Schlock! Webzine Vol 9, Issue 11

Welcome to the two hundredth edition of Schlock! Webzine. Almost five years after its inception, Schlock! has produced 200 editions, at a rate of almost one a week, barring occasional lapses due to holidays, funerals, and the malignity of the Google Corporation. Traditionally, this is a time of much back slapping and clips from the archives, but instead we’ll spare you all that and just get on with the stories.

This week a group of persecuted fugitives prepare to enter into legend in a story from Cameron Walker, whose return we welcome after an absence of three years. Gary Murphy’s two-parter Lesbikons ends this week, happily for some but not for others. A man lost in the woods seeks A Good Death in Ross Burton’s story. An art lover is invited to a darkly sinister event in Steve Laker’s The Perpetuity of Memory. And a restaurant worker enters an eerie reality in Gregory KH Bryant’s The Bridge.

In Arthur Machen’s The White People we meet with Aklo letters, voorish signs, and other proto-Lovecraftian echoes, in a young girl’s disturbing story. Robert E Howard shows us a glimpse of an age long ago, when things undreamed of lived beneath the ground and their horror transcended even racial animosity. Meanwhile, Professor Aronnax is four thousand leagues under the Pacific. And after last week saw the end of the Yankee’s sojourn at King Arthur’s Court we’re back in Arthurian territory—the Caledonian forest no less—for the first installment of John Buchan’s Scottish black magic classic Witch Wood.