Along with the Heather Shaw chapbook reviewed elsewhere in Green Man Review, Issue 7 of Flytrap demonstrates that Tropism Press is a source for consistently intelligent and experimental speculative fiction. The tone of Flytrap is set in large part by editors Shaw and Pratt, who list themselves on the masthead as “enablers,” and indeed, their chatty offbeat editorial columns encourage a sense of having been invited into their living room for an evening of literary experimentation. With all the bad news in the SF genre regarding the buyouts and downsizing of numerous publications, it is a welcome change to find chapbooks such as Flytrap maintaining the ‘zine tradition of creating a sense of shared conversation among publishers, writers, and readers.
Make no mistake, however; the four stories, three poems, and regular columns contained within the forty-four pages of this Flytrap are anything but amateurish. The first story is the noirish but flirty “My Shoes” by Ray Vukcevich, a whimsical meditation on the mystery of identity and empathy, followed by Leslie What’s “Frankenfetish,” a creepy story about the effect a mother’s death has upon her young family (think Donovan’s Brain meets The House of Usher.) One of my favorite pieces from this issue is the story “Apology” by Jan Wildt, which gives a science fiction spin to the experience of being a baby (though perhaps a not-so-human one, written in a James Joyce stream-of-consciousness style, which complements the subject.
This is you. This is the philosopher you are, all of you, nine months out. The amateur scientist Keen student of the rerum natura: your calling, love, and gift. Before life grinds you down. Before you turn your vaunted mind to kissing boss’s ass and getting laid.
“The Gardener of Hell,” by Amy Beth Forbes is another darkly twisted story, this one pondering the possibility that the afterlife is really just more like life, only it’s the most mundane parts of life. This story captures the macabre but ominous surrealism of a Bosch creation, such as the following line: “Hell is full of buildings like flesh. Some are flesh. You don’t want to go into those.”
Flytrap 7 also includes poetry by Jay Wentworth and two non-fiction columns: “Life Among the Obliterati,” Nick Mamatas’s thoughts on the more bizarre aspects of the writing life, and the new comics column “Wham! Bam! Pow!” by Erin Kelley.
Flytrap 7 is the perfect antidote when you begin to feel your reading has become stale and predictable, but you don’t need to wait until then to enjoy the wit and originality of the writing. Flytrap is published twice a year by Tropism Press and costs $4 per issue, $16 for 4 issues in the U.S.; overseas subscribers may contact Tropism Press for prices.
(Tropism Press, 2007)
[Updates: Sadly neither Flytrap nor Tropism Press seem to exist anymore. We encourage you not to look for the latter at the most obvious URL, which will give you a site that is NSFW.]
