speculative fiction

Halloween 2018

Pop Lit Fiction

WHAT MAKES A GOOD HALLOWEEN STORY?

A good Halloween story should be truly scary– or at the least, disturbing. Something which climbs inside your head to unsettle your dreams. Or magnify your nightmares.

Our Halloween presentation for 2018, “God, the Machine” by Travis Simpson, does not involve pumpkins, demons or goblins. The story features instead that most frightening of nature-or-God’s creations, the human mind. Set in a futuristic world swiftly becoming contemporary and real.

She imagines the room filling with water, their bodies floating inside, spilling whatever blood is still loose inside them free in billowing clouds, a little like the nebulous entity outside the craft. This is the will of God, who moves through all dimensions and put this plan in her life from the moment she was conceived.

rivera controller of the universe

(Art: “The Headless Horseman” by Ichabod Crane; “Controller of the Universe” by Diego Rivera.)

A New Kind of Horror

Pop Lit Fiction

MONSTERS AND GOBLINS are products of the imagination. Reflections of our irrational minds.

What happens in an electronic world which overstimulates the brain to ever-higher levels of panic and hysteria? When media infiltrates our every waking and sleeping thought?

THESE QUESTIONS and others are raised in D.C. Miller’s intense, pop-tinged speculative novel, Dracula Rules the World and Mark Zuckerberg Is His Son. With his permission we’re able to present, in time for the mad pagan holiday of Halloween, five excerpts from the book.

Are the monsters inside us– or outside in the world?

Caught in the same chain of spaces, back and forth, between my apartment and the office, always facing a screen, as if I was trying to outstare it, it had gradually become unclear when I was inside the headset and when I was outside it.

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(Painting: “Vampire” by Edvard Munch.)

California Writing

Pop Lit Fiction

LOS ANGELES has long been the most extreme example of American excess. Many writers have tried to capture SoCal’s special vibration; its captivating mix of ethnicity, cars, class, color/weather/nature jammed together like an expressionist painting come alive. One of the best writers on the subject is Robin Wyatt Dunn– who appeared in our modest first New Pop Lit print issue with a terrific story about Los Angeles. Now he’s given us another one, “Travelogue,” full of reality and imagination. A journey through L.A., but also, perhaps, through somewhere else. A Robin Dunn story is always a unique experience.  Don’t miss this one!

Here in the Big Sleep there is no moon, so the sea is tideless. However, it does move. Creeping tendrils of water you will find anywhere along it, shimmering in the darkness. I have walked along Seaside on many a moonless night.

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Speaking of California, be sure to read D.C. Miller’s Appreciation of Philip K. Dick, part of our ongoing All-Time American Writers Tournament.
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(Painting: “Herbstlandschaft mit Booten” by Wassily Kandinsky.)