Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Chapbook Original Anthologies, 2003
These two original anthologies appeared as slim chapbooks, very much in the format of 'zines like Full Unit Hookup and Electric Velocipede. Both also fit fairly smoothly into the slipstream-oriented category which broadly describes most such 'zines. The books in question are Rabid Transit: A Mischief of Rats and Intracities. Between them they included 16 stories, all short, for a total of just over 50,000 words of fiction.
Rabid Transit: A Mischief of Rats is the second chapbook put out by the Ratbastards, a writers' group consisting of Barth Anderson, Kristin Livdahl, Alan De Niro, and Christopher Barzak. Last year they each published a story in Rabid Transit -- this year they serve as editors for stories by Victoria Elisabeth Garcia, Douglas Lain, David J. Hoffman-Dachelet, Nick Mamatas, and Haddayr Copley-Woods. I liked Lain's story, "The Headline Trick", the best: it's about a guy who makes money by stuffing headlines into an ATM machine, and of course it's a politically pointed story. I also quite enjoyed Hoffman-Dachelet's "Braiding", which is a very short, sweetly erotic, gender-busting story.
Intracities, edited by Michael Jasper, is a set of stories about cities. The stories are fantastical and/or slipstream for the most part, and pretty well written. Most of them are decent work, none really stood out. Best perhaps were "Broken Branches" by Heather Shaw and Tim Pratt, about a fairyland underneath Oakland; and "Mom and Pop" by Paul E. Martens, about a real Mom and Pop store.
