Sur-noir 

submissions deadline: 20^th March 2012

All submissions for this issue to be sent toseinundwerdenguest@gmail.com

This issue will have a guest editor, who says:

“What I’m looking for is surreal noir: what I call ‘Sur-noir’.  I would define ‘surreal’ as anything that might be considered weird, dreamlike or nightmarish, illogical, or simply falling outside the genre of traditional realist fiction.  My definition of ‘noir’ here extends from that genre, with a capital ‘N’ (think Jim Thompson, Horace McCoy, Patricia Highsmith, etc.) to the detective genre (I’m especially fond of detectives who have an uncanny propensity for losing their footing, a la Quinn in Auster’s City of Glass, or the gumshoe of Abe’s Ruined Map), or indeed to any fiction that is, as the term literally denotes, ‘black’ (i.e. dark). The rest is up to you.”

Please submit all material to seinundwerdenguest@gmail.com

 Please note: This issue of Sein und Werden will be in PRINT ONLY. 

General submissions guidelines can be found at: www.kissthewitch.co.uk/seinundwerden/submissions.html

http://www.kissthewitch.co.uk/seinundwerden/oct11/index.html

Read at your peril. And don’t forget to take a map…

2009

ISBN: 978-1-907133-02-2

274 pages

£7.99 at www.doghornpublishing.com

Reviewed by Rachel Kendall

In Broken Symmetries Redwood pools together some of his most heinous characters and then lets them loose to break every commandment and rejoice in every sin. A motley crew of murderers, liars, perverts, capitalists, cannibals, mad scientists and evil doctors run rampage through the collection, creating mayhem and madness at the turn of every page. But this isn’t a book about good versus evil. Redwood has never done ‘black and white’. He doesn’t write science-fiction, horror, black comedy or surreal stories. He writes them all, at the same time, blending historical fact with futuristic theory.

‘And some of those commandments! No other gods: end of the pop music and film industry. No killing: end of the armaments industry. No bearing false witness: end of politics and international diplomacy. No coveting your neighbour’s cow or wife: end of capitalism and good healthy competition.’ Hot Cross Son

With such a weaving of different forms and themes, another author might create an altogether horrendous garment; an ill-fitting, itchy-scratchy coat of many colours and dangling threads. Broken Symmetries however, although not quite a one-size-fits-all, is a collection of perfectly stitched, snug works of fiction, sewn using the most basic human emotions – hunger, lust, anger, fear, guilt… the last of which is to be found in abundance. Marrying guilt to religion to sin, Redwood uses unconscious memory, secrets, childhood mistakes, peer pressure etc as tools to bring the guilt to the fore, whether in the heart-wrenching Epiphany in the Sun, the science-fiction style of Going Back or Expiry Date with its dreaded countdown to buried truths, it’s there, as retribution, punishment or revenge. It’s there in the body of Christ or a mere imitation; it’s there in the devil or his idle hands. It’s there in the titles – The Burden of Sin, Sacrifice, The Road to Damascus, Sanctuary, The Rosary, The Crucifixion Conspiracy – and it’s there between the lines.

‘But even this was still not absolutely pure sin. It was contaminated with flecks of remorse, twinges of conscience, fleeting desires of reparation and expiation, wisps of prayer, and other impurities.’ The Burden of Sin

Another theme that recurs in Redwood’s fiction is that of metamorphosis which, if you were to psychoanalyse these pieces (probably not a good idea!), would probably be entwined with the guilt factor – change and repression… Jekyll and Hyde.  From a simple tale of transformation into a cockatrice, to the biomedical uses of cloning, from transportation through TV, to women as library books waiting to be loaned…

‘Watching her undress that night, he noticed more signs of decay. Where the gold had flaked off, bruised flesh was showing through, and her body hair was beginning to show under her armpits, and on the lower part of her belly. As she got into bed, he noticed a slight odour. For the first time it entered his mind that she might actually die.’ Damaged

Or a straightforward mythological metamorphosis, such as in the brilliant and beautiful Circe’s Choice:

‘So I had only my hounds. When hunger pangs were not driving us wild, for the mariners learned to avoid our strait, when an autumn evening would lay itself around our cliffs and slowly, tantalizingly, draw back the veil and give us the gift of the stars shining over the Ausonian Sea, then, sometimes, we would know a moment of peace and instead of howling and snarling, the creatures that were now me would gaze at me with sad eyes full of questions, lick me and lay their heads on my unkissed breast.’

