Dreams and Nightmares 34 (May 1991)
Welcome to the October 2018 Literary Meeting!
The theme for this meeting was Late 20th-Century Small Press Horror Magazines.
As always, I’ve made informal references in text, with full references listed at the end.
Aromatic Accompaniment: Midsummer’s Night by Yankee Candle.
Wine: Rosa Obscura 2016 Red Wine Blend. California: Winc.
In college I became very involved in the small lit mag scene. I loved the retro-physical aspect of a pre-digital medium, despite (and perhaps because of) the distribution challenges the medium poses. Flipping through a box of old lit mags feels like a stolen mystery—maybe nobody else has ever seen what you’re holding in your had before.
During one of my annual pilgrimages to the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, OR, probably in 2015, I was browsing the wares of one of the many vendors that show up each year for what the Festival calls the “Arkham Bazaar” when I came upon a man with boxes and boxes of what looked to be lit mags—horror lit mags! I’d never heard of any of them, but they had titles like Dreams and Nightmares and Necrofile: The Review of Horror Fiction. They were priced at around $5 a magazine. I began flipping through these treasures, knowing that I needed to own some.
Being the broke undergraduate that I was, I knew I was going to have to be choosy, but I had quickly stacked up over twenty magazines in my “maybe pile.” This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I calculated that each box probably contained around $250 worth of mags if priced individually. I couldn’t afford a box, but I had recently been able to get a huge pile of Ravenloft modules from a vendor at PAX at a flat rate after telling the vendor about my game and convincing him that these would actually see real play rather than sit in storage or be re-sold later in a collector’s market. (Note: my game still meets weekly. Almost all of those modules got played.)
Deep at heart, a lot of these people are enthusiasts who want more than anything for their wares to be used, not collected. So, I started telling the man with the magazines about the Spooky Society, and then asked him in my best Big Spender voice how much for a whole box. When he told me to make an offer I dropped a $100 bid on him like it was the lucky break he’d been waiting for, and waited for him to reject it out of hand. But I waited, confidently, to see what he said. He pursed his lips, sighed, flipped through the box a little bit, perhaps calculating the loss he was about to take, and said okay. To this day I don’t know if he saw some poor kid and took pity, was sold by my genuineness, or just realized that he probably wouldn’t get a better sale that day. (I never saw anyone else buy one, and he never came back with them in later years, so maybe it was a good deal for him.)
In any case, at least once every couple of years I like to have a literary meeting where we distribute some of the magazines and crowdsource the content. Here’s what we found this time around.
Most of the content was drawn from Dreams and Nighrmares no’s. 34 and 40 (May 1991 and May 1993). The physical objects are little more than ten-or-so sheets of paper folded over and stapled into a card-stock cover, yet they are clearly assembled with care. Based on the information in the masthead, print runs were around 100-200. Notably, print runs started declining between issues 34 and 40 of D&N, which left me with a feeling of sympathetic melancholy. The editor, David C. Kopaska-Merkel, would have been acutely aware of the fact that for issue 40 he typed “Print run 175,” while for issue 34 he typed “Print run 200.” With Tin House having just folded, seeing these clues of declining subscriptions makes me sad. However, interpretations of doom and gloom proved to be premature, as it appears that not only was D&N able to make the transition to digital, but they still publish a print version: issue 111 went to the printer yesterday. A lifetime print subscription costs $90, up from $50 in 1993, and I’m seriously thinking about it.
Loneliness. (Illustration by Cathy Buburuz.)
Spooky. (Illustration by Allen Koszowski.)
What is immediately striking about this publication is the illustrations. They are horrifying, mysterious, slightly romantic, and exactly what a “magazine of fantastic poetry” deserves to be filled with. Some, such as an illustration by Allen Kosznowski, who in 1993 lived in Upper Darby, PA, are even Spooky. An illustration by Russ Miller for the poem “Florence: Lost,” by Robert Nagler depicts the lost layers of civilization built atop each other, topped by the eerily-tilted form of a modern neoclassical civic building, clearly likewise ruined. The resonance between the illustration and the poem is considerable. “Of us, of what we were, there’s no trace. And we are lost in Florence.” The unsettled-ness comes from the realization that despite the visual evidence of literal traces depicted by the illustration, the emptiness demonstrated by the ruined building, quickly becoming just another layer of trace, contains nothing of the essence of the “us” that are lost and wandering. The building becomes eerie in a Fisherian sense of a present absence.
