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Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Alchemy, 2004
I've only seen one issue of this very well-done new fantasy magazine in 2004. This was #2, the debut issue having appeared in 2003. Alchemy is edited by Steve Pasechnick. It is a magazine of fantasy stories, and nothing but stories -- no non-fiction, no features. It is quite nicely put together -- the look of the magazine appeals to me greatly. And the stories have been fine as well.
Issue #2 featured 6 stories, two of them novelettes, for a total of some 43,000 words. The novelettes were both good. I preferred Sarah Monette's "The Venebretti Necklace", a Kyle Murchison Booth story. Booth discovers a walled-in skeleton and eventually learns the secret behind the skeleton's burial and the cursed necklace involved. As with most of these stories, I find Booth's character more interesting than the particular episode. The other novelette is Holly Phillips's "A Beggar in Shadow", which reminded me for more than one reason of Ellen Kushner's _Swordspoint_. An older man asks his younger companion, Julian, to help him seduce a beautiful young Duchess -- but Julian too is attracted to the sad young woman. Of the short stories, my favorite was Theodora Goss's "Miss Emily Gray", a subtle piece in which the title character comes to be a young girl's governess, and ends up her stepmother. There is a sense of hidden menace to the whole thing that never comes quite to the forefront.
