WARNING! INEVITABLE SPOILERS BELOW! 

Indie authors Ian Nols, JD Sauvage, Robert Garron, Hermann Morr, and Rawle Nyanzi combine their collective horrifying sci-fi and fantasy speculation in the first issue of the contemporary literary magazine, Phantom Whispers. Each new pieces casts readers both back and forward through time, across the vast reaches of space, and through alternate dimensions and timelines. Phantom Whispers is the modern incarnation of the spirit of old pulp fiction written for and by fans of weird, genre and setting-bending tales.

And just like the pulps, there is a variety of skill, talents, and execution across authors in this anthology; therefore, this review must view each of the contributing authors individually, commenting on specific stories when they stand out from the rest of any one author’s pieces.

Ian Nols

It is only right to begin with the lead author and publisher. In this first volume, he contributed the stories Lost Little Girl, ESCA, and The Angry Blue Planet: Gensis. Ian’s style and quality of prose is the most consistent despite his stories’ settings ranging from science fiction to fantasy. The quality of content of each piece varies more than the quality of the composition.

Lost Little Girl is an intriguing and tense short sci-fi piece in which a woman gets tricked and then abducted by aliens. The horror elements come through in the short, clipped sentences of unnatural sensory description. However, the work is punctuated by expositive phrases which smack of anime, which bleed the earned tension. It’s tough to take lines like “If she’d been wearing a white dress she’d be a dead ringer for a creepy Japanese ghost girl.” seriously.

ESCA is a fantasy-horror piece very much in the spirit of pulp scoundrel adventure tales. It is refreshing to read fiction from the unapologetic perspective of banditry, as was once common of adventure stories. Less refreshing, though still in the spirit of said old pulps, is the abundance of exposition in dialogue, which leaves the characters feeling a bit stilted. As a result, their untimely demise at the hands of their erroneously-presumed victim loses a lot of its potential emotional weight.

Lastly, The Angry Blue Planet is very much an old-school sci-fi piece complete with the lady in a skin-tight spacers suit. Unfortunately, this is the weakest of Ian’s pieces while also tying for his longest. The story is riddled with passive prose—such as the aforementioned lady, Countess Hakkady’s introduction:

Standing in the center of the room, wearing a skintight shiny astro jumpsuit, was Countess Hakkady. She was staring up at the carnage, unfolding across the sky, unbothered. No, not unbothered. Enraptured. She had arms spread apart slight*sic, palms facing up towards the transparent ceiling, her head tilted back, her emerald green eyes wide and glistening as the flashes of lighting danced in them.

—and typos such as, “Captain’s Minnel’s wife, two daughters adolescent daughters, and young son were also there.”

In the prior example, almost every sentence, plus the next one not quoted, is passive. This includes that huge list, which is held parallel by the passive, “She had...” If you didn’t catch it in the latter example, there is an extra “daughters”, which, unlike an extra article or short word, is impossible to miss on an attentive pass. These are easy fixes, which is why they are worth pointing out. They really should have been worked out in revision and drafting.

Overall, Ian’s got potential real. His stories are very interesting from a content perspective, and at times also shine in their composition. I expect to be more impressed with his work in each subsequent issue, though I also recommend that he tries out hiring a line editor.

Robert Garron

Full disclosure: RJ Garron is an editing client of mine; however, he is notoriously furtive with his works-in-progress, and so I was only familiar with one piece in the whole collection. In this volume, RJ’s works include The Bait, Snapshot, A Different Palette, and Transmigration.

The Bait is by far the best and most polished piece in this anthology, as it is of all of RJ’s stories I’ve seen. This happens to be the one story I contributed some feedback to, though many others in a critique group did as well, and I can say that RJ managed to revise what was a decent short piece of dystopian science fiction about a boy who falls for the lie of a free lunch into a clean and weighty fable-like story. The plot and theme shine clear as daylight without the dialogue or exposition beating the reader over the head with the somewhat political message. The Bait is art—as opposed to indulgent escapism or propaganda.

Snapshot, A Different Palette, and Transmigration—all sci-fi pieces: though Palette earns the category weird & pulp for sure; and Transmigration subverts typical setting expectations—share more than their setting-types in common. This is unfortunate, as what they share is excessive narrative exposition and contrived dialogue. There is a lot of greatness to emulate from the old pulp stories, but there is also a lot that is not desirable—was not desirable even at the time of publication. For instance, the attempt to build character sympathy via interiority via repetition:

The experience of this final ritual she and her tribe were about to engage in was new to her. She was stepping out of her realm of comfort and into the unknown. The baggage of uncertainty riddled her conscience.

