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Adam S Doyle is a classically educated fine artist and illustrator with a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from New York’s School of Visual Arts. Boston-born, Doyle’s horizons are vast, both physical and intellectual. He has studied and created in Los Angeles, Rome, Auckland, and now Hong Kong, on a mission to “explore stories, thoughts, and feelings that connect us” through his oil paintings. Learn more at www.adamsdoyle.com.
This [story] is still my favorite, and is probably going to be hard to displace. It does everything I really want my fiction to do—the prose is pretty, the characters are unquestionably “bad guys,” and I get away with presenting something brutal and depressing as if it’s a happy ending. I hope that in the future when they’re writing papers about obscure 21st century spec fic writers, this is the kind of story I’m known for.
See if this plot sounds familiar to you: A disillusioned middle-aged writer is forced to return to the small town where he was born to reunite with childhood friends so they can face the ancient evil that almost destroyed them once before.
In my mind, this story looks like the original Evil Dead poster as painted by William Blake. It came out of my ongoing volcano obsession, which led me to the notion of observatories in reverse: essentially looking down into the center of the earth through a volcano.
This month, we have original fiction from Anaea Lay (“They Called Him Monster”) and Brit Mandelo (“And Yet, Her Eyes”), along with reprints by Ramsey Campbell (“The Companion”) and from the new anthology The Lowest Heaven, Maria Dahvana Headley’s “The Krakatoan”. We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with all of our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and part one of a two-part feature interview with bestselling author Joe Hill.
There’s a lot of overlap between different forms of trauma, physical or psychological or both, and how they destabilize a person’s identity and self-concept.
My inspirations were books about supposedly true hauntings and the fact that there was a “haunted house” in my neighborhood . . . right next door, as a matter of fact. But I actually was a big fan of science fiction, and I was doing those kind of stories too, as well as “war stories” starring kids in my classes. Those made me fairly popular because everybody either wanted to survive or die as heroes, and I had their fates in my hands.
The story owes pretty much its entire existence to the Stuart Gordon film Dagon. While watching it, I felt like I finally got what Lovecraftian fiction was all about, a feeling I hadn’t gotten from any other story, or even any of Gordon’s other Lovecraft-inspired films. It really is horrifying, it never quite crosses that line into gross or silly, and the resulting madness the main characters fall into feels genuine rather than contrived. I just loved it. But of course, given my own quirks, I wasn’t interested in the main characters’ story, I was interested in the villagers, and how they got to where they are from what they had been before.
Soufiane Idrassi is a twenty-two-year-old freelance digital artist from Meknes, Morocco. Four years ago, Soufiane began teaching himself Adobe Photoshop—still his weapon of choice for his creations—and has become expert enough that his technique was explored in the January 2013 issue of Advanced Photoshop Magazine. He is currently expanding into 3D character creation and 2D concept art with his startup company, CG Pro Technology.
You can choose to ride the train, and once on it seems impossible to get off, or you can turn away from the depot. But the God also represents the darker desires of humanity, a kind of built in self-destruct. From what I can tell, we don’t learn much from history, or at least we seldom learn.
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