This is one of Redwood’s most atmospheric stories, but there are others. Redwood is, for the most part, a satirical writer, but when he turns his mind to love, for instance, he can produce something quite rapturous and passionate. You may have to look hard for the love, but it is there, dark, and demented and demonic.

‘Jeanne. Wild blonde hair that made you ache to catch it in your fingers, the great, solemn green eyes of her mother, freckles like daisies dotting the fields around the valley, child’s lips hinting at a woman’s heat.  Jeanne.’ Jeanne

If I were to scrunch up Redwood’s fiction to make it fit into a little box, that box would be labelled ‘absurd’. To me, absurdist fiction is a weaving of black humour and satirical horror, and Broken Symmetries is both of these. Admittedly some of these stories will threaten to make you lose reason, such as Keeping it in the Family, a Sadeian farce with a sci-fi twist that will leave your head spinning, but that’s what happens when you let someone like Redwood loose with a pen. All in all this is a slippery set of stories whose images linger long after the story has ended and which might, quite possibly, leave you reeling. 

‘… in the best places they stuff Rover in a sack, and beat him with iron bars for fifteen minutes or so before finishing him off. Because the pain and fear of the dog sends adrenaline into the mashed-up body, giving it that extra piquant flavour to delight the palate of that creature ‘made in the image of God’. Bait

2011

ISBN: 13: 9781884097423

338 pages

$16.15 at Amazon.com

Reviewed by Marc Lowe

Yuriy Tarnawsky is a unique find.  Nobody on earth writes like he writes.  I will not take up space discussing his impressive background here, for I have already done so in my review of his earlier collection of “mini-novels,” Like Blood in Water, but what I will say is that his tales/tails, in this case taking the form of 24 distinct-yet-related “prose pieces,” continually surprise, confound, and, yes, entertain as well.

The collection opens with the truly short tale “receding” (all titles are presented in lowercase lettering, so I will follow this precedent), a work in which a man notices that his left eye is creating a distorted image of the world.  When he goes to the mirror to have a look, it turns out that the entire “left side of his face in fact has gotten smaller and grown flaccid, wrinkled, like the skin of an elephant.”  Eventually, the entire left side of the man’s body shrinks, followed by the right, leaving “nearly all eye” and vanishing into the horizon at “the speed of light.”  But this is just the tip of a very strange iceberg…

Many of the protagonists of these tales seem to be lost in a sort of hazy, unpleasant dream from which they cannot wake.  For instance, in “the albino inside you” (written in second person), the “you” figure is sure that he has seen a white-colored apparition flit by, and he convinces himself that the apparition, when it again appears, will take the form of a “tall and heavy” albino man who will be waiting for him in the bathroom.  He obsesses on the idea, though the albino is never there.  Later, “you” becomes convinced that this albino exists within himself as a sort of evil alter ego, and that he might encounter (and be forced to confront) him anywhere: on the streets, in a café, etc.  Much of the story is set in Vienna, there is a young psychiatrist character, and individual dreams are both described in detail and analyzed, suggesting that much of what “you” are experiencing could indeed be part of a diseased (Freudian) dreamscape, or else a symptom of madness.  And what to make of the fact that there is a character named Frau Braun, not to mention that “you” is fairly certain he has glimpsed an angel’s “right wing”?

