Previous | Next "The Ascent of the North Face" is a lesson in building up and sustaining an amusing (but not hilarious) joke. Written in the format of diary entries penned by an explorer, the story details a gruelling climb across cruel and frigid conditions; only, a climb to where? I can't tell you -... Continue Reading →
Previous | Next A skeleton pig dreams of spring in the depths of winter. In its search for heat, it meats a butcher - and finds heat in the least likely of places. I read this in a particularly melancholy mood while listening to joik music (recommended me by a friend), and snow has covered... Continue Reading →
Hullo, intrepid reader. I'm incapable of prying my eyes away from Adrian Tchaikovsky's City of Last Chances and so I cannot offer a pithy short story review. What I can do instead, however, is show you my artwork. It's not particularly good - I've only been learning to draw through 21draws.com for the last few... Continue Reading →
https://youtu.be/zF2NILz_yj4 Give a man a card game and he'll log thirty hours into it without a second thought. Give a man a dice game, and watch him go progressively wonkier as he is forced to remember six different types of dice mechanics, one for each of the six characters you can unlock while playing Astrea:... Continue Reading →
Previous | Next Are you in the mood for some nightmare fuel? Excellent, because "Dr. Seattle Opens His Heart", a flash fiction piece by Winston Turnage, does fantastic work of presenting itself as such. A creature that might be God but is likely something far more sinister has appeared, and it wields power that makes... Continue Reading →
Previous | Next Whereas a previous Apex Magazine #141 piece drew the image of Medusa into a starkly feminist context, this piece by Liv Strom romanticises the innate tragedy to the mythological figure. Mirroring is a theme the text takes up with skill, though I don't want to tell you much about, save that the... Continue Reading →
Previous | Next Titan is as hostile as a planet gets. Yet humans have colonised it through an ingenious method: liquifying their brains and inserting them within nigh-on indestructible bodies; it's a great method to earn little, live in a cramped dome-home, and mine for mother Earth (or whatever colonial corporation trades with the citizen... Continue Reading →
Previous | Next Guilt is a bitter pill to swallow. Normally, I'd write something flippant after this, say, "Not as bitter as acid, but still." Only, I can't, because Leah Ning's haunting piece about guilt - and the inability to live with it - makes a persuasive case about just how acrimonious a taste this... Continue Reading →
Previous | Next Who'd have thought that stopping the zombie apocalypse would be rewarded with little but misery? This is what Saul does: he, a security guard, takes out his weapon and "puts down" (the comparison is made by one character in the story) two researchers, infected by a compound that would've jump-started the end... Continue Reading →
Previous | Next What if women didn't have to be afraid of men? What if they had a way to protect themselves from those predators who hide among us and strike at the vulnerable at their weakest? This short epistolary piece, less than two thousand words in length, examines the aftermath of a world in... Continue Reading →
The Grimoire Reliquary 