The absence of presence makes this eerie. [Robert Nagler (text), Russ Miller (illo.).]
Why the dark liquid dripping? [M. B. Simon (text) & Virginia Rubio (illo.).]
Other poem/illustration combinations are equally striking. While “Florence: Lost” was characterized by a mysterious emptiness, “The Shellcracker,” written by M[arge] B[aliff] Simon and illustrated by Virginia Rubio, disturbs in a weirder way. In the illustration, an old woman holds something in her hand, but there appears to be some dark liquid dripping. Why is there an old woman with some things in her hand with dark liquid dripping? A glance at the title reveals that she is probably a shellcracker. That would explain the hammer she holds in her hand that doesn’t have the somethings and the dark liquid dripping. She was cracking shells. Those are shells in her hand. But why the dark dripping? Well, reading the poem reveals that “She applies the hammer to the hand holding/the nuts. Each time the nuts break, a bruise/spreads wider, blood creeps to surface/as she hums, eyes half closed.” The effect of the simple drawing, with such an unlikely and disturbing object being depicted, recalls the “hoo ha’s” one gets when reading the original Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. The effect comes from something that shouldn’t be, yet is, because the drawing is there, and no matter how much we want the dark dripping liquid to be plum juice, she isn’t juicing plums. She is cracking shells.
Late in number 34 is an illustration by Cathy Buburuz that looks half cyclopean city and half eerie fantastic castle in the sky. A white-eyed faerie creature of sorts, viewed in profile, makes up the background for the image. To me the prevailing emotion of the drawing is loneliness and longing of something once great now lost.
Another combination is W. Gregory Stewart and Russ Miller’s “Workshop.” It depicts a bio-mechanical man who looks half Xenomorph, half Brain Salad Surgery, and 100% H. R. Giger, which my mind views with Frank Klepacki’s “Mechanical Man” playing in the background.
Two images run through a shredder and interlaced. This is as analog as it gets. [Bill Sweeney.]
These magazines are also of interest from a print culture perspective. These mags were probably enabled by the desktop publishing revolution, but they are also so very analog. The back cover art for D&N 34 features an interpolation of a war scene and the face of a woman, but it took my digital-era brain a minute to recognize it as such. The two images were clearly run through a shredder and the shreds interlaced, creating an analog blend. Something like that wouldn’t happen in 20018 (early 2019 as I finally write these notes).
You could do this digitally, but it wouldn’t usually look quite like this.
A copy of an anthology called Not One of Us goes ever further, its word-wraps and textual incursions something out of an older age. The effect could certainly be created with careful work digitally in InDesign, or whatever people used before 1999, but to me it looks more like they did the layout physically. Digital word-wrapping would show more tracking issues. (Not One of Us indicates it was published in Oct. 1986, so it almost certainly was laid out physically.) You rarely see this kind of thing anymore, and it was interesting to notice a difference in effect just by looking at the physical objects.
A final story by Geoff Jackson rounded out the magazines, although it led to a final act (we broke out Alice Isn’t Dead for a finale). Jackson’s story “Overboard” focuses on a man sitting on the seashore and his box, which is lost and floating in the sea. The man is looking for his box. “It was his box and had been thrown overboard in mid Atlantic by a band of chanting loonies and was drifting in the world’s oceans.” Eventually he finds the box. “Now he was alone with the sea and the box.” The whole effect reminded us greatly of Part I episode 4 of Alice Isn’t Dead (“The Factory by the Sea”). Go listen and then guess what is in the man’s box.
Until next time, everyone. Keep it Spooky!
Content References from the October 2018 Literary Meeting (in the order read)
Kopaska-Merkel, David C., ed. Dreams and Nightmares numbers 34 (May 1991) and 40 (May 1993).
Benson, John M., ed. (Not) One of Us. Oct. 1986.
Fink, Joseph. “The Factory by the Sea.” Alice Isn’t Dead Part I Episode 4. Nightvale Presents, 19 April 2016. Podcast.
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