situation had been complicated by the loss of their unborn baby. The woman is visited by a man who appears to be the devil. At first it seems he is simply there to collect her husband, since we are told that domestic abusers are punished in Hell. The stranger tells her he will return when it is time, but his visit is later revealed to be of a Faustian nature. There’s a damned if you do, and damned if you don’t quality to this story, which reflects something of the predicament of women who kill their abusive husbands.

’Epilogue’ by Stephen Melling begins with a father and son on a picnic, but because this is a Whispers story, we know it’s going somewhere dark. In fact, as the story progresses, it becomes clear that the two are living in a post-apocalyptic world, where the dead are decaying in their vehicles, and the city is an empty place. Something in a message left in the man’s office implies that he may well have had something to do with the holocaust around them. The story ends on a dark note, threaded with poignancy as he is about to inject his young son with morphine.

’A Tale of the Supermarket’ by Jim Steel is told in mild Scots. A huge supermarket is built over an old cemetery which leads to supernatural occurrences during construction and also later when the shop has opened. Goods disappear from shelves, and ghostly children are seen. In fact the story of the supermarket is being told to a group of children who would appear to be the very children in the story. They live in a tent above one of the aisles, and steal out at night to get food. There is an ambiguity in the ending though - they could be real children, or they could be ghosts. Their presence and the stories of the haunted supermarket have boosted profits as people come from far and wide. Content with this, the supermarket and its strange tenants live in peaceful symbiosis.

’Did I?’ By Garry Charles features a man who has been accused of the brutal murders of a number of women. He claims innocence, and records his thoughts in a diary which forms the basis of the story. The police interrogate him, convinced that he is the killer. Endlessly harassed by nightmares, ghosts and the police, he confesses, only to discover later that it was someone else, someone close to him who committed the crimes. The story ends on a supernatural note that echoes a theme that runs through this issue: the triangular relationship between fathers, sons, and wives/mothers. In fact the mothers in these stories are often dead or absent. Since stories are selected for the magazine on the basis of how they fit together, it’s likely the editors detected a theme in the current batch of submissions. What is interesting is that all these stories are by men.

’The Hokkaido Exit’ by Dan McNeil is a more poetic piece that interweaves physics and metaphysics with images of the Japanese countryside. There is also a poem by Jon Brown called ‘Free’ which picks up on the nature image, but the brevity of the lines leads to a staccato rhythm that works against the poem. This may have been solved in part, by running some of the lines in longer and more variable lengths, yet the overly confined nature of the words also represents the static nature of the trees depicted, and in that respect the poet probably intended the lines to be confined as they are.

This is the first issue of the new look Whispers of Wickedness that I’ve seen. The quality of the writing has certainly gone up a notch. The formatting errors of the past have disappeared entirely, and if I had a quibble at all it’s that whisky is spelt without the ‘e’ - unless you’re Irish or American. I will not, however, name the guilty party (the misspelling appeared in only one story). But as far as I can make out, the author is neither Irish nor American…

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.