Review: "Occult Detective Quarterly"

Lovecraft and his crowd lived by submitting their writing to various pulp magazines that were willing to pay for their contributions. Sadly for them, this means of living dwindled away for most of them and left them hanging with literally nowhere to go, except to find day-jobs and get on with things. For HPL this was anathema and he died rather than take this step; for Robert E. Howard as well, after bending his material to fit the shapes of various magazines increasingly uninterested in printing his A-game stuff, he decided that a bullet was the only answer. Of all of them, perhaps Clark Ashton-Smith was the only realist among them who could stay the course and last at least some of the distance.

In recent years, the only way to get into print with a Mythos-based short story was to find an agent and pay for it to happen. The big publishing houses, have become ever-more impatient with writers of short fiction and demand only novel-length literary fiction, or factual material. Increasingly, the big houses only want 1) novels by authors with a proven track record, or 2) stuff that’s been done (and which has sold) before. It seems the likes of Penguin, or HarperCollins, are refining their tried-and-true material into increasingly rarefied stuff and, if you aren’t Salman Rushdie, you won’t get a foot in the door. Self-publishing has filled the gap here, allowing those passed over by the Big Guns to get something into print (or, at least, onto Kindle). There are pitfalls with this, however: if a big publisher picks up your stuff, they give it their all – packaging and promotion – and it can be an easy ride; for a self-publisher, all of this falls into their (often inexperienced) lap. Despite all the hype, blog-site promotion doesn’t really equate to book sales.

Fortunately, there’s a positive response. With things like Kickstarter and an increase in the availability of print production (including print-on-demand facilities), the pulp magazine has had something of a re-birth. If you look hard enough, you can find a growing bevy of underground magazines hoping to revive the heyday of the classic pulps. One of these which I’ve been pleased to make the acquaintance of is the “Occult Detective Quarterly”. The purview of this magazine is fairly specific: they publish material which examines the notion of criminal detectives who use, or encounter, supernatural phenomena in the course of their investigations. There is a solid basis for this specification: many great weird fiction authors have used this concept, from Edgar Allan Poe, to William Hope Hodgson, to Algernon Blackwood, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. When you factor in television material like “The X-Files” and “Supernatural”, and comics offerings like “John Constantine: Hellblazer”, you can see that there’s a wealth of territory to be covered.

The print run of this journal is very short – the fourth instalment is being compiled – but enough water has passed under the bridge to give a critical overview. My feeling is that this is a positive and well-helmed vehicle; there are some quibbles (inevitably) but I will address these at the end. For now let’s jump in to issue 1:

GAFFORD, Sam, & John Linwood GRANT (eds.), “Occult Detective Quarterly #1 – Winter 2016/2017”, Electric Pentacle Press, Printed in Wroclaw Poland.

Quarto; perfect-bound paperback; unpaginated (100pp.), with many monochrome illustrations. Mild wear; covers lightly curled. Near fine.

With efforts of this nature you’d be forgiven for thinking that there would be some misfires in a first issue, while the editorial and production staff find their feet; surprisingly, there is very little of that in evidence here. The compilers are sure of what it is that they’re trying to do and they hit the ground running. This instalment has a wealth of solid literary performances accompanied by some high-quality artwork, commissioned especially for the pieces that they’re illustrating. There are some entertaining articles and a Reviews section which speaks directly to the type of material which this exercise is focussed upon. All in all, especially with the Mythos material contained herein, this is definitely value for your hard-earned.

Things kick off (after the welcoming editorial Introduction which spells out the scope of the project) with a rather surprising collaborative effort from David T. Wilbanks and William Meikle which channels Raymond Chandler via Curious George, in that it features a gorilla named Gus who works as a private detective in Los Angeles. In the course of “Got My Mojo Working”, he manages to isolate an incursion into this reality by menacing Australian  Aboriginal Dreamtime entities by means of a series of bizarre paintings, which activity he thwarts with his finely-honed understanding of Louisiana-based folk magic. This is a mildly-entertaining piece of fluff, which ticks a whole bunch of boxes that seem to be touchstones of the assembled material, the Chandler-pastiche being prime among them.

