Literary: The Magazine of Writing
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
The June 1997 issue of Literary: The Magazine of Writing printed my short story "The Metamachines." That story got a beautiful illustration (albeit a stock digital art piece from a CD-ROM) of a Stonehenge-like circle with a pillar of light rising from it.
There were some very good stories in it, like Barbara Less's "Psychic Network," in which a young woman's dependency upon one of those telephone psychics leads her into a very unpleasant encounter with some werewolves. Barbara Custer's "The Dark Gift" dealt with another major monster, the vampire, but through the elements of hypnotic regression and reincarnation manages to take a fascinating new look at the old type. However the writing in it could have used some more work -- I found myself wanting to rewrite almost every sentence to make it cleaner and bring it up to the level of the fascinating ideas that it was supposed to tell.
"At Extreme Unction" by Natalia Lincoln was a very brief horror story of the undead and the Inquisition. Unfortunately, I was never entirely sure just what was going on when I read this. Hal Marcovitz's "Adult Situations, Profanity, Nudity, Sex and Violence" simply didn't appeal to me, since I generally don't enjoy reading stories about unlikeable teenage males who wind up getting what they have coming.