New Genre #6 is out after a long wait and available for purchase: chills, space-tech-lingo, and wholesale freakouts feature. Our contributing editor Adam Golaski has selected both the science fiction and horror stories for this number (Jeffrey Paris A Lawyer Walks Into a Bar… psp , science fiction editor for numbers 1 — 5 has passed the baton); as Open Letters readers may know, Adam doubles as an experimental poet and his science fiction selections schitz with the poetry of hard SF:

• A Lawyer Walks Into a Bar… movie

With a remote controlled jig torch he shaved loose the raspbushings in the halogen assemblies, then activated the flip-up lathes and the bit grinder, and ran the winch moldings and fuse block stripping into them. Disconnecting the linkage tips of the emissive hoses with an oldinary bleeder wrench, Jack disentangled whole segments of cleats and chocks. Satisfied with the debris produced, next came the running brushes under the substrate boards, which produced a blakanized screech of white noise.

A bleeder wrench!  This from “Jack the Satellite Jocky,” by Michael Filimowicz. The volume’s other speculative tale, the long and winding, “I Am Antenna / Antennae” by Matthew Pendleton, is equally strange: a society of female nurses tend to a society of confused males in sight of a “Hospital” shaped like a cake; they live in confused and shifting corridors where food is left at their doors each night and clean dresses float down from the sky.

There are also a pair of horror stories, both straightforwardly narrated and both designed to make you feel satisfyingly unsettled. In the first, a dark western by Stephen Graham Jones called, “Lonegan’s Luck,” a wandering salesman takes advantage of a good Christian town in a sneaky, thorough, and brutal way. The other chiller, Eric Schaller’s “The Sparrow Mumbler,” investigates the sort of crazy down-on-his-luck coin-flipper who’d permit himself to be pecked and clawed all day and night and be grateful for the paycheck. And then a haunting woman arrives …

You can order your copy right away by sending the $8 cover price, check or cash, to PO Box 270092, W. Hartford, CT 06127. New York City readers can ask for it at St. Mark’s Books, and other spots where unique and unwholesome concoctions appear.

Last Days

• 1776 full

Brian Evenson
Underland Press, 2009

Detective Kline awakes one morning to find that a dapper pair of amputees have broken into his apartment. A crime has occurred at their compound and Kline is asked to investigate. What crime? They cannot say. Why do they  require him? Well, you see, he is an amputee too, and a famous one (if only among “The Brotherhood”). A “self-cauterizer,” Kline has achieved heroic status among the shifty mutilates who proceed to his kidnapping. Things begin creepy and become terrifying. As The Brotherhood shuttles Kline from gruesome meetings to gruesome ceremonies, the detective discovers he has been forcibly inducted into a mutilation cult, one in which the only way to rise in the ranks is to chop off increasing portions of yourself. Pure biblical literalism: If thy right eye offends thee…

A “one” on arrival (one chop: his hand), Kline can only escape the dark plans of the “tens” and “thirteens” by enacting the kind of gory revenge that will ultimately render him less human than his captors. (”A third part of himself, the part that terrified him the most, was saying What if Paul is right? What if I am God?”)

This is a nervy and squirm-inducing book. The prose is knowingly spare and Evanson’s got a sense of humor, a gallows patter:

• Breakfast at Tiffany’s release

“I could count the number of people who self-cauterize on one finger of one hand,” said Ramse.

Dead End dvd “If he had a hand,” said Gous.

Hornblower: The Frogs and the Lobsters video “If I had a hand,” said Ramse.

Jersey Girl movie

They drove for a while in silence.

Sniper dvd Ramse and Gous, Kline’s minders and companions, don’t so much resemble their famous R. & G. counterparts from Wittenberg as they do K.’s uncanny assistants in The Castle The Honeymooners divx . The story of a secretive brotherhood of amputees is rife with absurdities that can suddenly dart into cold horror (like the strip-tease; hint: she takes off more than her clothes), then pathos (over dinner: “‘I don’t have any hands,’ said Ramse. ‘You’ll have to feed me when you’re done’”). Evanson writes with a light touch and there are plenty of jokes he could have made but didn’t, plenty of scares and shocks he could have sprung instead of passing them over for others. The book is strong for his restraint.

Born of a literery mind, Last Days is a deliberate page-turner and Evanson’s prose is the opposite of ponderous. The sentences slip by and the action moves and moves. This is an easy book to read in a night; and needn’t be a moonless one. Moon or no moon, the room will be dark and your spine cold.

I’ve heard whispers implying Last Days Unrest download is a sort of metaphor for the Mormon Church. I don’t know enough about Mormonism to say, but The Brotherhood could stand in for most mystical and hierarchical groups (Scientologists, lifestyle junkies, The Fox Nation). I’m sure there’s more going on in Last Days than I was privy to and that’s just fine by me. I came to it looking for a quick and disturbing shocker. And it satisfied. That’s something real.

—John Cotter