Moving on, we come to “When Soft Voices Die”, by Amanda de Wees. Straightaway, we’re into the other trope that’s a constant of the fare on offer – the late-Victorian, Hope Hodgson knock-off. Even moreso than the Chandler pillaging, this is a high-wire act in that, if the details aren’t hit squarely on the head, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. Outlining a psychic investigator-cum-stage actress’s dilemma in finding a place to stay after her house burns down, de Wees presents to us the character of Sybil Ingram Lammle (after the "Frankenstein" director), whose sensitivity to ghostly presences leads her to the resolution of a mystery long-ignored by the family with whom she finally finds a (haunted) billet. This is an amusing effort, somewhat undercut by its anachronisms of language and attitude, that wends its way to a rather obvious conclusion.

Next, comes “Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You” by Adrian Cole. This is another Chandler-esque romp - this time with a snappier line in descriptive writing - that throws us into an urban-fantasy milieu wherein our characters hop from this world into the “Pulpworld” and back. The Pulpworld contains all of the Noir-ish things you’d expect with a name like that, along with dragons and magic. Our detective – Nick Stone – is a trench-coat-wearing, twin-Beretta-packing investigator who runs a shady deal across the divide between realities, becoming mired in a game of revenge, justice and retribution. It’s at this point that “Occult Detective Quarterly” really starts to deliver the goods.

“Orbis Tertius” by Josh Reynolds springboards off the works of Jorge Luis Borges and tries to reach above the simple one-note tune of ‘spooky detective romp’. We meet his Occult Detective - Charles St. Cyprian - with his dissolute female sidekick, “Ebe” Gallowglass, on a mission to defend the Empire against the incursions of the arcane. In the course of ridding a moderately-respectable Gentlemen’s Club from a hideous mind-altering entity unleashed from a mouldering tome, they are forced to confront the fact that the paradigm shift which the entity was impinging upon them might actually have been better than the reality in which they find themselves. This was a moderately successful turn, although the arch quality of the character’s names, along with their fashion-conscious posing with coats, hats and firearms, made them sound more like someone’s roleplaying favourites, rather than fleshed-out protagonists. There is an issue at play here too, in that Americans have an odd perception of what it means to be ‘Victorianly English’: I’d probably have enjoyed Mr. Reynold’s attempts at an Occult Detective from the other side of the Pond rather than this. And just what is “Ebe” short for actually?

Up next is T.E. Grau’s “Monochrome” and, hands down, the best piece of writing in this issue. An early note on the Editorial page states that this story is re-printed from Celaeno Press’s "The Court of the Yellow King", edited by Glynn Owen Barrass in 2014, and it’s easy to see why the Electric Pentacle people wanted to give it an airing here too. This is ground-shaking stuff. Set in L.A., our disaffected, drink-sodden investigator, now working as a free-lance journalist, follows a trail of disturbing events which dramatically shift the landscape around him as it begins to crystallise its hideous shape. This takes Robert W. Chambers’ “The King in Yellow” premise, beefs up the stakes and updates it perfectly for contemporary times. This is the uncaring dispassionate negligence of the Cosmos made real, behind a mask of the Rodney King assault and the ensuing L.A. Riots. If I have a quibble, it’s that the illustration commissioned for the piece lets too many cats out of the bag before the conclusion. This story alone is worth the price of admission, especially for Mythos fans.

“Baron of Bourbon Street” by Aaron Vlek follows the investigation of a New Orleans detective – Alfonse de Cartier – as he gets to the bottom of an outbreak of soulless corpses. This wouldn’t be too unusual a deal except that these corpses were soulless before they were killed and Alfonse’s patron, Baron Samedi himself, wants it stopped. Here we see the third tine of the Occult Detective pitchfork in full flight – the Vodoun element. From “Got My Mojo Working”, to the villain in “Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You”, to this articulation, it’s clear that the go-to option for ‘States-side supernatural dicks is to wallow in the ways of creole folk religions. Not that this is a bad thing necessarily; it’s just that it’s going to get quite old, quite quickly. Anyway, the premise for this tale is a nice slant, but by the end I was wondering why we needed an Occult Detective at all, since the Baron was pushing along most of the action by himself.

