White Knuckles #5 Spring/Summer 1996
$4 from
Editor John Platt,
P.O. Box 973
New Providence, NJ 07974-0973

White Knuckles is a sharp little digest that centers around good ol' fashioned traditional horror, much like Terminal Fright. But editor Platt doesn't limit his reach to horror; the last piece in this issue, "Promotion," by newcomer Steve Hockensmith, is a fun bit of surrealism about a guy who wakes up as a cockroach and ends up having his unwanted transformation win him a promotion...and some tips on a new tailor.

Novelist Yvonne Navarro starts this issue off with its best story "Pictures Within." This is the kind of story that left me with dark dreams as a kid. A strangely gifted boy is possessed with the urge to draw the pictures he sees in his head on an alley wall. But his pictures are always violent and, as the cop narrator discovers, apparently based on prescience. The last scene is true knuckle whitener.

William Marden turns up with a familiar bit of Halloween horror about the ghouls beneath apparently human masks, Paul DeCirce plays with a Poe-ish theme in "Cawrl and the Boys" about a gravedigger and the crows who he feeds, and James S. Dorr offers a reprint from 2AM magazine of "Ratso," a little story about a guy bitten by a rat who subsequently, on the night of the full moon...you can guess. Jeff Hufford provides a hilarious bit of stalker horror in "The Jogger": When an apparently defenseless guy is held up at an ATM machine, he turns the tables in humorous and horrible way...And finally, Lester Thees clocks in with a tale of the monster that lurks within his "Problem Cat."

This is a most enjoyable, quick-read issue of classic horror with the occasional smirk of dark humor.

Copyright © 1996 by John Everson. All Rights Reserved.