Tincture Journal, Issue Six, Winter 2014 by Daniel Young

Tincture Journal, Issue Six, Winter 2014 Reviews

• 
  Rudi Landmann

  Standard Tincture disclaimer: I have a personal connection to the editor and publisher of this journal. I don’t “get” free verse, so I don’t review it.
  
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  This time: 14 short stories, 10 free-verse poems, and two non-fiction pieces (one interview and one piece of creative non-fiction).
  
  I was happier with this installment of Tincture than the previous one: some of the variety that I felt was lacking last time around seems to be back. The dominant form is still short stories that are more vignettes than complete stories in their own rights; but even though this is not a style of which I’m overly fond, the craft on display is undeniably impressive.
  
  I really liked the immediacy and close observation of Tiggy Johnson’s “Waiting”, Stephen Koster’s “The Interesting People of Mount Kilimanjaro”, and Su-May Tan’s “Mrs Fernandez”. All three stories are high-fidelity slices of life. So too are Adam Byatt’s “The Cicada Clock”, Anna Ryan-Punch’s “Only After School”, and S. G. Larner’s “Proximity”, although this second group of stories all feature young protagonists, none of whom I found particularly credible. On the other hand, these three appealed to me more in terms of their more fully-developed narrative structures.
  
  For most of its length, Eleanor Talbot’s “White Noise” seems also to be on a strong narrative trajectory: the setup for a fable is all there. I was very disappointed, however, when the climax was so disconnected from the story that led up to it. The encounter with the homeless man alters the trajectory of Jed’s life in a number of ways that are tacitly approved of by the narrative. However, the climax really ought to be the biggest change; and for that to be him actually calling his mother, then his relationship with his mother should have been depicted as a particularly problematic part of his life that he needed to fix. I did, however, like the self-professed unreliability of the homeless man. He’s absolutely right: in life or in story, the ontological truth of such pronouncements is absolutely secondary to the effects that they have on people or characters.
  
  More developed narratologically are Rhys Timson’s “Rain of Ashes” and Annette Siketa’s “The Favour”, both very complete stories. “Rain of Ashes” captivated me with the quandry with which it presented its characters: it lends itself very much to introspection and discussion about “what would you do in their situation?” The answer is not obvious—to me, anyway. The gothic quality of “The Favour” appealed to me immensely, although, for all that, it’s a very conventional Victorian-style ghost story. With no surprises offered up, its appeal is likely to rest entirely on how much you enjoy the formula, which I think Siketa has delivered to perfection. Personally, I love it!
  
  Given my love of weird tales, unreliability in fiction, and interest in memory, it’s no surprise that I found Andrew Hutchinson’s “Memory” to be one of the stand-out pieces in this issue. I especially like the fantastic when it’s juxtaposed up hard against the mundane. I found the result here to be suspenseful, and deliciously disorienting. I love it when a writer messes with my sense of what is real and what is not in a story. Hutchinson does this for me here, and then follows it up with an ending that both closes the story and still remains gloriously enigmatic.
  
  My other favourite this time around is Frank Scozzari’s “The Happy Mule”. At its core, a survival adventure yarn, not only was it a suitably thrilling and vivid example of the genre, but I was very pleased by the ambiguity of its conclusion. There’s a natural and deep contrast between the harsh blizzard on the mountain and protagonist Jagger’s memories of an idyllic spring thaw in the foothills below. The abrupt shift from one to the other at the story’s end—read at face value—can be understood as the sudden abatement of the storm: a fickleness already introduced earlier in the story. However, a contrasting reading—that the shift from the blizzard to the idyllic are the last thoughts of a dying mind or even the crossing over into an afterlife—is very easily sustained, à la Bierce’s “An Encounter at Owl Creek Bridge” or, as I’m fond of speculating, Duncan Jones’ film Moon.
  
  I was certainly very happy with the variety and quality of stories this time around, and as usual, my favourites even by themselves made this Tincture worth its cover price to me.
• 
  Debbie Guzzi

  A fine magazine from 'down-under' and you get to read poetry by me ;).