Oscar Dowson’s “The Adventure of the Black Dog” examines the mess that dabbling in the paranormal can leave behind when a soldier, lately returned from the Boer War, takes up his friend’s offer to house-sit only to discover that a hideous Tulpa in the form of an eyeless black hound is haunting the place. In the course of the tale we meet the portentously-named Dr. Henry Jerusalem Crow who clears the supernatural slate and takes our un-named narrator onboard as his new assistant. We’re back in late-Victoriana mode here but with a writer who better knows his chops about the time period; sadly, his writing could’ve done with a bit of a polish as, apart from ending rather too abruptly, he constantly makes assertions about his characters only to undercut them a few paragraphs later – our narrator, for example goes from being comfortably well-off to financially ignorant in a handful of sentences, according to the changing needs of the story, which was unsettling. A good potential tale that just needed that little bit more work.

The final literary offering of this issue is the first instalment of a round-robin story incorporating the work of several of the editorial staff and their associates in an ongoing tale of occult detection, entitled “The Occult Legion”. To be honest, I passed over this as it felt a little like a pointless exercise. Of course, in an endeavour such as this, it follows that the writers who have a desire to pen these kinds of stories are also the ones who got together to create the vehicle to showcase their efforts, so it figures that there would be just such a forum for them to strut their stuff. That’s fine, but I just feel – personally – that this type of thing is like knocking off ‘artworks’ simply to fill in space on a wall. I’d rather read something that had its own point and expression in preference to watching an ‘in-crowd’ slapping each other on the back.

In terms of articles, there’s a witty essay on “How to Be a Fictional Victorian Ghost Hunter (in Five Easy Lessons)” by Tim Prasil, who runs us through the Victorian literature of the Occult Detective and gives us the low-down on the art of fin-de-siécle spook detection. After this there’s a look at “The Occult Fiction of Doctor Spektor” a character from the Gold Key Comics range of the 70s and an interview with his creator in “The Man Behind Doctor Spektor – An Interview with Don F. Glut” underlining the fact that the concept upon which the magazine has been predicated is wide-ranging and well-interpreted. Finally, the Reviews section covers more bases with overviews of two collections of short stories focussing upon the Occult Detectives created by Tim Prasil and Jessica Amanda Salmonson as well as a recently–released audiobook version of William Hope Hodgson’s Dr. Carnacki stories.

All in all, a solid start to this enterprise. Now on to Issue Two!

GAFFORD, Sam, John Linwood GRANT & Dave BRZESKI (eds.), “Occult Detective Quarterly #2 – Spring 2017”, Electric Pentacle Press, Printed in Wroclaw Poland.

Quarto; perfect-bound paperback; unpaginated (104pp.), with many monochrome illustrations. Mild wear; covers lightly curled. Near fine.

The second instalment kicks off as before and this time with an ongoing comic series featuring an Occult Detective who happens to be a dog. “Borkchito: Occult Doggo Detective” by Sam L. Edwards and Yves Tourigny had me grinning right from the word ‘go’ with all of its tangled grammar and pleasing doggie-ness. I’m a sucker for an ongoing comic… The first thing to notice this time around is that the number of ads between the covers has increased, which is good if you’re looking for alternative venues to publish your material, but which might annoy some punters. Still, it’s a good sign for the continued health and prosperity of the magazine overall.

First cab off the rank is a pastiche tale of Dr. Carnacki’s younger days, “The Arcana of the Alleys” by Brandon Barrows. This is a tight little story of an untold event in Carnacki’s past which is set up in a manner of which Hope Hodgson might well have approved and even incorporates a bit of fisticuffs which rings true from Hodgson’s real-world activities. It suffers, sadly, from being a New Age occult experience wholly outside of Carnacki’s purview and feels somewhat like it was originally another story idea, co-opted to a new purpose.

“The Black Tarot” by Mike Chinn takes a page from “The Shadow” and sets us up with a trio of two-fisted pulp era mystical crime-fighters trying to stop a letter-bomb hoodoo - a la M.R. James’ “Casting The Runes” - from targeting a bunch of US tycoons. Here again, we have a story that feels like everyone’s favourite RPG characters taking parts in an old classic, but it’s well-penned and amusing enough in its own way.

