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Summary: Flytrap, 2004
The second and third issues of Tim Pratt and Heather Shaw's 'zine Flytrap appeared this year. This 'zine fits in pretty well with the most common sort of small SF/Fantasy 'zine, similar look, similar mix of poetry and fiction, similar somewhat slipstreamish orientation. And the two editors (both fine young writers) are doing a nice job.
There were 17 stories this year, all short stories, about 43,000 words total. By my count, six of the stories, including a couple of the best, were short-shorts. That makes an average of about 2500 words per story.
From the May issue, three stories stood out. Rudi Dornemann's "The Labyrinth Tourist" is about a bank teller visiting an exotic city, in which the tourist must trail a thread behind him to guide him on the way out. David Moles's "The Ideas" affectingly treats the old notion of the source for stories being a post office box in a certain upstate New York town: despite the potential for mere cutesiness, it becomes moving and thoughtful. Michael Canfield's "Kank's Last Breath" is about a connoisseur of lingering breaths, such as one Neil Armstrong took on the Moon and which returned Earth with him. The breath considered in this story is much more obscure, perhaps meaning something only to one person. From the November issue, Benjamin Rosenbaum's "Night Waking" is a powerful short-short about a girl waking in the middle of the night with an all too real fear. And Jay Lake's "The Dying Dream of Water" takes a westward bound teenager, the victim with her family of Apaches, on a strange journey to an unexpected refuge.
I don't usually review the poetry -- I seem stuck in a mid-century time warp sometimes, with Wallace Stevens my favorite poet, followed by the likes of Philip Larkin and Geoffrey Hill, and no poets more recent than say Mark Strand and Marilyn Hacker exciting me. (I think this is largely the result of not enough reading.) But I did enjoy a fair amount of the poems, in particular Sonya Taaffe's set in the November issue. (Taaffe may be my favorite recent SFnal poet.)