The albino is not the only apparition—perceived or otherwise—to appear in the collection.  At the end of “smoke,” the protagonist Rauch, whose house has been struck by lightening, realizes that he himself has died and become a ghost.  The first hint of this comes when a man wearing black looks straight through him at a coffee shop.  He flees the shop in terror and, once outside, sees his old friend who had died months earlier approaching with outstretched hand, a sure sign that both are phantoms.  Another “tail/tale” in which the protagonist—in this case also the narrator—realizes that he is in fact dead is “father,” though here there is a curious and clever swapping of personalities/bodies reminiscent of the ending of Poe’s famous döppelganger tale, “William Wilson.”  The narrator eventually realizes how similar his father’s hands were to his, as well as the shape of his nose and the look of his skin.  And so:

Disturbed, perturbed, I want to check this, hope it’s untrue, get up, walk over to the mirror on the nearby wall, stop, look, stand stunned, aghast! —There, staring at me out of the leaden surface, out of the florid, floral, ornate, golden baroque frame is my father’s face—not his likeness, spit and image, but exact, his actual face, him!  So it’s not I who stands in front of the mirror but my father, that is I am the father and not the son! (265)

From the get-go, the narrator of this episode seems quite confused; he cannot, for instance, remember that his father had died twenty-six years ago.  Similarly, the narrator of “the pain machine”—which plays with the French word for bread (“pain”) and the English word “pain”—does not remember very many details about his own situation.  The opening line begins: “I was for some reason in Puerto Vallarta—I can’t remember why—and found myself at a garden party…”  This uncanny sense of not knowing how one has arrived at where one is pervades many tales in the collection, and lends to them an uncertain, oneiric quality.  What the narrator here discovers is that what he had thought to be a bakery van (i.e. where “Pain Machine” would translate to “Bread Machine”) is in actuality a vehicle in which the “white object in the window” is a man who screams while being tortured, the sound of his voice pumped through a loudspeaker for the sake of “entertainment,” though he, and others like him, never receive “much more than the minimum wage.”  The tale reminded this writer of Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” though here the twist is even more cruel when one considers that the underpaid, presumably third-world workers alluded to voluntarily subject themselves to the worst forms of torture for such little money (the screams, the narrator says before he realizes that they are in fact screams, were “reminiscent of Eastern singing—Arabic or Indian—but harsher, with passages in it more like moans or screams of pain than music”). 

Another “political” tale is “lenin’s brain,” wherein Wally Uhland buys an item during a Columbus Day sale for only $1.90 that turns out to be a human brain.  He wonders whose it is and determines, after thinking about it for a time, that as it couldn’t be Whitman’s or Stalin’s, etc., it must be Lenin’s.

Lenin?  Yes, he thought Lenin’s brain had been removed from his body.  The body was embalmed and lay in the Kremlin, so the brain must have been removed…. Old Egyptians removed all internal organs of bodies they embalmed…. And he was almost certain he had read that Lenin’s brain had been carefully studied. (114)

Having made this discovery, Wally then proceeds to become just like Lenin; he has dreams of Lenin’s Russia, grows his beard in a similar fashion, fixes himself cabbage soup, and, finally, takes a trip to St. Petersburg (“Leningrad”), where he all but forgets how to speak in his native tongue, English.  (By the bye the brain, which rots despite refrigeration, is eventually dumped into the trash.) 

The other tales are equally unique and surprising; one can expect to encounter missing fingers, roses tattooed on foreheads, earthquakes that go on and on (and that seem to be related directly to a character’s state-of-mind), an acrobat named after the author of the Sherlock Holmes series who spits fire and tries to make his body form a perfect cube, a boy obsessed with peeking—and eventually crawling (much like the boy in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum)—under women’s skirts, and, finally, a yellow streetcar that has no name (to desire) and whose destination is tenuous, at best. 

The collection in its entirety is both cohesive and utterly satisfying.  One way the short works are tied together is through (realistic or artificial) nature imagery: a great number of these “prose pieces” end with the sun, the horizon, the sea.  Another device employed is that many of the names of the protagonists start with the letter “R,” e.g. Rooke, Rauch, Rick, etc.  (It’s impossible not to think of Roark, from Tarnawsky’s previous collection, as not also belonging to this family of Rs.)  Finally, all of the prose works in the book are relatively short—the shortest being the “bookend” pieces at 5-6 pages each, and the longest running about 40 pages—and all have a particular “feel” or atmosphere or style to them, despite the range of subject matter, wildly divergent imagery, differing POVs, etc.  This makes the collection read almost like a loosely-told novel-in-stories: nothing here is random or extraneous, nothing misplaced.

