| Monthly Magazine Review: Greatest Uncommon Denominator |
[Nov. 27th, 2009|10:44 am] |
 GUD: Greatest Uncommon Denominator (Issues #3 and #4)
What holds GUD together as a magazine? The space to hold a lot of different kinds of quality fiction. There's a lot of different styles in each issue, a veritable bouillabaisse of various stories - straight fantasy, cyberpunk, experimental poetry, even "straight" fiction with no fantastic elements whatsoever. In a gigantic magazine the size of a small book, you're sure to find something you like in here.
It's exactly what it says on the tin: a bunch of very good stories, loosely held together by the fact that they're, well, good.
That's not strictly true, though. Scratch the surface, and you'll see that GUD tends towards tales that delve into someone's character; in fact, if you're a writer looking to submit and characterization isn't your strong point, you might wanna pass 'em over. The best of GUD's stories are tales of sharply-drawn, real folks in strange situations - a Mayan astronaut about to be sacrificed, an insecure lover with his girlfriend falling for mysterious aliens, a mailman with a bloodied claw-hammer in the back of his truck looking for rebirth canals.
GUD's stories also tend towards the longer end - there's some well-done flash fiction in there (and poetry, to break things up), but most of the tales are long enough to lose yourself in for some time. GUD's stories want you to spend some time with the people inside them, walking along them and losing yourself in their skin.
When that works, which it usually does, it's a sensuous journey. On those rare occasions that GUD fails with a story, it's usually because the ending lacks punch - you've followed someone for five thousand words, only to find that really, it isn't much of an ending at all, turning what looked to be an actual story into little more than a rambling tone poem. (Or, as will happen, you just hated the lead character and didn't want to follow them anywhere.)
There are few misfires, though. The good news, however, is that GUD is of high quality - I anguished over choosing the "best" stories below, since almost all of them had something to recommend them - and is thick enough to be an exceptional value. For $3.50 a PDF, you get 211 pages - and the stories are wildly varying, from quick pulpy prose to lush, lingering visuals, so you're sure to find at least a few stories to fall in love with. And the art inside is also gorgeous. It's a downright pretty magazine, spiced up with professional artistry.
And hell, it's even cheaper: as a part of their Black Friday sale, you can pay whatever you like, making a normally unbeatable value of $3.50 an issue even more beatable.
That's a lot of reading, man, and a lot of value in a very pretty magazine. It's definitely worth checking out.
The stories that called to me in these issues are, in descending order of love:
Daya and Dharma, by ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) shweta_narayan (Issue #4)
Daya is a handmaid in the palace of a selfish, beautiful princess - and a beautiful red bird from the court of the Rainbow Prince arrives to find a bride for his master. And what could have turned into a twee gratification story instead lands two steps beyond where you think it will to turn into something dark, beautiful, and majestic. The only problem I have with it is that this story started very slowly, but once it got rolling it was unstoppable.
Soon You Will Be Gone And Possibly Eaten, by Nick Antoeca (Issue #3)
He loves his girlfriend, Sabile, and yet he never really understands her. Even more so, when the aliens come to Earth and start abducting beautiful people. A tragic tale of love, loss, and the confused bereavement that comes when a lover betrays you for reasons you can't quite understand but can't quite condemn, either.
Night Bird Soaring, by T.L. Morganfield (Issue #3)
A Mayan man wants to be an astronaut, but that can never be: he was born as the Night Wind, a living God to be sacrificed at age 30. This is an excellent look at other cultures, one where Mayan culture was ascendant, and the only flaw is that the ending isn't particularly personal; it wraps things up, but doesn't necessarily connect. Still, the journey through this strangely mundane alien land is well worth it.
Think Fast, by Michael Greenhut (Issue #3)
"Pick an alternate timeline and you'll find my corpse." A man can send messages from his past self to his current self - a power granted so that he can help rescue his sister, who died. But the ending's a strange and surprising twist that makes sense, Memento-wise, becoming that rarity of things: a consistent, satisfying time-travel story.
