Midnight Echo, the Magazine of the Australian Horror Writers Association
Issue #9: Myths and Legends, May 2013
By Various Contributors
Pages: 149
Reviewed by Eden Royce
“Horror is its own mythology…”
Geoff Brown, editor of Midnight Echo’s Myths and Legend issue speaks to the core of what horror is.
It is tales that created some of the deepest fears we still live with. We begged to hear them, even though we knew sleep would elude us.
We grew up with fairy tales intended to make us dream of magic, beauty, or heroic deeds.
Those are not here.
This issue focuses on the ancestors of those tales; the ones told in hushed tones in an attempt to warn us and make us stay inside when night falls. Midnight Echo’s Issue 9 has removed the happily-ever-afters from these stories and replaced them with something more cringe-worthy.
The characters you know are still here: the old crone in the woods, the elusive fae, even merfolk. But their masks have been stripped away, leaving only the undisguised horror of truly legendary creatures. These tales go beyond the façade of goodness to a place where evil is done for sport or because… well, one just can’t help it.
Even Mel Gannon’s cover artwork speaks to the evil disturbia in these pages. Even as I write this, I’m staring at the art, expecting the little girl thing on the cover to lift its head and reach for me.
But Midnight Echo isn’t only fiction.
There’s an article by Robin Furth on the legends used in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. A non-fiction article by Tony Vilgotsky on Russian folklore, which I admit to knowing precious little about, was fascinating. Before this read, I hadn’t known that some of the symbolism from Russian legends bled into the Native American stories I grew up with.
This magazine the covers the entire horror genre: film, comics, poetry, and in this issue includes interviews with award-winning authors Jonathan Maberry and James A. Moore.
It’s good to see a horror magazine gaining a foothold in the speculative fiction market.
Recommended. Visit www.midnightechomagazine.com for full details.