Tarnawsky’s 24 “prose pieces” are at turns strange, intense, hilarious, erudite, sur / ir-real, uncanny, symbolic, thought-provoking, disturbing, sexy, horrific, delightful… The book is truly a box of surprises, and if you haven’t yet read one of Yuriy Tarnawsky’s sui generis novels or collections, it is a great place to start.  Short Tails is anything but short on innovation and originality; in fact, it’s one of the most original works this writer has read in ages.

About Yuriy Tarnawsky (from the back of the book):

Yuriy Tarnawsky has authored twenty collections of poetry, seven plays, eight books of fiction, a biography, and numerous articles and translations.  He was born in Ukraine but raised and educated in the West.  A linguist by training, he has worked as a computer scientist specializing in natural language processing and as professor of Ukrainian literature at Columbia University.  He writes in Ukrainian and English.

His books include the novels Meningitis and Three Blondes and Death, as well as a collection of mininovels, Like Blood in Water, all from FC2, and Ukrainian Dumy, a translation of Ukrainian epic poetry published by Harvard University.

~

About Marc Lowe:

 Marc Lowe is the author of a chapbook and an e-book, both from ISMs Press (2010).  He lives in Japan with his wife and baby daughter.

The print issue of this October’s METROPOLIS-themed Sein und Werden is now available.

With fiction and poetry from Neddal Ayad, Sara Bickley, Defne Cizakca, Neil Ellman, John Greiner, Richard Gessner, Zachary Scott Hamilton, Rhys Hughes, Mat Joiner , A J Kirby,  Roberta Lawson, W L N Smith, J J Steinfeld and Steve Toase, this is a super duper bumper issue you just don’t want to miss.

Order your copy now for £4.50 inc p+p. Paypal seinundwerden@gmail.com

Or subscribe to 4 issues for only £16.00.

It’s a BARGAIN!

The web version is soon to be announced, with more fiction from Richard Gessner, Rhys Hughes and W L N Smith, along with some fantastic images and text from B Drew Collier, Nicole Votta, Beau Johnson, Mark Howard Jones and many more. However, due to a minor glitch it is going to be a little delayed. Watch this space for news.

In the meantime, the next theme is FUTURISM, deadline 20th December. Check out the general submission guidelines here: www.kissthewitch.co.uk/seinundwerden/submissions.html

Megazanthus Press

2011

ISBN: 978-1-4477-5735-1

324 pages

£10

Available from Amazon

Reviewed by Nick Jackson

This review is hugely biased. After all, I have a story in this collection myself, so I’m hardly likely to rubbish any of my fellow writers.  I’ve avoided comparative judgements in the interests of assessing it as a collective effort rather than a competition of egos.  This anthology of anthologies encouraged quite an indulgence of literary themes and perhaps might have ended up as the worst kind of exercise in authorial navel-gazing but somehow, with the kind of quirky twitch of the tail that characterises any DF Lewis enterprise, it has escaped that worst of fates.  Reading this book is a bit like looking into one of those kaleidoscopes in which, with the effect of light and a few bits of mirror, the plastic pieces turn into minutely varied patterns.  So, the elements of anthology and horror are interpreted with each writer’s idiosyncrasies to create a kind of Borgesian nightmare – libraries within libraries, books within books.

There are common themes and references in all of the stories, above and beyond the obvious, giving rise to my conviction that all of the writers here are recording a common cultural phenomenon: a disintegration of meaning and a deep fear of what lies beyond.  I was reminded, at some point, of the opening of Sartre’s “Nausea” in which the narrator begins to experience a visceral horror of the concrete object.  The characters in the stories often touch the real world and recoil – preferring the insubstantial world of ideas to the horror of the mundane.

In “It’s Only Words”, the fine first piece in the anthology, the protagonist uses fragments of texts to cocoon his victims, thereby relieving the thunderous discourse of the inner voices that poison his existence but, as people around him begin to lose their ability to communicate, he fears he has become the agent of this linguistic decay and the final impression is of a world spiralling into chaos.  “You Walk the Pages” by Mark Valentine deals with a similarly autistic-seeming individual who uses horror stories as a way of getting back at people who offend him, like the lady in the chip shop, by substituting their names for the characters in the stories and making them suffer the same fate, or worse.  It is the hilariously deadpan first person narrator that made the story work so well.  “The Rediscovery of Death” by Mike O’Driscoll, features a struggling small press publisher in search of a winning title to keep the publishing wheels turning and a shadowy character offering some kind of Faustian bargain.  A down-to-earth girlfriend provides the rational viewpoint.  The horror anthology becomes, for the publisher, a horrific anthology.  This is a story about literary obsession and also, crucially, about the disintegration of meaning.

