GUD, Issue #2, Spring 2008

GUD is an impressive magazine that offers around 200 pages of literary and genre fiction, poetry, and artwork. It is available in print, pdf, and e-book formats.

The stories in issue #2 tended to be rich with imagery and atmosphere. Perhaps they cluster around the literary or magical realist end of the fantastic spectrum. Some could definitely be horror (“By Zombies; Eaten”) or SF (“The Salivary Reflex”) yet have the texture often associated with literary fiction. But GUD comes from a tradition that strives to break down such boundaries.

One quibble: with just a look at this beautiful PDF I had a feeling this magazine was special. I wanted to know more about it—who publishes it, where it comes from, what its aims are. But the issue kicks off straight with table of contents and artwork, and then we’re into the stories themselves. I later found this information on the website, but it would have also been good to read this in the publication itself.

Anyway, onto the stories…

“El Alebrije” by D. Richard Pearce is partly narrated by a magically animated, rather mischievous ceramic butterfly—Alebrije—which flits about San José assisting its maker or “mother,” Natalie, a self-exiled American artist and self-educated bruja with Native roots.

Alibrije feeds on “dreams and nightmares”—for example, the rich visions contained in the paintings of a local artist. But if Alebrije might seem a more benign and rather cute version of the slake moths from China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, the creature shows a darker side when it puts the frighteners on a bigoted turista who angers Natalie.

The story is occasionally marred by stilted dialogue delivered by a close to standard-issue wise old codger speaking in proverbs. But he also has some sensible things to say when he tells Natalie that everyone “should be proud and fiercely protect their heritage, and whether is by birth or by choice is no import.” Identity and choice, exile and home emerge as the themes of this promising start to the issue.

And now for a bit of fun with “Four Torments and a Judgment” by Eric Williams. Important, midlevel demon Yarsloth is given the lowly task (”barely fit for a lower-caste imp”) of tormenting a paedophile cleric. While chafing at the indignity of it all, he finds the job much more difficult than he thought when the Reverend Simms actually shows signs of dedication and fearlessness. Has he been sent to torment the wrong guy? I had a feeling of déjà vu when I found myself negotiating this story’s infernal bureaucracy, but so what? It definitely drew some chuckles.

“Painlessness” by Kirstyn McDermott is one of the longer stories. Fleeing a traumatic druggie gothic past in Sydney, Faith is a newcomer to Melbourne where she scrapes by working as a telephone market researcher. When she is home with the flu, she is awakened by the sounds of extensive domestic violence next door. But it isn’t. Her neighbour, Mara, is a prostitute making the most of a condition where she doesn’t feel pain. But there is much more to it than that. Like “Alebrije,” this is an evocative piece that wears its mythical elements lightly.

This story too was subject to a few stylistic excesses:

“And even as Faith closes her eyes… a shored-up space within her cracks and splits and breaks wide open, and something far too familiar worms its way out, uncurls its long and greedy limbs, and laughs.”

That said, “Painlessness” boasts some characters and creates a vivid picture of precarious life on the fringes. I was rather sorry when it was over.

Jim Kacian’s “Watching the Playoffs” is a less than one-page something about staying at home with the flu and watching football on telly. Then the dog wants to go out and there’s a spot of haiku. Prose-poem or flash fiction? While neither are favourite forms, I tried to put my preconceptions aside. But this did strike me as pretentious, adorned with phrases such as “mild miasma,” “futility of resistance,” and redundancies such as “different variations.” Was it meant to be satire?

At the start of “The Disappearance of Juliana” by John Walters, Julianna herself is looking for a lost friend. She is informed by drunken associate that her ex-boyfriend, Greg, was taken by the “invisible people.” She starts off on a search that takes her to Rome, to India, and places beyond. There are occasional clichés and repetitions: a woman with eyes “bespoke wisdom,” and someone else with eyes that are “intense with wisdom and mystery.” But generally, there is a strong sense of place, pace, and character.

Meanwhile, Juliana’s abusive stepfather is looking for her. Though the initial viewpoint shift was confusing, I was quickly caught up by their respective journeys. Palpable menace builds as the stepfather pulls strings tighter around Juliana: consorting with shrinks and officials to draw up commitment documents, getting the American embassy and local authorities on his side, or selling her to a local brothel.

