Author: Heavy Feather

Silent Hill: The Terror Engine, an academic study by Bernard Perron, reviewed by Jeremy Behreandt

There was a HOLE here.It’s gone now.—blood graffiti in Neely’s Bar, Silent Hill 2 I never did get to see Hellraiser, though I’d always pause to look at Pinhead’s gridded face on the VHS box at the grocery store, back when I was young and you could still rent VHS tapes at your local…
How to Be Happy, short comics by Eleanor Davis, reviewed by Colette Arrand

*Ed.’s Note: click on image to view larger size. The best stories in Eleanor Davis’ debut Fantagraphics collection How to Be Happy are grounded in narratives that we are familiar with on a primal level. A group of men and women return to nature. A daughter, now a successful artist in the city, returns home…
Contributors’ Corner: Jessica Alexander

Welcome to “Contributors’ Corner,” where each week we open the floor to one of our contributors to the journal. This week, we hear from Jessica Alexander, whose story “A Stranger Never Comes to Town” appears in 3.1. Jessica Alexander’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blip Magazine, Pank, The Collagist, Monkeybicycle, Big Lucks, Denver…
The Pedestrians, new poetry by Rachel Zucker, reviewed by Jordan Sanderson

I came of age during the heyday of the compact disc, and one of the highlights of that era was the release of a “double album.” 2Pac’s All Eyez on Me comes to mind. Fans debated whether the discs should be heard separately as stand-alone albums or as a single album. No matter the answer…
Echo Lake, a novel by Letitia Trent, reviewed by Gabino Iglesias

Any narrative that manages to create and successfully convey a distinctive mood deserves to be called atmospheric. However, there are novels that possess an atmosphere so strong, so inescapable that it turns the narrative into an unbelievably engrossing reading experience. More than atmospheric, these rare novels deserve to be called something far more powerful: mesmerizing.…
Silence Once Begun, a novel by Jesse Ball, reviewed by Nick Francis Potter

I recently re-watched the famed Coen brother’s film, Fargo, with my wife, having last seen it in my teens and remembering virtually nothing about it. The film’s notorious for its opening text: “This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors,…
Lost in Space: A Father’s Journey There and Back Again, essays by Ben Tanzer, reviewed by Leesa Cross-Smith

I don’t read a lot of essay collections and I’m way pickier about the essays I read. I’ll pretty much read any work of fiction if it’s short enough, but essays, no. I wish I could explain exactly why or what it is, but I cannot. All I know is that when an essay is…
If I Don’t Breathe How Do I Sleep, poems by Joe Wenderoth, reviewed by Ezekiel Black

When I was an undergraduate, I took an Introduction to Creative Writing class with Brian Henry. I took this class almost on a whim. I had thought about writing before, but I did not know much about contemporary letters, especially about how to write such poetry, fiction, etc. Brian Henry assigned Wenderoth’s Letters to Wendy’s…
Nevers, fictions by Megan Martin, reviewed by Alex McElroy

In his first letter to Franz Kappus, Rainer Marie Rilke advises the young poet to decide, first and foremost, “Must I write?” Necessity is one of the simplest and most overlooked requirements for the writer; it is often taken for granted when the activity, writing, precedes its necessity. Megan Martin’s second collection, Nevers, a slim…