Other stories are themselves fragmented like Chinese puzzles in which the reader has to piece together the meaning from sparse clues.  S.D. Tullis’s “Horror Planet” consists of a deconstructed narrative that flits between scraps of seemingly random thought, depicting, in a few short pages, a kind of planetary collapse.  I loved the frantic pace of this story.  “The Useless”  is Dominy Clements’ totally unconventional contribution to this anthology.  It’s brutally short and it succeeds, with charming simplicity, in confusing the hell out of you whilst leaving you on the lingering verge of understanding.

“Flowers of the Sea” by Reggie Oliver follows the physical and mental decay of an artist, as told by her husband, whose slowly dawning consciousness of the process of the disease has a haunting emotional depth.  The narrator’s realisation of his own mortality is rendered with great skill.  The story seems to draw out the themes of the collection’s other narratives, to focus their sometimes only half-expressed ideas, with a disturbing clarity.

In Joel Lane’s “Midnight Flight” an elderly man, in the grip of dementia, seems only half aware that he is out of kilter with the modern world but forms a fierce determination to track down a half-remembered book of horror stories from his childhood.  As he searches, his childhood memories surge up to obliterate the present.  The quest for the book becomes a quest for the book’s author and ultimately for the remaining shreds of his own identity.  The story gives us an exquisitely detailed description of the process of amnesia and the stories, the memories of stories, that we cling to when we are out of touch with all else in this fast-disintegrating world.

In “Tears of the Mutant Jester”, the books themselves become sick, vomiting indigestible words and having to be relieved of their unnecessary appendices.  Rhys Hughes’ brightly punning narrative transforms the darker subtext of horror like a breath of fresh air.  Where other authors see an opportunity for expressing angst, Hughes seizes the chance to make us laugh at this literary conceit – books have feelings too!

Thornton Excelsior, Rhys Hughes’, character understands the power of books and the words they contain as much as any of this collection’s authors.  We spend so much time in the company of printed words that we know their power: their ability to create or destroy, to provoke wars and reduce men to quivering wrecks, to inspire love and devotion and to raise our eyes to beauty.  Books are the driving force of many of the characters’ lives.  In D.P. Watt’s story, “All Your Worldly Goods”, we are introduced to the deceptively cosy world of a charity shop volunteer.  His carefully regulated life is gradually undermined when a mysterious man brings a fateful book into the shop.  The very ordinariness of the man’s life, its petty jealousies and creeping sense of worthlessness creates a profoundly moving setting.

In several of the stories, the process of writing itself is evoked in all its arduousness – the anxiety, the growing sense of purposelessness and the sheer bloody-minded determination to define the indefinable, half aware that, in the very act of creating, the author destroys the very thing he is trying to perfect, the beauty of the idea submitted to the harsh and sometimes ugly reality of ink and paper.  Oh the horror!   “The Writer” by Clayton Steelback draws on this creative struggle.  The story gradually assumes an uncomfortable presence in the writer’s life, becoming ever more concrete until an evil character breaks through into real life.  The horror of nightmares becoming flesh crops up in several of the stories.  As authors perhaps we are more than usually susceptible to this illusion or delusion, perhaps because we are always striving to model characters from real life.  I’m surely not the only author to feel confused as to whether a memory of an incident is from real-life or one I imagined for some self-created literary world.  Perhaps it’s the first sign of madness.   Rosanne Rabinowitz’s finely detailed study of a woman’s search for a book she once picked up in the school library acknowledges the power of books as totems, somehow focusing a person’s entire worldview.  The story within this story develops the idea of feelings or ideas transforming people’s lives –either for the better – a pearl, or for the worse – a boil.  The story’s psychological depth allows the reader to appreciate the symbolic power of the book.   A girl and boy encountered in a field of flowers, provides a sort of Arcadian vision for the story’s protagonist, towards which she strives.  Flowers and plants are symbols of love but, later, in a different story within the story, another plant engulfs and digests the girl who tends it.