With “Conquer Comes Calling” by Edward M. Erdelac we’re back to American folk-magic wrapped up in Chandler pastiche with a dose of “Shaft” thrown in for good measure. John Conquer is a Harlem-based private eye with hoodoo in his arsenal taking down a hex-y villain who has the ability to turn into a cat. Not only does he show up the detectives investigating the case (including saving them from being shrunk down to doll-size) but he makes off with the girl at the end of the story. It’s a little bit of 70s period fun, but A Rage in Harlem it ain’t.

Tim Waggoner’s “The Grabber Man” is a well-written story that seems to be an entrée into a wider world of dark deviousness. Having encountered “The Shadow” as a child – a dark, parallel world of creepy mutagenic monsters - our narrator Ismael, now grown and working as a psychologist, examines his patients for signs of them falling under the evil influence of this outside force. In this short tale, which begs for some kind of follow-up, Ismael rescues a girl from a “psychovore”, a caterpillar-like creature which lurks undetected behind her ear and generates fear of manhandling strangers during her dreams and, later, waking life, off which it feeds. This story was highlighted by a blurb on the issue’s front cover, which made me turn to it first; sadly, it was full of spelling errors which seriously undercut its impact.

Tricia Owens’ “White Ghost in the City” is a diversion from the usual run of paranormal sleuths we’ve had thus far. Ashton Lesser is hunting through Kowloon for a clue leading to the discovery of a missing soldier on leave from the Vietnam Conflict. Unfortunately, Lesser is a hard-bitten bigot who’s well outside his comfort-zone. Engaging a Hong Kong whore to help gain an entrée into the world of soldier-kidnapping, he soon discovers that the handful of missing men of which he was vaguely aware numbers a whole lot more than that… just before he joins their ranks in a suitably nasty way. This is one of only a few examples in these collections which make a deliberate and positive effort to subvert the stereotype.

Now we have “Devil in the City of Lights” by Bruno Lombardi. There’s one thing that bothers me and that’s a story that plainly hasn’t done its research. This is a great story with entertaining characters about a nightmarish, sewer-dwelling creature attacking people in the French capital that completely overlooks the fact that the sewers in Paris are wide and run directly under the streets specifically in order to not wind up as the sort of hellish lavatorial mess that exists under the streets of London. If you decide to think of this tale as a story of two French policemen taking a stroll – for whatever reason - in ‘London Below’, then it works; if you know anything about the sewers of Paris, this is an error in judgement.

Kelly A. Harmon is a writer who pushes a series of novels concerning an Occult Investigator named Assumpta Margaret-Mary O’Connor who deals with demonic happenings in her mid-west American setting. “Light from Pure Digestion Bred” is a short piece that wraps up some left-over business from her earlier, longer material while providing a nice entrée to the characters in the ongoing series. Frankly, I’m not a fan of Laurel K. Hamilton’s work and Kelly A. Harmon obviously is; I’ll leave it at that.

“Death and the Dancing Bears” by Steve Liskow is a story that partakes of its indigenous American setting with gusto. This is a tale of lycanthropy and circuses in a reservation locale filled with inter-racial miscommunication and local sheriff intervention. Our sheriff is a racist bigot and his deputy is a Native American woman with a greater insight into what’s going on than her boss. There’s a lot to like in this story given its cultural cross-grain revelations. Annoyingly though, it reads a bit like a literary version of a decorated Franklin Mint china plate, with eagles and rainbows and semi-clad sexy squaws.

“The Occult Legion” round-robin narrative continues in this issue with “Terror on the Links” by Joshua Reynolds. Again, I let it lie, for the reasons listed elsewhere.

In terms of articles, Danyal Fryer provides us with a solid potted history of “John Constantine: Hellblazer” - talking us through his character and motivations and revealing why he fits the bill as an Occult Detective - followed by “The Man Who Is Carnacki: An Interview With Dan Starkey”, who voiced the character on the audio-book which was reviewed in the previous issue. Tim Prasil then provides us with a breakdown of what makes an occult medical 'man' in “Doctors of the Strange: the tradition of the Occult Physician”, covering everybody from Dr. Heselius, to Abraham van Helsing, to Dana Scully. The Reviews section covers a bunch of self-published and e-published potboiler series (some of which skim the margins of the erotica tag) released though a number of representative presses and is worthwhile perusing for those on the lookout for a new series to get their teeth into.

