The Tale Spinner
Issue #3 Summer 1996
40 pages/$5.00 from Glasgow Publishing
P.O. Box 336
Bedford, IN 47421
Editor Perry J. Glasgow

With well-known small press names like Tom Piccirilli, John B. Rosenman, Kathryne Kennedy and Barbara Malenky, I expected great things from The Tale Spinner. My expectations turned out to be too high, although that's more the fault of editor Perry Glasgow than the authors who appear in this magazine. Almost every story in this issue is riddled with typos, often turning up at crucial moments in the action, lessening its impact because of the distraction. (One example that's laughable in its irony: Rosenman is referred to in his bio as an "edirot" of a literary magazine.) In a short quarterly magazine that consists only of eight stories and two poems, this sloppiness is unforgivable. Glasgow has also chosen to have no editorial presence to TTS other than the fiction; there's no introductory editor's column, reviews or non-fiction. That makes it hard for a magazine to develop a "personality," which, to me, is an essential part of a magazine. Without "personality," you might as well just buy an anthology. I sometimes look forward to Kristine Kathryn Rusch's editorials even more than the fiction of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I've bought Cemetery Dance over the years more for its chatty columns than for its horror fiction.

But enough complaints. Mistakes and omissions aside, what's the fiction in Tale Spinner like? Piccirilli starts things off with "Water Ways," a story within a story about the reunion of twins on the anniversary of their mutual flame's apparent suicide. This is not, by any means, Piccirilli at his best.

Rosenman's "Space Blobs" is an amusing lark about an untalented cartoonist who turns out to be shaping reality with his alien space opera comic strip. It's hard to go wrong when a story starts out with a talking toaster. Lorraine A. Jean offers "Night Class," about a professor whose gothic literature class is plagued with a pale troublemaker...yep, vampire troubles await our hero, who soon learns that he's been chosen to correct the lies about creatures of the night. Kennedy's "Queen's Pawn" offers a reason for the disappearance of dragons, by showing the first rebellion against the telepathic reptiles' mental slavery.

Things basically go downhill fiction-wise from here. Malenky's "The False God" opens with a description of a travelling preacher who seems like he has an otherworldly connection; that turns out to be a false trail as the story devolves into a lame gold rush/greed story. Gail Hayden's "To Catch A Thief" is a pretty straightforward old West story: an Indian medicine man is looking for the cash to pay the dowry for a wife, and quickly finds the opportunity to solve a robbery with the help of an incantation.

The last piece in the issue is also its least successful. Robert Collins' "The Last Medal Winner" begins with some cryptic future technobabble (S-Net, vizphone, transit card) to let us know that this is an SF story. I'm not sure what the point of that is, because the rest of the story revolves around a journalist who puts aside more exciting stories to help a woman get her late husband's long-overdue medal of honor from a government that has forgotten its war heroes. Substitute Viet Nam for the "Azeri-Armenian" war, and this is just another injustice of war story--without much in the way of plot. And the author never gives us any reason to care if the dead guy gets his medal or not. Yawn.

If The Tale Spinner is going to succeed, it has some heavy spinning to do in future issues.

Copyright © 1996 by John Everson. All Rights Reserved.