In other stories plants poison or become symbols of annihilation as in “Flowers of the Sea”.  In “The Writer”, a vase is transformed into a multi-stemmed plant that scatters its spores and invokes a state of madness.  “Tree Ring Anthology” by Daniel Ausema subverts the tree’s image as a thing of beauty, usefulness, permanence and shelter.   The story cleverly uses the concentric pattern of the tree’s rings to document the aftermath of an environmental catastrophe.  Subverting symbols of innocence, transforming them into objects of corruption and decay is a common technique used by writers of horror, but Ausema’s story is perfectly original in its execution.

Werner Herzog said that the thing to be avoided at all costs, in cinematic terms,  is the clichéd image, as presented through the lens of any Hollywood movie.   The stories in this anthology avoid the clichés of horror, either by creating fresh sources of disturbance or by getting inside the horror image to dissect its psychological power.  In “Common Myths and Misconceptions Regarding Rita Kendall”, A.J. Kirby exposes the world of an aging horror starlet whose famous scream is subjected to analysis by a bored magazine writer who thereby uncovers the star’s secret source of guilt.  As Rita Kendall’s shadowy doppelganger is slowly and clumsily sleuthed out by the hack we slowly witness the pain behind the melodrama and the emptiness of the celebrity life that conceals it.

“The American Club” also features a doppelganger, of sorts.  The narrator delves into the enigma of his dying father’s writing but uncovers an unpalatable explanation for his father’s refusal to publish his work.  This is an intense study of the subconscious.  A ruined building with its decaying staircases and abandoned cellars acts as a metaphor for the writer’s twisted imagination and reflects an over-arching theme of this collection – the horror of the literary imagination.  As writers in search of horror we become subjects of our own literary endeavours.  What could be worse?  The author, Christopher Morris, is astute enough to leave the ending insubstantial, to give the reader the merest hint of the dark truth.

By contrast, Rachel Kendall’s “Horror Stories For Boys” shows no restraint in revealing the brutality of an abusive father and the traumatic effects of his up-bringing on the son who returns to his childhood home to remember, with the aid of a book of horror stories, and rekindle his hatred of his father.  But it’s the final scene, as he visits his dying father in hospital which carries the full sting of this powerful narrative.  This is a story full of light and darkness and a terrifying realism.

A gentler pace is set in Tony Lovell’s “The Follower”.  This story works, like Rosanne Rabinowitz’s, more as a study of the totemic power of books, than as a straight ‘horror’ story.  Yet, there is definitely something unsettling in the idea of books, especially those read in childhood, which influence our lives, almost as if they had been the blueprint for the way we react to others, shaping our actions and  defining our prejudices.  The story consists of little more than episodes from a woman’s life – as a young girl, a mother and later as a dementing old woman.  Apparently minor details acquire a mesmerising significance as her life concertinas itself, folds in with the precision of origami, so as to make her life seem very short indeed.  Perhaps this is Lovell’s horror; I was unsure, but entranced nevertheless.

Another story, equally chilling in its ability to reveal the power of stories to corrupt our lives, is Colin Insole’s “The Apoplexy of Beelzebub”.  Insole has created a city somewhere between a fantasy city and a city in Britain’s North East, Hull comes to mind, in which a daughter strives to get away from her wicked (step?) mother and the poisonous web of libel and gossip which festers in the city archives.  Is the daughter in control of her destiny of not?  Will she escape the web of words?

“Residua” is ostensibly a story about a prisoner who is, by all accounts, innocent of the crime of which he’s accused.   The characters and setting evoke the prisoner’s world, but it’s the story’s growing sense of unease that goes beyond the setting and presents the reader with a disturbingly surreal conclusion.  With its flashbacks and character transpositions, this should have been a confusing piece but it is anchored by a strong pair of central characters and worked beautifully.