A very solid follow-up on the first issue; now onto the third instalment.

GAFFORD, Sam, John Linwood GRANT & Dave BRZESKI (eds.), “Occult Detective Quarterly #3 – Fall 2017”, Electric Pentacle Press, Printed in Wroclaw Poland.

Quarto; perfect-bound paperback; 122pp., with many monochrome illustrations. Mild wear; covers lightly curled. Near fine.

Back again and third time’s the charm. For Lovecraft fans there’s a wonderful story about the Mi-go here, set just after Professor Wilmarth’s return from Vermont, and there’s a very nice overview of Robert E. Howard’s attempts at generating his own Occult Detective. Let’s hook in:

There’s a touch of “Predator” about S.L. Edwards’ “Magdalena” and I’m certain that several viewings of that film (and its sequels) were undertaken by the author as part of the research process. A village in South America is attacked by a demonic entity which is trying to wriggle out from under Satan’s boot-heel and stake a claim on its own personal version of Hell. Our Occult Detective, backed up by a cadre of CIA-activated death squad veterans, goes into the wilderness to sort things out. It’s pretty much a train-ride to a vaguely splatterpunk end at this point. The best feature was the opening section wherein the Devil comes to our Detective’s office to enlist his aid in ousting the usurper – it’s a magical beginning, let down in part by what comes next.

Aaron Smith pitches a nice tangential sequel to Dracula in “Blood Sings To Me”, the tale of the small child taken by Lucy Westenra at the start of Stoker’s novel, now grown to adulthood. Since her abduction by the “bloofer lady”, Katharine Mason is able to ‘read’ impressions of blood splatter left at the scenes of murders, thus allowing her to track down the perpetrators. This is a nice conceit and a very nice story, enlivened by the hint of a blossoming romance between the seriously-sanguine Miss Mason and her erstwhile partner, Inspector Walter Franklin.

A post-script story based on H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness”, “Disconnected” by Brian M. Sammons sees a Pinkerton agent set on the trail of a trio of Mi-go nuisances, bent on enacting their fungal revenge upon Albert Wilmarth. In a William Burroughs-like fashion, the narrative has been cut into pieces and re-combined into a crazy-quilt story that cleverly segues between its own disjointed sections – the reason for this is the deliciously-evil surprise at the end.

I’m not a fan of Holmes pastiche. Either, it was written by Conan Doyle, or it wasn’t; if it wasn’t, then it’s almost invariably bad. The trap that most writers fall into is in thinking that Sherlock Holmes is a slight, two-dimensional caricature and is therefore easy to replicate on paper: this is a fallacy. If it were that easy, we’d all be doing it and there’d be no reason to print “A Study in Scarlet” ever again. It is with just such a mindset that William Meikle presents us with “The Ghost Shirt” a tale of Holmes and Watson tracking down paranormal goings-on at a London-based “Buffalo Bill Wild West Extravaganza”. Quite apart from the fact that fans of “Penny Dreadful” with be familiar with this trope, once again we have a writer with a surface knowledge of the time and characters trying to write convincingly when their efforts would be better-spent telling a story about the things that they actually know. This is a well-crafted story, but it’s bad Holmes-and-Watson and it’s bad Victoriana: “quarter to eight” people, not “7.45”!

Edward M. Erdelac gives us another dose of John Conquer, 70s hoodoo detective, with “Conquer Gets Crowned”. Here, we see a tension between a writer attempting to adhere to an established template but also instil some information on another subject that they’ve become interested in: Erdelac is juggling his “Shaft”-with-juju-bags premise with an extended insight into the street-art sub-culture of New York in the 70s. Frankly, I think he should have saved the graffiti bombers for a stand-alone tale. Trying to blend afros and red leather jump-suits with spray cans and street-art smarts is too much and detracts from both without adding anything to either.

