Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Abyss & Apex, 2005
Abyss & Apex is an e-zine available at www.abyssandapex.com. This year they switched to quarterly publication, and indeed four issues appeared. Carol Burrell is the Editor-in-Chief.
They published a total of 20 stories this year. The total word count was about 55,000. All the stories were short stories, seven of them being "short-shorts". I should note that they publish quite a lot of poetry as well, some of it quite good.
I think my favorite story here this year was Simon Kewin's "Museum Beetles", from the Third Quarter issue, about people who seem to live in a huge museum, endless engaged in cataloging the exhibits, and how things change when some beetles escape from an exhibit. Also worth noting are Matthew Cheney's "Variables" from the First Quarter, a dizzying story, experimental in form, that I won't claim to understand but which was worth the ride; Patrick Samphire's sad "Next" (Second Quarter), about a man in an institution and his sinister "carer", Eddie; and Igor Teper's "The Relativity Prison", from the Fourth Quarter issue, about a man who decides he is not moving, everything is moving around him.
