Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Cemetery Dance, 2005
Cemetery Dance is a long running horror magazine. The publisher is Richard Chizmar, the editor is Robert Morrish. Besides a fair amount of fiction the magazine is packed with interviews, book, movie, and other media reviews, other columns, and lots and lots of ads. This last, combined with the fact that it gets distributed in places like Barnes & Noble, suggests that it's a pretty successful publication.
I saw two issues this year, #52 and #53. I believe #51 was also a 2005 release, but I didn't see it. The issues I saw included 15 stories, one a novelette, one a short-short, for a total of some 70,000 words of fiction. (Not counting a brief excerpt from Stephen King's new short novel _The Colorado Kid_.)
On the whole I found the fiction fairly satisfying, especially considering that horror is not really my favorite thing. No story really wowed me, though: perhaps a horror fan would see things differently. The only story I really didn't like was the novelette, Eddy C. Bertin's "When You'll Be Ten", which takes a not very believable but I suppose interesting enough long-term murder method and strings it out for way too long, with a totally unbelievable motivation and villain. Of the short stories, my favorites were Kim Antieau's "My Little Angel", about a 14 year old boy on the run through a series of homeless shelters and short-term apartments with his mother, chased by a shadowy figure his mother claims is going to kill him; Dominick Cancilla's "Josh's Collection", about a boy who collects some very strange insects, and ultimately about his cousin with whom he lives, and why he lives with her; Michael Cadnum's "Hazard", about a botched bank robbery; and perhaps best of all, Adam-Troy Castro's "Good For the Soul", about a successful, happily married, man who releases his demons by writing first person fantasies about horrible torture-rape-murders, and about what happens when his wife finds his writing.