These three sentences communicate the protagonist’s one experience three times, and not in efficient language. This kind of writing was indeed common in literary magazines of a bygone century, but it was part of why pulps were looked upon with contempt by the educated classes. Genre &/or setting blending and bending is great. The use of high, figurative, and precise diction is also fantastic, but discernment is important when it comes to quality. Consider the following examples:

As soon as he adjusted, the elephant in the room became clear.

...

A sheen cast over it, as if radiating from the object itself.

...

All evidence making its age, including the smallest bits of stone and dirt, had been removed, as if fresh off the foundry.

In the first example, while the turn of phrase is technically correct, its literal and figurative meanings contradict one another. “The elephant became clear” is mean to mean it became obvious, but a clear—read, transparent—elephant is harder to see. What is meant to be said is that the scene has become clear, meaning unobscured. There is also the matter that “elephant” is a figure of speech meaning “something obvious,” so it is a contradiction to say the “elephant” was unclear to begin with and then became obvious, because, figuratively speaking, it wasn’t an “elephant” before it was “clear”

In the second and third examples, we see similar errors. A “sheen” is reflected light, which contradicts light radiating from the object itself. Likewise, stone and dirt being removed is not how a thing is “fresh from the foundry”. “Removed” implies it got dirty, and when something is brand new, it has not had the chance to be soiled as such, especially cast metal, which might need polished, but it not dusty or covered in rock.

Overall, Robert Garron also shows a lot of promise. If he can cultivate the lightning captured in The Bait, and if he can better discern when and how to implement his purple prose—or if he’d share more of his work with his editor—his future fiction will be of even greater quality.

Hermann Morr

Morr contributed two stories to this volume, those being Those from the Outside and Magog.

The first of his two stories is a weird urban fantasy story like something out of a dream. After attending a concert, the protagonist finds himself in the company of monsters and supernatural bikers. And that’s all I can remember of Outside. The premise was weird and wild, the prose was well composed, but the story failed to stick in my mind.

As I write, I’m looking back on the piece in question, and the issue seems to be a thinness of character. The conceit is fun as hell, giving no care for conventions or expectations, but the protagonist and the named characters feel very two dimensional, leaving me to wonder why I should care. This issue gets exacerbated by the ending:

Those things from outside exist.

That’s why when I look into my glass, I still see the moon reflecting in the water. I already know what I’ll do; there’s just one last question I need to resolve.

Do I go for a Ducati or stick with a Harley?

The finish is a spinning-of-the-wheels, picking up where the action began. The protagonist is planning to delve back into the other world because…it’s cool as Hell? It’s believable, and perhaps if this were a personal fantasy of mine, I’d be drawn in by the strangeness and action of the setting and plot by themselves. However, since I’m not, I fail to project myself on to the blank slate protagonist and am not invested the author’s fantasy world.

Magog is similar to Outside in all its positives. The prose is active, and the sci-fi setting is interesting and unpredictably genre-blending, mixing elements of westerns, military sci-fi, and religeous fiction. However, on that last aspect, the author gets a bit preachy:

I was in my last year of school when the turn of the millennium was celebrated. I remember how they rushed to explain to us that it was just a symbolic date, that the Scriptures weren’t to be taken literally.

...

They keep telling us that this war heralds the third coming of Christ, just like a thousand years ago.

...

I’ve begun to believe. I’ve come to understand that if the third coming hasn’t happened yet, it’s because He’s waiting for us. Waiting for every person, until the very last, to decide which side they’re on in this war...

Perhaps I’m being overly critical. This story is told from a first person point of view, and so the narrator is expressing his own beliefs within the setting in which he exists. However, there is a break in verisimilitude for me which screams “cope.”

Let me be clear, Christian fiction is fine. What is not fine is characters and setting contorting themselves into unbelievable pretzels so that the indulgent can have their sci-fi cake and eat it too alongside their religious convictions.

Does this even apply to the author? I don’t know Morr or anything about him, and so perhaps this is no indulgence on his part. If not, it certainly looks and functions as one, and so future works would benefit from making the religious elements more believably cohere to the sci-fi aspects of the setting.

JD Sauvage

Sauvage contributed In Another World with My Tank. I do not have pleasant things to say about this piece, and so I’ll lead with an excerpt from the story:

What he found instead was petite, shapely, pale flesh. Long blond*sic hair spilled out in a rumpled halo. Alice grinned and moved her arms to give him an eyeful.

He grunted. His Tank Intelligence wasn’t on the fritz after all. It was a girl. Which was far weirder.

He tossed a poncho at her. The garment unfolded, covering Alice’s grin and perky, ample headlights alike in woodland-pattern waterproof synthetic.

