The Town Drunk, March 2008

In “The Importance of Portents” in the March, 2008, issue of The Town Drunk, Zoltan doesn’t have much magical ability but hasn’t had much competition. Until now. One by one, his demon and assistant abandon him and go to work for the machine.

“You focus on your question, gaze through the window, and up from the murky depths of the—‘Phantasmagorical Eternal Ether,’ they call it—floats your answer. Then a little bell rings, and from out of a slot in the base comes a small rectangle of paper with that answer in tiny red print. As a bonus, it also gives your lucky numbers.”

All Zoltan’s customers are lined up for their turn for a fraction of the truckles they paid him in the past. So he decides to demonstrate to them all the power of his curses.

Jason E. Thummel’s story is well-paced, with clever writing, large does of sarcastic humor, and an ending befitting a “great and glorious augur.”

Instead of lounge lizards doing the club crawl, Tim W. Burke takes us into a world where fiends, demons, and assorted villains come up for a showdown with two notorious vampire huntresses when “Lampreyhead Meets the Vampire Slaughterers”

Bonita Poole “killed the undead just so she could brag to them about having killed them.” And “Jonquil Holliday: Supernatural Marshal for the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts.”

But the spirits are so excited by the sights, they take over the entertainment. Lampreyhead has a plan:

“Listen, ladies,” I interjected, “only two of you actually started out as vampire slaughterers. The rest of you are people who have become trapped and tailored to be what the spirits prefer. Really, you have to disperse before the entire population of metropolitan Montreal is turned into hard-hitting paranormal heroines with complicated personal lives. ”

[…] “Why is it that you the gruesome one must bother these beautiful cheres?” […] The werewolf smiled. “There is always danger with certain femmes. They are beautiful and deadly like knives. To have so many, it is the giant Cuisinart of love set on ‘grind’.”

Almost every sentence of “Lampreyhead Meets the Vampire Slaughterers” is a one-liner or parody of paranormal romance and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Every time I read it, I found something else and laughed harder. I’ve always loved the interjection of foreign language phrases, and the French gives this additional panache.