The Bleeding Pen
The only thing I didn’t completely dislike about this glossy goth-mag was the fiction. That’s a bit fierce isn’t it? Probably a bit unfair too. If you’re into this sort of thing – overwrought serif fonts, ghostly photos of people hovering around graveyards, barbed roses, black-clad women with ornamental daggers, poetry about death and broken toys etc. – then you might well want to fork over the $6.50 and commune with a kindred spirit. I, having missed this particular cultural boat, have actually developed an aversion to such magazines; whatever lament they cry, whatever hypocrisy they attack, the medium of delivery seems so deeply swaddled in arcane 19th century ballyhoo that I just can’t be bothered. But in all fairness, Peter Mansfield (editor and resident poet) has clearly worked hard to put up this first issue – clean, high quality printing, design and graphics – and I should be ignored for pissing on a new mag that might well go new places in genre that could use an infusion of some kind of new-ness. And a re-birth of good serial fiction might just his first step on the way. (HC)