“The Fifth Corner” by E. Michael Lewis is a well-written story that might have made its way into any collection of horror fiction.  It’s the story which stands out for me as being less concerned with the world of literature and ideas and more with the standard tropes of the horror genre:  a struggle against a manifestation of evil.  It kept me on the edge of my seat and turning the pages but I was aware, even as I admired its technical skill, of the extent to which its central “horror image” was familiar to me from films and stories within the genre.  The protagonist, unlike many of the other characters in this collection, seems to emerge unchanged by his experience.   It serves as a reminder of what it is about “horror” that the small press and particularly the slipstream is so good at subverting.

As horror collections go, this anthology is more existentially unsettling than comfortably frightening.  There are very few references to evil and more of an exploration of the psychology of fear: our fear of disease, corruption and death.  There are plagues of words that express nothing and stories within stories that go nowhere.  The authors in this collection seem to understand that true horror is that which is not explicit or definite or resolved.  They may use gods or myths (their own created mythologies) to evoke a sense of horror or reveal lives of astounding banality, echoing our own.   They lead us to the abyss and force us to look down, but it seems we are looking inwards at ourselves and there we encounter the worst horror of all.

Duties will vary and may include:

- reading submissions in the first instance

- proof-reading, editing and type-setting

- Using Word and creating a final draft as a pdf

This is a new role and may change over time as required. It is a position for ISMs Press (NOT Sein und Werden), however it may be that I require assistance with certain aspects of the zine on occasion. It is also a voluntary position. I am therefore looking for an enthusiastic individual, able to give up a decent amount of their time.

________________________

Also required – an individual with knowledge/experience of marketing in the world of the small press. Duties will include all or some of the following: publicizing the chapbooks, organizing events, maintaining a blog and liaising with other publishers/editors/authors.

________________________

I have decided to create these positions as I would like to expand ISMs Press but feel unable the manage the workload myself. I would also appreciate the fresh perspective new team members could bring.

Once again, please note these positions are voluntary as ISMs Press is a non-profit-making venture. A love of the written word, a shared interest in bringing literature to a wider audience, an understanding of the work ISMs Press seeks to publish, and an appreciation of why we pour our hearts and souls into keeping the small press alive are what I ask for if we are to work together.

If either (or both) of these positions sounds inviting, drop me a line at ismspress@gmail. com explaining briefly why you would like to join the team and what skills/experience/interest you have.

http://www.kissthewitch.co.uk/seinundwerden/ismspress.html

with every issue of Sein und Werden/Wunderkammer I’ll be giving away a FREE copy of Tantra Benkso’s brand new, limited edition chapbook ‘The Cabinet of What You Don’t See’.

Of the chapbook, author Alana Capria says, ‘ In Tantra Bensko’s The Cabinet of What You Don’t See, the dreamlike stories build upon one another slowly, as the cabinet drawers open to reveal the many surreal, mythical, and dangerous parts. Delicate owls exist in conjunction with reptilian things that invade our beings and little winged dolls prance across the page, ignorant of their sexuality. Bensko’s writing is methodical in its lyricism. Her stories read like poems, beautiful sentences woven together that churn like waves as dog bodies eat and vomit one another over and over again.‘

Welcome to the magical world of Tantra Bensko. This esteemed author has contributed to Sein und Werden a number of times, and this online issue (coming very soon; watch this space) will feature 3 of her images.

The Cabinet of What You Don’t See will soon be available to buy for £2.50/$5.50 or FREE with the Wunderkammer issue of Sein und Werden.

For just £4.50/$8.50 you could find yourself one happy owner of a wunderkammer within a wunderkammer.

This summer issue of Sein und Werden includes fiction and poetry by Elaine Borthwick, Dave Chambliss, Dave Early, Richard Gessner, Richard Godwin, Jack D Harvey, Nick Jackson, Mark Howard Jones, Shannon Quinn and Graham Tugwell, with a selection of creatures by Suzanne Norris, let loose from their cabinet for these pages only.

Pre-order your copy of Sein und Werden or The Cabinet of What You Don’t See now. Just drop me a line at seinundwerden at gmail dot com

Sein und Werden is one of those great little magazines that cannot be pigeonholed but is always guaranteed to delight, shock and infuriate. Is it a horror magazine, a very, very dark fantasy publication, literature, avant garde? Well, all of those things and none. And, like a pill that will be good for you, it must be swallowed whole.