Frank Duffy’s Showcase is now online at Paul D. Brazill’s brilliant website:

‘A lot of my stories deal with people who feel out of place, not lost in the physical sense, but somewhere in a mental landscape of their own design…’

‘The stark brilliance of the underground had begun to show him things he’d rather have not thought about; the stamp of indefinite weariness on so many faces had shocked him; the seemingly arbitrary explosions of unexplained violence had given each train ride an abnormal musicality all of its own…’

(‘And When the Lights Came On’)

An interview with Frank, plus some choice excerpts from his short fiction, can be read here.
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Coming Up in 2010…

Steve Jensen’s short story, The Mirror of Venus, will be featured in the Whispers: Stories of Spirits and Hauntings issue of Mirror Dance in Summer 2010:

‘As consciousness started to seep away, I fell against Mariana, whose form rippled like a body of water disturbed. I am unsure if she sleeps as humans do, but if she dreams, the dreams belong to others…’

Click here to visit Mirror Dance.
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Pulp Metal Magazine Presents…

The final part of Frank’s short story, Cycle, is featured at Pulp Metal Magazine now:

‘Marzena noticed one of the compound workers stood at the gates to the compound. She’d had a terrible dream the night before. She dreamt she’d crept up on one of these disposal workers and torn his throat out with her bare hands…’

Also featured at PMM is Steve’s review of Peter Straub’s Ghost Story:

‘In fact, and in fiction, Ghost Story‘s characters are given life, power, by the stories told about them, just as we turn typed characters on a page into creatures human and otherwise with our imaginations.’

Also available to read at PMM is Mr Paul D. Brazill’s excellent column I Didn’t Say That, Did I?, along with reviews, art, music, celluloid and more…

Click the image to visit

Finally, Steve’s review of John Travis’s collection, Mostly Monochrome Stories, is online at Sein und Werden here.
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New Fiction from Frank

Part One of Frank Duffy’s short story, Cycle, is featured at Pulp Metal Magazine now:

“Paradise is an illusion, trust and reliability, that’s what makes it work,” said Marzena. Later she would wonder what she had meant by that.

Click the image to visit
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Pulp Fiction

Steve Jensen’s short story The Sinner’s Release is now featured in Pulp Metal Magazine:

“Yes, well, I must admit that my journey here was not a pleasant one – and I did run. But who could blame me? The very forest came to life at the command of the trickster, the Strigoi! A lean, wild-eyed hound of Hell chased me – it became a ravenous wolf; the ravens called my name, mocked my cowardice. And behind me was the vampire himself – never seen, never heard but at one with the wind as it made me stagger and fall…”

Visit Pulp Metal Magazine here.
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Introducing our Special Guest

Paul D. Brazill features in the first of an occasional series of guest blogs today.
Paul’s excellent flash fiction piece, The Night Shift, can be read here.

‘Almost imperceptibly, winter had crept up and smothered the days with darkness, flushing Victor’s memories – good, bad and, yes, ugly – to the forefront of his mind. Night after sleepless night his anger brewed and bubbled to boiling point…’

Visit Paul’s website here.
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Frank & Steve on the Guestlist

Frank Duffy’s excellent guest blog – subject: football – is now available to read at Paul D. Brazill’s superb website:

‘…And this is where I have inadvertently shot myself in the proverbial foot so many times in the past. Especially here in Poland. Mention to anyone that I come from near Liverpool, and you can practically guarantee that their response will consist of two words: Jerzy Dudek. They will say these two words with such hushed reverence that I’ve often wondered whether these sanctified words are endowed with possible magical properties…such as ‘Open Sesame’, or ‘make mine a double scotch on the rocks’.’

Steve’s guest spot, namely his essay on Orson Welles, is also available to read now:

‘The truth is, lies have a glamour with which veracity cannot compete; why else our fascination for fiction? Even the greatest, most eventful lives are full of mundane moments, discord, the absence of that ‘epic grandeur’ for which Scott Fitzgerald yearned…’

Visit Paul’s blog here.
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Frank Duffy featured in Estronomicon

The Journal is delighted to announce that Frank Duffy’s short fiction piece, False Pilgrim, is now featured in the Screaming Dream Press magazine Estronomicon.

Quote:

A figure began to materialize; slight and without substance it seemed, a phantom composed only of air and light, its limbs like a quick sketch spread out around it in supplication, as if it were hovering off the ground and drifting towards him through the gap in the trees…

Read Frank’s story in Estronomicon here.
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The Treachery of Images

Steve Jensen’s short story The Treachery of Images is now available to read at the Gloom Cupboard:

Quote:

I had been looking for someone to change my mind, but instead, I found Aislin.
Fortune and fate had nothing to do with our meeting, I see that now, though at the time
I came to believe in destiny, along with other articles of consolation. One can laugh at the myths we weave around those we love, and who love us in return…We can afford to laugh now, because we are older, wiser and have long spent the gold of our youth. It’s the only currency, the only certain truth we have left; bittersweet, inviolable experience.

Visit The Gloom Cupboard here.

Art: The Mirror of Venus by Edward Burne-Jones