The above sets the tone for the whole piece. It’s a lot like how I imagine it would be to watch somebody else watching porn. While there is nothing explicit in this piece—everything is played for humor—the very conceit and its handling struck me as the juvenile wish-fulfillment of a young man never successful with women. Why do I think this? Well, the protagonist’s object of specialization and interest, his tank, gets embodied as an attractive, naked young woman who is already completely loyal to him, knows all about and shares his interests, and who will probably only be cute when she’s angry and never annoying or incomprehensible.

The actual plot is about as mature and complex as the abovementioned, and it even resolves with an unnecessary and literal deus ex machina—and I don’t mean Alice. An angel shows up at the end to answer some loose threads and possibly set up another story, and it is about as telegraphed and random as it sounds. Since the angel has black hair, and since another attractive female character is a generic firebrand redhead, I can only conclude the angel was inserted in order to ensure every reader had the literary equivalent of a waifu to fawn after in the recesses of his imaginartion.

That being said, I have to admit that the prose is fairly solid, and the crunchy aspects describing the weapons seems legit (though I could be wrong; I don’t know much about tanks, but I did notice Sauvage describe scale armor as mail, which means mesh—a modern fantasy inaccuracy of terminology, which I’m probably nitpicking). If you don’t mind indulging with your friends, you likely felt this story was awesome. Like candy.

I prefer my health, performance, and teeth.

Rawle Nyanzi

Nyanzi’s Memento Mori is probably the second best story in the collection. At least, I enjoyed it quite a bit despite my gripes with the resolution.

The story is set in an occupied(?) North America in alternate-history-future California, year 2049. The protagonist, Daisy, is trying to save her brother, Seth, by getting her father—a general in the Imperial Japanese Army—to change his deployment location. Daisy’s activism is ineffective, so her boyfriend clues her into a terrorist cell, which turns out to include the use of ghosts as a power source for magical abilities in a tale of double backstabbing and usury.

Rather than provide a single quote for this piece, it is easier to summarize the plot. Major spoilers ahead.

Daisy gets introduced to the terrorists by Errol, her boyfriend. They are Jack and Tabitha, and they proceed to take Daisy to the woods where she gets killed by spirit wolves and resurrected by a ghost named Emma. Daisy’s resurrection give her the powers of a laser pistol. Once she obtains her powers, jack and Tabitha strong-arm her into taking hostages to pursue their political ends. Daisy doesn’t want anything to do with this, so she tries to turn on Jack and Tabitha. However, the terrorists expected this, as they already knew about her from catching her boyfriend Errol in the same trick—which is how they roped her in in the first place. So Jack goes to do the kidnapping himself, because they really just need Daisy present to make their plan work, since she is a general’s daughter. However, Errol tipped off Daisy’s broth Seth, who is in the army, and he rigged the building with bombs. Jack gets killed by the trap, and Daisy shoots Tabitha while she isn’t looking. There is an argument, but ultimately Seth ensures Errol won’t get prosecuted for initially working with the terrorists. The story ends with an obituary. Seth dies in the war.

This is a very engaging set of ever changing stakes. The narrator’s voice can grate on my nerves at times. Granted she is Californian, so perhaps that is inevitable. What is not inevitable is the rapid acceptance of the supernatural by characters in what is presumably a non-magical, secular world. The ghost-familiars is a cool idea, but it could be set up and either explained or else not-explained better—the protagonist could struggle coming to grips more in the latter case.

The plot twists were definitely unexpected, but a lot of that lack of predictability comes from a lack of set up. The result is that the death of Jack and Tabitha falls kinda flat. They die because of stuff off screen and because Tabitha got distracted because...reasons? Daisy tried to shoot Jack and Tabitha before and she got caught the first time. The second instance is believable, but it doesn’t feel great narratively—neither does the obituary. Seth’s death feels like an “it was just a dream” ending in that saving him was the core motivation for Daisy. That was the point, and it got shot down despite everything that happened.

In sum

Phantom Whispers vol. 1 succeeds in its objective to bring a no-holds-bar literary magazine to contemporary fiction. The mix of weird and science fiction with a splash of fantasy fits the spirit of the pulps perfectly, and it even features illustrations throughout. For the most part, the book is formatted well, though there are some errors, and many of the stories could use with line-editing. Content-wise, there is something for anyone—who likes weird fiction, that is, and who is looking for fun more than a journey or a challenge.

I have a lot of hope for future issues of the magazine. This was a great first attempt with lots of potential, so I foresee the quality only going up from here. Though I give this volume a modest review, I do encourage you to pick up a copy for yourself by clicking the cover above. Doing so will give you access to at least of few stories you’re sure to enjoy, and it will help to bring about even more and even better weird and wild fiction in the future.