Midnight Street #10

Midnight Street is a 56-page saddle-stapled A4 magazine with a color cover. It doesn’t have the classiest production quality, but what’s between the covers is what matters. Its subtitle, “Journeys Into Darkness,” doesn’t particularly apply to the contents of issue #10, but that’s not the fault of the contents, which, although they don’t necessarily fill out the strap-line of “horror dark fantasy science fiction slipstream,” they do fit somewhere within it.

The first story, “Ghosts” by Al Robertson, is science fiction with, as you might guess from the title, a hint of horror. Craven is on a salvage mission, hunting for one of the disused missile platforms orbiting a derelict Earth, hoping to make his fortune and so be able to chuck his current job. Against the odds, he finds a platform and goes aboard, but it doesn’t appear to be quite as deserted as it should be, with well-handled increasing foreboding. Eerie and unsettling, with a neat, unexpected ending.

“Old Wounds” by Andrew Humphrey is well structured in alternative times five years apart, distinguished by different tenses. It’s a surprisingly gripping tale of the extraordinary impinging upon the ordinary, yet there’s no hint of a speculative element. An underlying subtext concerning the true relationships of the five main characters keeps the reader guessing what is really going on, while pithy quotidian details root the story firmly in familiar reality. Ingenious and intriguing.

Joel Lane’s “Into the Garden” tells of a lonely student in a new city who finds herself subject to lurid dreams—but are they just dreams? Written in sparse, direct prose in diary form, this story grabs the attention. Its balance of mystery and everyday detail forms a beguiling narrative, leading the reader to a strange, unexplained, and undeniably dark place. Excellent.

“Gaining a Loss” by Gary McMahon is a frame story about a shallow loner who believes he has cancer, but it didn’t work for me. The framing device—a tale told by a doctor to his five-a-side football friends—left me wanting to know more of the characters listening to the story, while the story itself was unconvincing. Perhaps it was meant to be humorous—if so, I didn’t get the joke.

Stephen Gallagher’s “Dead Man’s Handle” is a reminiscence of a young man’s incongruous summer job in an amusement park, with convincing characters and a real setting. It’s a story of possibly supernatural happenings to some ordinary and vaguely unbelievable characters—though the first-person narrator comes across as decent and honest, which might be expected. The dead man’s handle of the title is a removable device—like a key—that needs to be in place in order for a train to run. In this case, it’s a miniature train for carrying children and their parents around the park. The driver, however, is an odd, sullen character who possesses hidden, possibly unsavory depths. A spooky tale, its spookiness enhanced by the wild imagination of its young narrator.

In Simon Bestwick’s gritty “Left Behind,” some lowlife youth attempts to rise above his current existence—except that he does it in the worst way, a criminal way. The first-person narration gives a realistic feel to the story, which goes some way to compensate for the main character’s lack of any self-motivated actions. A hint of the surreal brings this short piece to a close, and the reader might be glad to be “left behind.”

There’s more than a little of the surreal in Heather Richardson’s “Chilled,” a story of a black English youth working his way across America. He takes low-paying jobs as he finds them, and one job he finds—or rather, that finds him, is working for an Elvis impersonator who also displays special exhibits, for a fee, inside his enormous trailer. This is a fun story, told with many a wry turn of phrase, and my favorite of this issue.

“Dazzle” by Nina Allan is rich in reminiscence and subtext, as the first-person narrator remembers her Aunt Anne—not a real aunt, but her next-door neighbor, with whom she kept in touch when she moved away. There’s no speculative element, and “Dazzle” doesn’t need one, being an evocation of memories versus aspirations, past versus future, things versus people. Thoughtful and expertly delivered.

This issue of Midnight Street also contains one poem: “Tin Lizzie’s Saloon 1886″ by Cathy Buburuz—short and evocative, but it seems to stop at the very point that something is about to happen.

There’s no shortage of nonfiction. Michael Lohr interviews both Neil Gaiman and Harry Harrison, as well as furnishing a column entitled “The Mystic’s Bardo: Nazi Gold, Hitler’s DNA and the Lost Land of Thule,” which touches on UFO conspiracy theory. Editor Trevor Denyer interviews Stephen Gallagher and reviews novels along with A. C. Evans. Allen Ashley, in his “Planet Dodo” column, rants about the way TV intrudes on privacy in similar fashion to his column that used to appear in The Third Alternative.

This is a packed issue with much to suit different tastes: insightful reviews, informative interviews, and engaging columns, with a high standard of fiction making up the not inconsiderable bulk of the magazine.