London by Night
| Zine | |
|---|---|
| Title: | London by Night |
| Publisher: | Clueless Press, a small division of the Sick Puppy Society |
| Editor(s): | |
| Date(s): | 1993 |
| Series?: | |
| Medium: | |
| Size: | |
| Genre: | |
| Fandom: | Professionals |
| Language: | English |
| External Links: | |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
London by Night is a slash, het and gen Professionals anthology.
Contents
- Return of the Ripper by Daria Littlejohn - GEN
- William Bodie and the Quiche of Death by DR
- The House on Cleveland Street by Gena Fisher
- Trilogy of Tragedy by H. Ann Walton
- Jack the Zipper by PJ
- Belling the Cat by Ruby
- The Murphy Horror Show by Skye
- The Death Isle Mystery by Vicki L. Martin
Reactions and Reviews
1993
A bizarre mix of straight and slash, serious and humour and wonderful artwork. This is a theme zine with an emphasis on the 'dark' aspects of life. We have stories that take our heroes back to the time of Jack the Ripper. A mystery where Bodie must play Watson to Doyle's Holmes. And a very strange visit to a very strange place. [2]
Just yesterday, I received my trib copy of LONDON BY NIGHT, put out by Clueless Press, a small division of the Sick Puppy Society. It has stories by Ruby, me, Skye, Daria Littlejohn, Gena Fisher (editor and main asylum inmate), and others. Cover Art by Ann Walton, interior by Anja Gruber and Karen Eaton.
I've read most of the zine, and while all the stories are interesting and flow smoothly, the woman who did the typing left a few typos undiscovered. And why she put my story into a different typeface, I'll never know...neither did Gena when I called her last night! :-)
The underlying theme of the zine is victorian setting or atmosphere. There's one really cute story that combines PROS with the ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW that is a riot. Two stories where they connect in some way with the detectives in the Jack the Ripper tv movie with Lewis Collins. Mine is about some of the lads being on an island in the middle of a cold scottish lake, trapped by a storm and cut down one by one by a mysterious killer -- anyone interested in seeing McCabe buy it or have always longed for Murphy to ingest rat poison, this one's for you. :-)
Haven't read all the stories twice through yet, so I can't say for sure if they're excellent or just plain good. Still, I've enjoyed every story I've read so far. On story content and flow, I give most of them (my own excluded--it's already perfect <snicker>) a 6.5 to 7 on a scale of 10. Art gets a 6 -- one by Anja with Doyle hugging Bodie's shoulders is really nice. On technical merit (i.e. production errors), I have to rate it a little lower, around a 4.5 (no pros joke intended there--well, maybe a little one), though the fault was not Gena's. Seems the girl who typed it for her changed some things between the time they agreed on typefaces and the time she took it to print. Too many typos (comma in wrong place or left out, words missing or typo'd, etc.), and lack of consistency in type face (my personal gripe--it was my story she did it to, darn it!) distracted me from the story line. But hey, it's only Gena's second zine. She's still learning. I remember some of my own first works (shudder--anyone who's read my QL novella FACES OF CLAY will know exactly what I'm talking about). We all grow out of these things, and Gena's too good a writer to let this happen again.
Hope I didn't sound like I was blowing my own whistle there. But you did ask... [3]
I remember this one had a truly putrid cover--B&D standing on a street corner at night, poorly drawn, Doyle looked rather like a serial killer on acid. I also overheard someone at Zcon saying that the stories were pretty bad, so I'd basically like to know if it's even worth borrowing. Thanks for any info. [5]
Zines to avoid: I'm sorry to say, London by Night was pretty thoroughly dreadful — full of malapropisms, misspellings, bad grammar (consistently using 'its' instead of 'it's' and vice versa--never using an apostrophe unless it should not be there...), and historical bloopers (in the turn-of-the-century streets of London, looking for Jack the Ripper (not just one J-t-R story, either!} and dodging Handsome cabs...shuttering in fear...). There were a couple of stories in it which would have been forgivable as the weaker stories of a good zine, but as the best (by far) of a really weak zine, they were not enough. And--to make it worse—it was dot-matrix printed, poorly at that—some pages were almost illegible. (Perhaps I shouldn't complain about that, on second thought...) [6]
References
- ^ Review sent to the Virgule-L mailing list in 1993, quoted anonymously with permission.
- ^ from On the Double
- ^ from Virgule-L, quoted anonymously (September 1993)
- ^ from Virgule-L, quoted anonymously (October 1993)
- ^ from Virgule-L, quoted anonymously with permission (September 1993)
- ^ from Strange Bedfellows #3 (November 1993)