From richard.horton@sff.net Mon Mar 15 23:40:55 2004 Date: Sun, 07 Dec 2003 22:42:37 -0600 From: Rich Horton Newsgroups: sff.people.richard-horton, sff.discuss.short-fiction Subject: Summary: Weird Tales, 2003 Summary: Weird Tales, 2003 Weird Tales stayed on a quarterly schedule, which they have maintained successfully for several years now. So, four more issues in 2003. They signaled an intention to go bimonthly, however, by labelling the last two 2003 issues "July/August" and "September/October". (I've seen proofs of the first 2004 issue, and it's labelled "January/February".) There were 23 stories this year, only one of them a novelette (though my count for one short story was 7400 words, so possibly it too was a novelette). Total word count, about 96,000 words. The novelette was by Robert E. Waters, "The Assassin's Retirement Party" (July/August) and it was OK, not great. Of the short stories I particularly like Thomas Ligotti's "Purity" (Spring), about a boy with a sinister father, who (the boy) befriends a strange black woman in the shabby neighborhood his father's experiments have driven them to; Robert Sheckley's "The Tale of Zanthias" (July/August), about the mayor of a town of misfits (zombies, witches, ghosts, etc.) and his own dark secret; and William Michael McCarthy's "The King of Rhythm and Blues" (Winter 2002/2003), which takes R&B history and personifies it, and makes it, well, weird. I also liked stories by Gene Wolfe, Tanith Lee, Charles Harness, and another by Thomas Ligotti, and Keith Taylor's Kamose stories, set in Ancient Egypt, continue to be reliable entertainment.