“Homo Homini Lupus” by Sam Schrieber is another case where we’ve obviously been dumped into a world that’s larger than what a short story can comfortably hold. This is a slice from a larger reality where supernatural magic, and the policing of it through government-mandated authorities, is taken as a fait accompli. We have a sinister Wall Street mystic cabal with a Brett Easton Ellis fetish dealing illegally in the trade of souls, artificially inflating the share prices and attempting to crash the market. Going undercover into the ‘soul exchange’ is our Occult Detective – a werewolf – who confronts the villains, only to find a double-, and then triple-cross. It’s a nice story, but it flags its twists a little too freely.

Here, at last, is a writer who’s read more than a surface amount of the stuff that they’re writing about. In “Cowherd” we have a couple of club members hearing a spooky tale from a third member with a supernatural reputation, along the lines of a Carnacki story frame. The narrative re-counts the awakening (by a sloppy spiritualist) of an ancient Otherworldy power at an ancestral estate, at which point our Occult Detective, Simon Wake, is brought in to deal with it. The dialogue is well-rendered, the characters believable and barely an anachronistic note is rung throughout. The evil at work here is of the Fey kind and here too, Melanie Atherton Allen has done her homework. The only thing letting it down is the artwork, which doesn’t really do the story justice.

Alice Loweecey offers us a tale (“It Runs In The Family”) of an antiquarian who inherits an estate from his wealthy ex-wife, eight years after she has vanished and who has now been declared dead. Travelling to the mock-"Addams Family" building, the only ghosts that bother him are those of the past and the unresolved issues of his broken marriage. Then the psychic sister of his ex’s boy-toy shows up and reveals that All Is Not As It Seems. This was an amusing yarn, although the stakes were never very high, and I was never convinced that our narrator was an actual antiques dealer.

This next story – “Out Of The Sea” by Soumya Sundar Mukherjee - introduces us to Bipul Pandaji, a seller of sweetmeats in the town of Puri on the Bay of Bengal. Having almost been drowned within the waters of that sea, he survived to discover that he had gained the power to summon the spirits of those who had died in that same watery grave and incarnate them in giant bodies composed of water. When approached by two young men who ask him to revive the spirit of the man who killed the sister of one of them – the lover of the other – he at first refuses, only to discover that the man they wish to take pleasure in reviving and killing is the same one who murdered his own sweetheart and who later almost killed him. While set in a unique locale quite different from any seen so far in any of these collections, the story concerns itself mainly with the mechanics of the revenge scenario letting all the excitement of the local colour fall by the wayside. Interesting notion, however.

Bob Freeman’s “The Occult Legion: Birds of a Feather” follows on from here, part three of the ongoing, tag-team write-fest. I know that even Lovecraft undertook one of these exercises in his day; that doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily a good thing. In the short term, they provide a way for a nascent magazine to fill in empty pages but, after awhile, new contributions by writers should be given preference, and such gimmickry should not be allowed to become the raison d’etre of the publication. ‘Didn’t - as a mad Lovecraft fan - read his page-filling attempt; didn't read this.

In terms of articles, there’s a very interesting and well-researched column by Bobby Derie on Robert E. Howard’s attempt to create a Carnacki, or John Silence-type figure to fill a growing demand in the publishing market, which was stumped by his inexperience in the form, along with his own personal preferences. This is not a ground-shaking revelation into the ways of the Conan-creator, but is a well-considered and interesting examination of the author’s style and process, backed up with excerpts from his correspondence to others within the Lovecraft Circle.

This is followed up by an article which focuses on Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle and their half-baked careers as “Dabblers in Ghost Hunting”. The article references instances where both authors set out to determine if a locale pointed out to them was actually haunted or not, and how comment and controversy followed these attempts afterwards. Dickens is held up as the “Scully” of the duo, in that he approached his haunting from a sceptic’s viewpoint, while Conan Doyle is our “Mulder”, desperately wanting to believe (if only in fairies). This is a thoughtful and well-balanced report by Tim Prasil and certainly provides valuable insight into these two giants of English literature.

The pleasing, and very grammatically-tangled, “Borkchito” returns and is a welcome continuation.

