Something Wicked, Issue 6, Summer 2008

On my personal world map of fantastic fiction, South Africa is one of the areas marked “here be dragons,” because I don’t know what else to put there. If the same applies to you, here to amend that is Something Wicked, South Africa’s only quarterly magazine of science fiction and horror (so here there not be dragons after all).

Issue 6 contains an impressively broad range of material: not just fiction, but also reviews (of books, films, and video games); interviews (with début novelist S.A. Partridge and actor Jolene Blalock); and features on the history of SF (the whole lot squeezed into four pages!) and the Indiana Jones movies (which, excellently, interviews a local archaeologist to compare Indy’s exploits to the profession in reality). There are even the four finalists in a short-short story competition, with the winner to be decided by a text message ballot. Living outside South Africa, I can’t vote myself, alas; but, though all four pieces have their strengths and flaws, I would go for Brett Venter’s “Step Right Up,” in which an “electric vampire” introduces himself. He was a programmer involved in a project to transfer a human mind into the network; he successfully transferred himself, becoming the equivalent of a vampire in the process. I love the idea, and the half-joking (but only half) prose style; but if only we could see the vampire in action, instead of him telling us everything.

Which brings me to the main part of the magazine: the fiction. Here, again, there is a nicely wide range of styles and approaches. Relatively light is Abigail Godsell’s “Making Waves.” Nathan Radley is more interested in the attentions of the hottest girl in school than in the water currently leaking into his classroom—until, that is, Nathan notices the room flooding and realises he’s the only person who can see it. Godsell successfully combines a genuine aura of menace around the invading water with the too-true depiction of a high-school jock (Nathan “has no interest in kids who wear glasses, particularly if they aren’t girls”) and adds a neat vein of humour, with her ending turning the tale into a kind of shaggy-dog story. On the downside, Godsell hammers home the notion of Mysterious Water That Nobody Notices a little too insistently at the beginning, and the ending comes in too much of a rush, leaving an unanswered question or two. Still, “Making Waves” is as much fun to read as I’d imagine it was for its author to write.

In “Without Face” by Michael Bailey, Saul Pravat has been (he claims) followed from a strip club by a woman without a face. The story intercuts between those events and a police officer questioning Saul about them, and why he has blood on his shirt. It wasn’t until a short way into the story that I realised how the closing words of each short scene are reflected in the opening of the next. At first, I thought this was artful, but a bit too clever. Only as the tale progressed did it become clear just how integral the technique is to the story. It interlocks present and past tightly, to the extent that they collide into one another, and you end up not knowing quite what you’ve just read, except that it was a thrilling jolt to the synapses.

Another highly affecting piece, though in a different way, is “Eyes” by Inge Papp. It’s the story of Bernard Geldenhuys, a bank manager who one day starts to see eyes everywhere, and is apparently the only person who can do so. Papp’s story succeeds primarily because it’s so wonderfully creepy. It’s not often I have such vivid mental pictures from reading a story as I did with this one; the thought of finding an eye staring up at you from the bottom of a mug is…enough to induce a nervous glance at the cup of tea resting on my desk as I type these words. I did finish the story unsure how well it hung together as a whole (I couldn’t work out whether the eyes were meant as a metaphor or something else). In fairness, reading “Eyes” back, I realise this was partly because I overlooked something. Even so, I can’t shake my reservations entirely, but I warmly recommend reading the story and seeing for yourself.

I’m pretty sure, though, that Widaad Pangarker’s “Day of the Whales” doesn’t work as well as it might—which is a shame, because it starts so well. A coastal town, whose economy relies on the tourism created by the presence of whales, is turned upside down on a day when seven whales are beached and the mysterious Gabriel arrives. Gabriel has the power, it appears, to heal even incurable ailments—but at a price. Not everyone is content to pay that price, however….Pangarker’s writing is beautiful and atmospheric (notably in a haunting scene in which the townspeople stone someone to death for killing the beached whales). But the tale comes unstuck at the end, which seems to wrap things up too quickly, leaving too much unexplored.

“Asylum” by Roe Malan begins with an unnamed man waking up in his hospital bed and following a nurse through the asylum’s corridors, encountering on the way other strange figures that the nurse appears to ignore. It transpires that all this is, if not exactly a dream, then certainly something other than reality, for “The Patient” is really Brandon, a photographer who was exploring the old asylum with his sister and two others—and he can’t seem to shake off the experience. Malan’s story has some evocative prose (”Memories struck him hard and fast, rushing back into his head as if they had nipped out for a drink and were ashamed to return so late”), an intriguing premise, and a satisfying conclusion that ties up just enough loose ends. It’s one of my favourite stories in a magazine full of enjoyable reads.

Going back to the beginning, then, if you don’t know the South African genre scene—and particularly if you don’t know Something Wicked—I would suggest it’s time to get acquainted.