I have to say I had doubts about his ease in accomplishing these things, but also that I willingly suspended them. Tension and attention is maintained through to the end, but then the story collapsed. While I can appreciate the creative use of typography in fiction, here it seemed to be a substitute for effective description—and why settle for substitutes when Walters has already done it so well? Juliana realises the nature of the “invisible people,” and the explanation is rather rushed and formulaic. More typographical fun follows before Julianna contemplates just what she must leave behind to become truly invisible and free.

Time for some cyberstuff! In “Offworld Friends are Best,” Neal Blaikie lays on the racy pacy word play. Young Miri goes on a trip offworld, armed with some acid observations:

“You’d think we were back on Old Earth or something, all knives and forks and anus-clenching. Like I spected, tho: primitive.”

The style is reminiscent of Jeff Noon, but certainly not derivative. “The mind gloppens, flays open and sputters… Just you and me, kid and I can’t even twitter. Can’t flutter nor smack, nor crack nor chortle nor spin.” Someone is “simmer-faced and skulksome”; a room is like a “queenless box of bees.” Miri expresses anger at a “little flurp” who is a “sorry little pud of goo, you no-good tissue flask, you pee machine.” The twisted cyberspiel is also punctuated by some quieter and equally effective descriptions: a search for a friend ends “up against a wall of stone and old packed earth, of orange mould and vines of crinkled cellotree.”

Blaikie’s way with words is awesome. I pelted along with this stream of inventive invective, but every so often I had to stand back and think: who is this talking and do I really care much about them? For example, I only realised that Miri was female some way into the story. A lot happens to her in the course of her journey, but I couldn’t really engage with the character. And as much as I admired the author’s display of linguistic skill, the story left me cold in the end.

And it’s time for a family reunion in “Monkeyshine” by Hugh Fox. I suspected that a different time setting was involved when the narrator is welcomed by his “step-grandmother” and there is talk of insomnia problems getting engineered out of the gene bank. There is a lot of amiable chat and singing. I didn’t quite get the point of the story on either the first or second reading, though it did have a nice feel to it. I wondered if this was a kind of futuristic Royle family, though they do turn the telly off.

The protagonist of Jeremy C. Shipp’s “Baby Edward” has a monstrous baby brother called Edward kept out in a VW van. Baby Edward has sharp teeth, grows very large, and wrecks havoc. The protagonist’s girlfriend calls him Ed, so maybe Baby Edward is really his alter ego. Baby brother has a voracious appetite and gets very big. There’s something both arch and dreary about this story. Though written with some skill, this is another where I just had to go “Huh?” at the end.

Coming just after “Baby Edward,” the first paragraph of “Jamie Hawkins’ Muse” gave me a sinking feeling:

Jamie Hawkins, only child of an old mother, had a hump on his back and one leg three inches shorter than the other, so that he walked like a crab.

Would this be another tale of possibly allegoric grotesquery? But the next sentence proved me immediately wrong:

His heart, his mother said, was so big it nearly cracked his ribs. It was full with wanting to love so much that his chest ached with the trying.

Vanessa Gebbie crafts a subtle and affecting tale. It is full of emotion but never sentimental. After the death of his mother, Jamie gets a job at a mortuary. Jamie wants to be a poet, and a mortuary seems like the last place to find poetry. But most unexpectedly, he does. There is nothing overtly supernatural in this story, but it is extraordinary.

“Freight” by Joseph Love sometimes verges in the direction of a rambling shaggy dog story, but this effect suits the mood and setting. Young Skoke finds Artie riding a bike about the train tracks and invites him to his impoverished home with his mother and grandmother. They have just about enough food to offer dinner to the stranger, but Skoke is put in the position of violating Artie’s trust. He will have to decide how far he will go to do this. As it bleakly conjures up its rural locale and atmosphere, the story ends on a note of hope.

Alison has a sensory quirk, a kind of taste-oriented erotic synthesasia in “The Salivary Reflex.” She marries Tom because he tastes of oranges and wassail. Tina Connolly offers a story rich in the sensual details of smell and taste. Connolly has a keen eye for the details of changing relationships and desires, as she follows Alison through her romance and waning marriage with Tom, then her subsequent affairs.

