mick mercer - November 24th, 2005
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11:12 pm
[Link] | VISIONARY TONGUE: Dark Fantasy For The Millennium #19
What is it? Allow me to quote from the website: “Established in 1995 by British fantasy author Storm Constantine and Eloise Coquio, Visionary Tongue grew out of Storm’s involvement in teaching creative writing classes. Recruiting a number of professional friends and colleagues, among them Graham Joyce, Christopher Fowler and Freda Warrington. Storm wanted to evolve a regular small press fiction magazine aimed at promoting and encouraging new talent. During 1999 VT followed many magazines in becoming fully online, until 2002 when it changed again into a printed magazine with online support.”
 Now edited by long-term poet, zine man (Monas Hierogylphica) and archaeologist Jamie Spracklen, Visionary Tongue is still going strong, and should interest those who hold modern fantasy high, where the bleakness of old sci-fi has been absorbed into various styles that all nestle together comfortably enough. ‘Collector Of Broken Things’ by Lauren Halkon finds a thoughtless hunter extinguished, ‘Vomit Angel’ by Jason Windham is realistically depressing about a supposed angel’s lack of actual supritve qualities, and ‘The Fractal Dance’ by Peter Loftus is just plain ugly about the abuse of others.
There is an interesting and lively interview with writer/journalist David Barnett and some reviews of similar anthologies, although with expected and dreaded poems (‘Threshold’ by Gordon Scapens, ‘Erobotic’ by Esmeralda, ‘Betrayed’ by Anthony Duncan).
The start of the show is undoubtedly Liz Williams. Her creepy ‘Mr De Quincey and the Sisters Of Madness’ cunningly whips us through Wordsworth-era England in which a man cruelly awaits his fate at the hand of a controlling female demon. The title means precisely nothing, and what might have been an engrossing novel has been reduced in status by being presented as a short story which just seems to rush by, but the content is exciting and draws you in well.
Granted, this suggests I don’t understand the actual nature of the short story, but there you go. Those who do ought to investigate the site below.
http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/jamiespracklen/visionarytongue/
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