The two magazines I read cover dated Summer only yielded two sword & sorcery stories, both of them in Cirsova. The new magazine Old Moon Quarterly (Amazon paperback • Amazon Kindle • Kindle Unlimited) had interesting pieces (and a fun cover!) but none ultimately fit the bill—one came close but was ultimately a historical ghost story despite the presence of some sword-swinging warriors. Curiously, this magazine has absolutely no apparatus. No masthead, no about-the-author sections, not even a table of contents! That said, these fantasy stories are excellent.
Cirsova Magazine of Thrilling Adventure and Daring Suspense volume 2, issue #11, Summer 2022 (Amazon paperback• Amazon Kindle • Kindle Unlimited • Lulu paperback • Lulu hardback) has all of that and I wound up deciding two of the stories rated inclusion here. A serial novel starting in this issue, Vran, The Chaos-Warped, looks to be S&S, but I’m reviewing short fiction, not novels (thankfully, as the writing of that in the first few pages was just painfully bad).
The first of the two stories is another entry in the Mongoose and Meerkat series by Jim Breyfogle, “Death and Renewal.” This story has some interesting world-building and scene-setting to recommend it, which just manage to elevate the piece above its ridiculous plot and confusing characterization. The presence of a fashion show in a sword & sorcery story is certainly unique and having a model part the curtains of the runway with the tip of a sword is a very nice touch. Unfortunately, as I mentioned, the plot is stuff and nonsense, and there’s some creepy male gaze stuff going on from the male protagonist towards his partner that wasn’t present in what I read as a refreshing platonic friendship in the earlier entry in this series I read.
This is the second issue of this magazine in a row that features a story set in a alternate world version of the Upper Nile in a pre-modern setting that has the phrase “crocodile god” in the title. The similarities of the story last issue with Mark Mellon’s “Melkart and the Crocodile God” are mostly cosmetic, but they are very much present. There isn’t a lot of there there in this story, it being basically a bunch of context set up for a kind of muddily described fight scene in which the two figures of the title face off. I would guess this is a series entry except for a sort of “and he lived happily all of his days” vibe to the ending. Melkart is a kind of hyper-competent figure, which is usually annoying, but here he falls victim to the same hypnosis that most everyone else in the city does and has to be rescued by the minions of an elderly woman, so that was refreshing.
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