Not One of Us is one of the small print* magazines I've been reading for a long time. It's been published by John Benson since 1986(!) -- and its 83rd issue came out in July 2025. Its format is the classic saddle-stapled 'zine -- 8.5" by 11" sheets folded once. It features both fiction and poetry. The poetry is to my taste some of the best I see in the SF/Fantasy field -- one of my favorite fantasy poets, Sonya Taaffe, is a regular. The fiction tends to what might be called "dark fantasy" -- it's not really a horror magazine (though some stories certainly qualify) and I should note that there is some range here -- occasionally Benson published SF, occasionally contemporary fiction, and while the mood is typically darkish (one might almost say "morose") there are sweeter stories here as well. And there is plenty of strong work to be found.
*(Not One of Us is both a small printed magazine, and a magazine whose print is very small!)
In this latest issue I enjoyed two stories in particular, both of which in this case can be called horror. "Distilled Fire", by Malory, is in the classic "story told in a bar" mode. The narrator has a glass of bourbon in front of him. It's very expensive bourbon ... £2000 a shot. The bottle has rested unopened in this pub in England for longer than the bartender knows. But the narrator knows ... a lot, and he tells the bartender the dark story of the whiskey's history. Leading, of course, to a dark conclusion. The whole success of such a story is in the telling -- the style, the flair, the voice of the narrator keeping our attention. And this one works, as the story unfolds -- a pre-Prohibition Kentucky distillery, a lightning-caused fire affecting the casks and limiting the output, a long history of the few bottles eventually produced ending up in a mysterious places, the narrator's search ... well mixed with the bartender attending to some other customers but remaining intrigued. Nice work.
J. M. Vesper's "The Subsidence" has Ellie returning to the home she'd fled years before as her mother is dying. Her hometown is a "company town" -- owned by a mining company. And we learn that the company has resisted attempts to properly compensate the residents for the environmental damage the mining caused. This is signified here by Ellie's childhood home sinking -- subsiding -- a few inches each year, so that when she left for collge the first floor was entirely underground, and by now Ellie's mother has been forced to the attic. It seems that the several houses so affected are owned by people who actively fought the company, and it seems the company has won, forcing them underground. But Ellie learns that what's going on underground is stranger than what she had thought ... It's a pretty effective metaphorical literalization of corporate misdoing, and of, as the story puts it "the foundation of ... prosperity."
In my visits to the Pittsburgh-based convention Confluence, I have enjoyed looking through the products of a small publisher called Air and Nothingness Press, based too in Pittsburgh. Todd Sanders is the proprietor. They publish a lot of SF, Fantasy and Poetry, as well as translations of poetry from the French. Their books are quite beautiful. This year I bought a slim colleciton of stories set inside a "Hollow Earth", called NeverwasEarth, published in 2020. It's a lovely product as usual for them. I will say that some of the stories seemed, essentially, unfinished: the Hollow Earth milieu might be introduced, along with a couple of characters, but no real story resulted. But one story did stick with me: "The Adventure of the Faithful Friend", by Jonathan Howard. This is a Sherlock Holmes tale, in which Holmes and Watson, along with Professor Challenger and others, join an expedition to the interior of the Earth to solve the mystery of the disappearance of previous expeditions. They do solve it, in a fashion, as they are immediately attacked by headhunting savages, and suffer terrible losses. Holmes and Watson only escape, and Holmes is severely injured, so Watson must carry him to safety and to the surface himself. The concluding revelation is rather shocking, quite macabre.
I'm still not back to regularly reading all the SF magazines but I did go through the July issue of Lightspeed. I enjoyed Meghan McCarron's "The Lord of Mars", about a corporate-backed expedition to colonize the Red planet, told via Oliver, who is responsible for trying to grow vegetable in Martian soil. Oliver is a true believer in the project, and something of a friend to the so-styled Queen of Mars -- the wife of the tech CEO who, back on Earth, calls himself the King of Mars. For all Oliver's optimism, however, the nascent colony is in trouble: equipment keeps breaking down, most of the "colonists" are subject to financially crippling indentures, and Oliver's potatoes won't grow. Things come to a head when a hint of success with the potatoes intersects wtih a bid to unionize the colonists, and with the harsh response of the King. Oliver is caught in the middle ... the ending is purposely inconclusive, and ambiguously hopeful.
There's another Omelas retelling, and as I said about this year's Hugo nominee "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole", it does seem like maybe there have been enough such. Still, "What Else, What Else, in the Joyous City", by Sadoeuphemist, is amusing enough, presenting several brief descriptions of Omelas variants such as Salemo and Moslea, etc. The author wrings clever variations and inversions on the theme -- no fugues, though -- nothing groundbreaking here but nice enough for its space. I also enjoyed Naomi Kanakia's "Domestic Disputes", in which a married couple are flying a spaceship to save everyone from the White Mass at the center of the universe. But Tomas, the husband, whose main job is spaceship maintenance, is feeling jealous of his wife, the Galactic Hero. So they bicker, and also Tomas is open to seduction by the White Mass, which is trying various tricks to convince him that he is the true hero. The resolution is philosophically amusing -- something of a subversion of SF cliches.
Kanakia is suddenly quite busily publishing new stories, and another one is the first August story from
The Sunday Morning Transport. As with "Domestic Disputes", it is one of her "tales", that she has also been featuring on her Substack, Woman of Letters. These stories are quite openly designed to illustrate a point, often philosophical. "The Last Planet" is about a small group of humans who have retreated to a distant planet, under attack by another group which has vowed to eliminate them. One of the survivors urges continued resistance, but as he discusses his thoughts with the captain of their group, he comes to realize that humanity had been in the wrong all along, and he decides to travel to the enemy and confess humanity's sins, and beg forgiveness. But -- the enemy too has been reevaluating their actions.
While I'm at it, I should mention one of Kanakia's recent tales from her own Substack, which I'll call "The Good Guy Always Wins". (I'm not sure of the proper title.) It's a tale inspired by reading Robert E. Howard's Conan stories. It tells of a villager, Erdric, who has vowed to become a great hero, and who has pledged to remain chaste in order to keep his powers. A nearby village has been implementing a harsh rule of law, and a woman is about to be sentenced to death. Erdric decides to be her champion -- and she offers to reward him, in the obvious way. Which would of course deprive him of his powers. The story spends time in the head of the veteran soldier who Erdic has to fight, as well. It's an interesting look at a few things -- the nature of heroes, the rule of law versus tradition, temptation. And it asks questions but doesn't force an answer. Nice work.
As The Sunday Morning Transport and Woman of Letters are both Substacks, perhaps I ought to mention one more: B. D. McClay's Notebook. BDM has been publishing a ghost story there each months, and they have been a widely varied and quite intriguing set. The July story,
"Step Out in Style", is about a bear abandoned in the woods when its circus's train crashes. The bear inevitably dies -- and becomes a ghost. And as a ghost, the bear -- well, I won't say. But it's a really lovely resolution.