The Reviews section continues to impress by the sheer range and quantity of material covered, proving that detective fiction with a supernatural bent is as wide-ranging and multi-faceted as the editors would want us to believe. Here are e-books, paperbacks, novel series, graphic novels and audio-books enough to cover all tastes and input preferences.

*****

So much for the good stuff, every review has to have a down side. There are a few points that I would like to make about this journal that I found less than edifying. The first is the tone. In all of the various interviews and some of the reviews herein (and – thank heavens! – only in those segments), there is a breathless ‘fan boy’ attitude which is tedious and also embarrassing. As far as reviews go, it’s great to be excited about the topic but this fact should never allow the critic to drop their even-handed perspective and simply gibber “this is fantastic! This is fantastic!” over and over again. As an interviewer or critic, if you ever feel tempted to end an observation with an exclamation point, you should stop, leave your desk and come back ten minutes later, having carefully reconsidered your options. There are several instances of this not having happened here and it certainly comes off as less than professional.

Awhile back, I examined two separate publications from Miskatonic River Press and found them wanting. A major issue that I had with them was the fact that the ‘editors’ had done very little in regards to actually editing the material and, having established the outline of the project, had proceeded to throw the concept out the window. Here, our Electric Pentacle people know exactly what they’re about, so the vision and content are not really an issue; still, in the copy-editing and proof-reading department, there is room for improvement. Two instances stand out, and they do so because they fall at extremely unfortunate moments: in the first story of the first issue, a sentence has been dropped at the bottom of the initial page causing a loss of sense; and, in a story in issue two that the editors chose to highlight by listing it as a feature on the front cover, there are a multitude of spelling errors that have thus become awkwardly underscored for the reader. I had to re-read the sentence “I straightened up in my hair” several times before I realised that “chair” was the required term, not “hair”. The issues here are nowhere near as bad as those evinced by Miskatonic River Press and, as I say, are most likely teething issues: with any luck, they should smooth themselves over as time goes by. Unfortunately, in such a project as this, these are also the sorts of things that can kill repeat sales.

(On a related note, if you’re going to include a contents page, then - by default - you must number the pages of the publication; this didn’t happen until issue three. ‘Good to see that it was addressed.)

Copy-editing and lay-out is one thing, but line-editing is another. There are several instances here – mentioned above – where the presented works contain errors of sense, or internal logic, that an astute editor should have picked up on and addressed before going to print. It’s possible that with imminent deadlines and a lack of other - better - copy, the editors simply couldn’t get in contact with the writer in time to say “how about sprucing this up a little?” before the kick-off. Again, as things roll on, hopefully this will be less of a concern.

I completely understand that such endeavours as these are a labour of love and that they get slaved over outside of working hours, after the serious business of making a living and earning a crust have been accomplished. Nevertheless, a production as professional-looking as these books are, should be - at the very least - able to match the standard of a daily news-print publication that manages fewer errors per page-count each issue on a far more demanding basis. Every error – of sense, or typography - makes the punter question the price tag being asked for admission, no matter who’s at the helm and under what circumstances.

*****

Aleister Crowley, who (I was certainly surprised to note) did not make a cameo in any of the first three issues of this magazine, worked long and tirelessly on his own journal, “The Equinox”. The first issue contained a wealth of colourful material, some provided by well-known writers of the day. Shortly thereafter though, the number of contributors dropped sharply, as Crowley was recognised as the con-artist and snake-oil salesman he truly was. In the later issues, every item – article; fiction; poetry; review; letter to the editor – was written exclusively by himself, under a plethora of pseudonyms. Finally, exhausted and burnt-out by the demands of his rag, he let it be known that the final volume would be one “of silence”. I’d hate for this periodical to go the same way, and that is particularly why I’m so dismissive of the tag-team writing exercise by the editorial staff – does anyone else out there remember the travesty that was Thieves World? If a journal is to survive it must actively seek out contribution, not provide it in-house as space and time pressure demands. That way lies madness.

So, it’s with fingers-crossed and warm wishes for a bright future that I cheer on “Occult Detective Quarterly” and wish them the very best of luck in their future endeavours. Four Tentacled Horrors from me, overall, for the first three instalments.