Meanwhile, a race of chubby, pink, alien missionaries called the K-I land on Earth. Soon the alien missionaries come to make house-to-house calls in her neighbourhood. They look strangely at home in American suburbia with their symmetrical and “cotton-candy pinkness” with blue bellies. Alison is fascinated by them, while others denounce them as “sickos.” And she discovers that her taste for the unusual might make her ripe for conversion…

“Nan” by Scott Christian Carr is a post-holocaust story where “A Boy and His Dog” by Harlan Ellison meets Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Naturally, it is narrated by a dog. His owner, Nan, takes him through the ruins of a city and to a school where they discover an unusual treasure. They have a telepathic link, and Nan teaches him some new vocabulary. This is the kind of story that could be corny, but there are touches that guarantee it won’t be.

I do not like zombies. I’ll happily spend time with an erudite vampire or were-creature or any creature with a bit of character. But zombies are just too…well, they’re zombies. However, there appears to be a resurgence of the shambling dead. “By Zombies; Eaten” by Christopher Buecheler has got to be the third zombie story I’ve read this month. Is there a change afoot in zombie-dom? Let’s see.

As a plague of zombies overtakes the world, the job of a small-town U.S.A. sheriff lies mainly in destroying the zombies. There are graphic descriptions of the process, as well as the usual zombie gut munching and brain slurping. Zombies prefer to go for the big meals first; children tend to be the survivors of an attack, so the town has a lot of orphans that have to be looked after.

The sheriff is called in to dispose of the newly converted zombie mother of a small girl. The girl is in shock. Meanwhile, he discovers that his deputy has fallen victim. He decides not to consign the girl to the overflowing local orphanage, turns his back on the town, and takes off with the girl. Once she comes back to consciousness after her trauma, the girl shows the sheriff that she’s much tougher than he bargained for. He discovers there may well be hope for renewal and resistance residing in the new generation born into the zombie-ridden world. The combination—tough soldier defying the monsters with a prematurely wise young girl—recalls Ripley and Newt in the second Aliens film.

It is relationships among the living that come to the fore in “By Zombies; Eaten,” and this element carries it forward and makes it stand out as one of the best—even for a zombie-averse reader like myself!

“The Festival of Colour” by Paul Haines is another long piece with a good start. A lone backpacker calls into a hotel—with a suitably seedy staff—located in an isolated but beautiful mountain village in India. He is given three pots of pigment for the upcoming Festival of Colour. Holly, an attractive fellow traveller and long-term resident of the village, invites him in for a spot of skinny-dipping in the local lake. Then she tries to drown him and warns him that other people have even worse intentions.

The prose promises much as it describes both unworldly natural beauty and shabbiness existing side-by-side. I was intrigued by the Festival of Colour and the nature of the impending celebration. But when characters started waving knives at each other, it all got rather silly as the story plummets from mystery to melodrama. And when the protagonist discovers he is fated to play out a mythological role, it really lost my interest. Maybe if I were more familiar with the mythology I could appreciate it more. On the other hand, a story should be able to stand on its own two (or however many) feet whether or not its allusions are known by the reader.

Second only to my dislike of zombies is my lack of patience with stories where characters discover they are fated to play out mythological roles. But while the quality of the writing and human characterisation persuaded me to engage with “By Zombies; Eaten,” that effect was ultimately lacking here.

“closer in my heart to thee” by Jeff Somers is another post-holocaust and plague tale. Bobby’s lover has been stricken by a highly contagious virus called the Sweat, and she has to be isolated in her room. Their block of flats is in turn quarantined for a 20-day period, and the neighbours stay away from each other to avoid infection. Bobby is left alone to listen to Helen’s delirious dying moans for help that could never save her. However, Helen and Bobby had previously made an agreement that he would keep her isolated and live as long as he can.

Will he listen to her delirious pleadings and infect himself, or will he honour their agreement and survive? There is a poignant moment when they sing an old song together, but I did find the ending rather predictable.

With fifteen stories, this magazine is the size of a full anthology. Its scope is wide enough to please many tastes, as well as convince readers to immerse themselves in stories normally not to their tastes! And there is also a good helping of poetry that is diverse, yet shows a common creativity and fascination with language.

After reading the issue, I turned to the website to learn that GUD #2 had a theme: “Heaven, Earth, and Space in-between; it is touched by religion, grounded in technology and comfortable with the occult.” Again, I would have liked to read about this theme and how it evolved in the magazines itself. But still, with over 200 pages to read, I can’t complain too much. I look forward to the next issue.