Spiral Tower Reviews: Reviving the Sorcery: Old Moon Quarterly 3, a Spark in the S&S Renaissance


Reviving the Sorcery: Old Moon Quarterly 3, a Spark in the S&S Renaissance
Old Moon Quarterly, vol. 3, 2023.
Words: 1337

Debuting in Summer 2022, Old Moon Quarterly has established itself as one of the premier contemporary magazines dedicated to the sword-and-sorcery genre. If you’re a Very Online Person (like myself), whispers of a possible S&S renaissance have likely floated your way, with numerous magazines and Kickstarter projects emerging in recent years that seem to indicate a resurgence of the subgenre. Debate continues on whether such an upswell will translate into visible, commercial viability, but at the least something is happening in the S&S world, and Old Moon Quarterly, for this reader, rises to the top.

Before discussing the stories, I want to address the presentation. Old Moon is a slim magazine, usually comprising a brief intro from the editors, four original stories, and a review. In other words, Old Moon is easy to digest, something you can pick up and enjoy in one sitting or savor over a few days. Due to this brevity I never doubted I would actually finish each issue (something I can’t say for some other genre magazines). Each issue is adorned with stellar cover art, the latest piece a particular highlight: a lone warrior floats before a leering monstrosity straight out of FromSoft game design, mountains and an ominous skyline fading into the background. The mood is somber, the stakes are high, and my investment is assured. Daniel Vega is the cover artist, and the work does the job of arresting your attention. These elements taken together, Old Moon’s presentation is a real treat; the cover art taps into the weird quality that editors Julian Barona, Caitlyn Emily Wilcox, and Graham Thomas Wilcox are shooting for, and, at only four stories per issue, each tale gets the space to shine and breathe.

“Evil Honey” by James Enge

“Morlock was about to indulge in another mugful of mead when the bartender began to scream. Morlock waited for him to stop before he placed his order” (8).

One of my favorite story tropes is when things get small. Honey I Shrunk the Kids, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Toy Story, Small Soldiers, that episode of Darkwing Duck where DW gets shrunk by a capitalist exploiting the labor of ants: all classics, all brilliant. Here, Enge shrinks his famous Morlock Ambrosius down to bee size to negotiate with/eliminate an infected hive on behalf of the god of bees, and I loved it. The story is weird, bizarre, and poignant, with Enge creating, in only a few thousand words, a believable bee culture that is afraid of bears and wants to build barriers to protect themselves. “‘Barrier will be big and new,’” the queen bee explains, in a stilted cadence drenched in a senile, isolationist rhetoric that will sound eerily familiar to anyone paying attention, “‘the bears will be sad when they see it. Believe me. I am your queen. The bears are big, but not as big as the wall in our hearts. We scare scary bears. Scare. A Bear’” (24). The political undercurrents are sharp, but the real delight is experiencing Enge’s imagination, his ability to toss Morlock into a paradoxically unfamiliar yet recognizable scenario while still maintaining a sense of orientation. And at the end of the day, this story is just fun, and it’s definitely motivated me to seek out more of Enge’s work.

“Knife, Lace, Prayer” by T.R. Siebert

“As she pursues her god across the Ashlands, the girl who used to be a beast carries only three things with her” (32).

Siebert’s tale takes the setup of True Grit and filters it through the dying earth genre, but not the “world has passed on” style of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series (which this story also reminded me of), more the world-is-ending-right-now immediacy of N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth books. Our protagonist is on a quest for revenge against the god that created their world, feeling slighted for not only her own personal destruction but also a little pissed about the rest of the world ending. She turns to a disgraced paladin as a guide, and the story becomes a race against the clock as the land they traverse begins to disappear, the god winding drawing the curtain on his creation. I enjoyed the way the personal and world-ending stakes become intertwined throughout the story, and Siebert’s prose has great moments: “the moon clings to the sky as a thin, pale sickle. The east stays dark. With the scorching sun gone, the cold creeps in” (44). Overall the story felt a bit too familiar for me, but there’s a solidity to the storytelling that is commendable, with every line and motivation purposeful, never extraneous.

“Singing the Long Retreat” by R.K. Duncan

“The valley below Ber al Tehan was full of mist on this morning in the thirteenth spring of the long retreat” (54).

Duncan’s story reads like an extended dirge, the quiet march of a group of “Prepared,” the name given to the warrior-poet women fending off an invading horde. The story centers on Fatima as she remains behind to hold the line/ Duncan’s main conceit here is that these warriors literally sing their combat, the poems from their stalwart lips manifesting material weapons that defend against the encroaching army. “This was their strength,” Fatima thinks, “to know that they would die, and to sing the glory of their endings as a sword of fire” (56). Shot through with a bombastic melancholy, the story is equally laced with a simmering rage. Duncan weaves the brutality of combat with the intimacy of poetry to great effect, and subtle worldbuilding nicely punctuates the piece without distracting. In a genre traditionally dominated by heavily-thewed male barbarians swinging swords with shouts of manly rage, Duncan’s piece functions as an earnest and effective rebuttal.

“The Feast of Saint Ottmer” by Graham Thomas Wilcox

“One Saint Ottmer’s eve, a nun bade me murder a man. It is a tale bloody and brief” (67).

The final piece in volume three is longer than the previous stories combined and then some, a novelette that plunges the reader into Wilcox’s surrealist-tinged medieval world. We follow a young, bellicose knight caught between competing ideologies; his father veneration of “Family. Love. Duty,” and the son’s obsession with “prowess” above all, the ability to best every contest at the end of the sword (78). There’s a siege and a flaming sword and some hallucinations, but, for me, the story’s greatest strength is its prose. Wilcox’s language draws attention to itself so your mileage may vary depending on the kind of prose you enjoy as a reader, but I will always perk up when a writer takes a language-first approach. In this world, the sun doesn’t just rise; instead, “dawn slit night’s belly, blazing all the world with its brightened gore, and a siege terror ferried us to our doom” (80). During the heat of combat, “gore bloomed like dust from a dandelion, guts slapped brick, and the knight turned, adder-quick, killer-calm, blade sweeping left, right, left again, the lazy efficiencies of a butcher with his meat” (86). The sentences pulse with rhythm and life. Which is not to say that the character work takes a backseat, as Wilcox is equally ambitious when it comes to presenting and interrogating medieval worldviews; he understands the distant past is as strange and ethereal as something out Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique tales. It’s a unique piece, and a pleasure to read.

Conclusion

This volume of Old Moon succeeds on multiple fronts – as a showcase for compelling S&S fiction, as a model for packaging stories in a digestible format, as an indie zine that yet manages to pay a pro-rate. But, as with any magazine, it’s the stories themselves that must carry the work, and the four here are exemplars of the contemporary types and styles available to the S&S genre. I love the sweaty muscles and pulp pacing of the Conan stories as much as anyone, and those paths are well-trodden and well-loved for good reason. But underneath the eldritch and waning light of Old Moon, we find another trail.

About the Reviewer: Matt Holder (biography coming soon)

About Spiral Tower Reviews: The authors who maintain the pulp genres of sword and sorcery and cosmic horror merit support. Financial support is key but there are other ways the cash-strapped can show support: engaged reading and thoughtful analysis. Literary movements emerge through the interactions of editors, authors, publishers, and amateur literary journalists. Learn more about contributing your review here. We are happy to work with first time reviewers.

Previous Spiral Tower Reviews:

Tanith Lee is the Empress of Dreams, review by George Jacobs
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