the FREEZINE of Fantasy and Science Fiction: Hallowe'en Piñata Issue ☠

art by Marc Rude

Welcome to our 21st issue: the FREEZINE has come of age, after a fashion. So we decided to throw a party, on Halloween, to celebrate the fact. We were initially just going to serialize Edgar Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838).

Then word got out there may be a Halloween issue in the works—and veteran freezine author John Shirley sent me a short story tailored for the season—and the word grew from there. After I told my friend Adam Bolivar that we were looking to fill this issue, on its final two days, with last-minute surprise tricks and treats made out of words, he immediately contacted the rest of his Crimson Circle—the excellent cadre of weird poets D. L. Myers, Ashley Dioses, KA Opperman, and all four of them promptly sent me their submissions to line the papier-mâché stomach of this year's only edition of our webzine. No sooner than I'd begun receiving these dark and provocative poems, than word got out to Marge Simon and Bruce Boston—each of whom have earned their respective credentials in the writing and poetry community—and they, too, submitted material for our consideration. Marge sent along some of her wonderful watercolors, to boot. All of the pieces fell into place. Ten authors. Forty-six entries. One serialized novel. Twenty-seven chapters. Seventeen poems. One short story. Nine living writers. A Halloween to be memorialized for eternity.

Without further ado, allow me to introduce our authors and their respective tales for this, one of the heftier editions of the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction: Poe. Shirley. Boston. Simon. Bolivar. Opperman. Dioses. Myers. Longshaw. Lawton. As long-time subscribers and readers know, this digital fanzine hosted on Blogger was incepted into our daily datastream back in the summer of 2009. That is when a host of microscopic nanocomputers—sent back in time to that innocuous year from our own emissaries of the distant future—managed to possess my central nervous system and override my synapses in order to get me to put out this blog. We've been led to believe this fleet of "nano-computers" were embedded within neutrinos, which must've traveled through a black hole (or possibly an entire series of them, threaded through quasars) and somehow managed to be directed back in time to the aforementioned date and place (eight years ago now), which happened to be here in the Salt Lake Wasatch valley, where I was living and working as a patient transporter in the radiology department of a local hospital. I still don't know if my being around radiology equipment had anything to do with narrowing down their target to me personally—but whatever the methodology implemented, I and a small assortment of devoted readers of the fantastic and macabre today remain forever grateful their calculated experiment gained fruition and has thus far corralled over sixty stories and approaching thirty writers, as well as a handful of artists, to submit their word-visions and eye-candy for the perusal of anyone surfing the worldwide web searching for something better.

The nanohorde (as I've referred to them constantly over the years, also known as the BloodHost) appear to be most interested in our eschewing commercial advertising and also seem pretty keen on the idea of the zine being free. I myself have had plenty of time and ample evidence to begin putting together all the clues as to why the human race in the far-flung future would take such care, not to mention the cost, to achieve this specific goal: the creation of an early 21st century online science fiction, fantasy, and horror fanzine whose lifeblood remains love and not money. It doesn't take a genius to see where we're headed as a society these days—hellbent and out of control, skidding on the rails of a crazy train—as the mass collective lure of money and profiteering collude with our best and worst intentions until...well...you know. Sometimes we have to remind ourselves to stop and smell the roses. In the case of this freezine—to stop and read a short story or two—to read some imaginative tales or poetry that might snap us, if only momentarily, out of our mass-transit trance as we glide like automatons towards our final dance. Excuse me, I digress.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

by Edgar Poe

The above image hyperlinks to the preface of Poe's legendary 1838 novel, considered by Jorge Luis Borges to be his best. (A million thanks to Andrea Beré for the tasty cover image shown here—it's from the Spanish website Fabulantes). There's something very telling in that Borges would think so highly of the novel—as Poe himself felt the book to be just "silly," after it was published. Perhaps that has something to do with his sense of general embarrassment for attempting to pull a "fast one" on the reading public of his day. The novel was constructed in a calculated manner so as to fool the general layperson into thinking the events written about actually happened. Maybe Borges himself was so smitten with the novelty of that idea, that he went a tad overboard in describing his enthusiasm for the novel—perhaps we'll never know. All I know is that while I was reading it, I was struck at just how suspenseful and outright horrific the turn of events have proven to be. This is a harrowing tale, violent and bloody and at turns so murderous and brutal as to have given me pause, and wonder—If someone were to make this into a bonafide R-rated movie today—I can only suggest it would not be for the squeamish nor for the impressionable among us. Pym's account of what transpires upon his ocean voyage to the antarctic remains one of the most harrowing stories I've yet stumbled across, as a reader. I hope you've enjoyed the safety of your own couch or wherever it happens to be you may have read these installments, because accompanying Pym on his travels to the bottom of our planet is certainly not something any of us would wish upon ourselves, nor practically to our own worst enemies. I am grateful to the University of Virginia site and to Claudia Kay Silverman for designing and creating their manuscript of the novel for the public to access; it's a wonderful resource our freezine and readership have benefited from greatly. I have since taken the time (and am still in the process of editing) to further correct any typographical errors I may yet find at the U of VA site's typescript—in some spots, I've already restored missing sentences—with the aid of a used Penguin paperback edition (1975). All images I used are in the public domain, including the chapter plates culled from various original editions of the novel. This novel went on to become hugely influential, spurring on H. P. Lovecraft to pen his fabulous At The Mountains of Madness, just to name one of the more prominent cases.

As followers and subscribers of this blog know, all entries, be they chapters, poems, or stand alone stories hyperlink together for ease of reading, especially for those who may happen to stumble upon our webzine after the fact, thumbing through the hyperlinks on their greasy touchscreens. The blog archive in the right margin opens all twenty-one issues' branches, revealing a forest of tales embedded in the landscape of cyberspace. In the beginning, there was some controversy over whether a Fantasy and Science Fiction website should stoop so low as to disseminate itself from a mere blog—there seemed to be a predilection toward the FREEZINE being able to brag about its own proper "dot-com" site, according to a small consensus of critics. Although that may become a possibility, eventually, as this bloggersite evolves over the course of the following months and years (Google-powered), it seems to me that remaining a mere blog turns out to be rather incidental at best, and I guess vaguely bothersome to a certain mindset, at most. In the end, it's someplace in the world we know about, and how to locate. Such it is with all magical kingdoms. After all is said and done, the stories remain for our reading pleasure, for as long as we have internet access, although yes—we took a hit when Photobucket decided to pull their third party hosting rights (and charge an exorbitant fare to relinquish them back) which resulted in the removal of hundreds of wonderful artistic images—I've been dutifully restoring them, one at a time. There ain't no way I'm about to pay that fee. So bear with me as I continue to do so, using alternate means, copying pegs bounced off harddrives, and before long, all the colorful artistry which necessarily complements the stories here will be resurrected and shine forth their strange light upon the writings themselves, adding dimension. Since this particular fanzine exists on the world wide web, I've found that its marriage of images and words to be of the essence. It's just not the same reading online without the visual accompaniment—maybe that's just me, after all—to while away the online hours with a modicum of comfort and pleasure for the eye. In a sense, this issue represents a rebirth of the Freezine. Stay tuned during the coming months for another issue to pop up unexpectedly, or something. Probably not until March, 2018—but at least we made it through 2017 without falling off the rails completely. I have hopes though fewer expectations for what the following year will bring us. Thanks to all artists and writers who contributed to this fantastic issue, and to all a good night. It's time to catch up on Stranger Things.