The Great Big Nothing, by Frank Haberle (Issue #3)
A story with absolutely no speculative elements at all. Yet it made me tear up.
Forests of the Night, by Abigail Hilton (Issue #4)
A frail woman is dropped off by uncaring relatives at an old-age home. This story is short, almost flash, but that's good; it's a simple idea, and it doesn't overstay its welcome, finishing up exactly when it needs to.
A Man Of Kiri Maru, by Laura L. Sullivan (Issue #4)
Kiri Maru, a small island out in the Pacific Ocean, has a unique religion, if it can be called that: their God died by accident, and for a dumb reason, and isn't really worshipped. Into this culture steps a traditional scientist, hoping to study the culture and who instead falls in love. This is a wonderful example of a story that shouldn't work - the beginning has almost nothing to do with the ending, the tale wanders, and the ending is, to say the least, a little odd - and yet somehow, thanks to a wry writing style and engaging characters, this one pulls it off with style and grace and squids.
Chica, Let Me Tell You A Story, by Alex Dally McFarlane (Issue #3)
"I was a door, once." A magical portal tells her tale. The ending is a little flat, but overall this is strong for its concepts and intrigues.
Unfinished Stories, by J(ae) D. Brames (Issue #4)
A tale done with style and visceral pulp, this one's a simple tale built up with lot of punkish stylistic (and effective!) fillips. Follow Albert, the crazy mailman looking for a suitable body to scrape off the road so he can crack open the rebirth canal, and the narrator, who tags along for reasons that will be made devastatingly clear towards the end. And it has a damn near perfect final line.
The Dancing Aliens, by Mithran Somasundrum (Issue #4)
The aliens didn't jet down from a great spaceship in the sky; no, they turned up in public squares everywhere, dancing in strange and hypnotic patterns, starving to death because they didn't know how to busk. And the narrator, one of the first to discover the truth about things, witnesses the reason why they dance. The ending's a little anticlimactic, given the awesome buildup, but it's still reasonably creepy and believable.
The Dragon's Thorn, Sword of Kings (And Fred), by Idan Cohen (Issue #3)
A very funny flash fiction story about a great magic sword that winds up in the hands of, well, Fred. I've seen a lot of stories like this. Most of them don't work. This does.
On The Monthly Magazine Review:
Every month (hopefully, on the first, though not this time), I'll review a pro to semi-pro 'zine. There are a lot of potential definitions of "a semi-pro zine," ranging from circulations of over a thousand to income levels for the publisher - but for purposes of this, I'll say that a) you have to pay at least a cent a word, on average, and b) not be a Twitter-zine. I'm not opposed to bold experiments like Tweet the Meat, but paying five cents a word for a 140-character story really isn't going to support any starving artists.
I'm also not going to review just a single issue. No, I want to read multiple issues, to get (and give) a greater sense of what hits this particular 'zine's kinks. Is it deep mystery? Beautiful prose? Pulpy action? Reworked myths? You can't tell by a single issue, man, you gotta see a few.
My goal as a writer is to both educate myself in the market (so I know what markets like what), to help give some attention to markets that are always hungry for new readers, and to read some damned fine stories. If you have a semi-pro zine you'd like to nominate for review, speak up. |
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Happy Black Friday Weekend to everyone! I hope you're either having fun shopping a bit (like my wife) or feeling happy to avoid the whole mess (like me). I think the word "doorbuster" is fast becoming my most hated cliche lately, outdoing several phrases from the Oxford English Dictionary of texting-speak. We'll see if this year is a turnaround for retailers or if more storefronts will go sliding into the aether.
![What? Oh, no, the 'Enchanted' soundtrack was just playing because Pandora's algorithms are terrible. [silence] ... (quietly) That's how you knooooooow ...](http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/pandora.png "What? Oh, no, the 'Enchanted' soundtrack was just playing because Pandora's algorithms are terrible. [silence] ... (quietly) That's how you knooooooow ...")
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