Herschel was a decent man before the angels arrived. Now there were no decent men or women, just the claimed and the dead. The dead were not truly dead, it was just the name the angels gave them. The dead referred to themselves as the decayed, as zombies, as dung beetles, as bodies without spirits,…
Category: Previous Issues
All previous issues of Seize The Press Magazine
“You Forever” by Maxine Sophia Wolff
Somewhere in the city a judge is counting money. Somewhere in the city three men stand shirtless in the rain. Somewhere in the city a baby cries. ~ The city is long and tall, and made up of many layers. The city sleeps but never dreams; the city pumps blood through its veins. ~ I…
From the Editor: Making Fiction Uncomfortable Again by Jonny Pickering
One of the reasons Seize The Press exists is because contemporary short fantasy and science fiction tends to be dominated by middle class writers who don’t understand what it’s like to have never been economically comfortable, and it’s often reflected in the kinds of stories they tell. Take a look at the big awards for…
High Tech, Numb Life: An Interview with Mário Coelho, author of Unto the Godless What Little Remains
In 2021, Portuguese author Mário Coelho made a splash with his short story ‘Ootheca’ in Strange Horizons. ‘Ootheca’ is the tragic tale of a man who wakes up with cockroaches for teeth, and his attempts to find companionship in an unstable world where sunlight is rationed and citizens are only ever one sleep away from…
Book Review: The Secret Goatman Spookshow and Other Psychological Warfare Operations by Jonathan Raab – Review by Zachary Gillan
Jonathan Raab’s The Secret Goatman Spookshow and Other Psychological Warfare Operations has an utterly perfect epigraph. “I’ve got a message for you, and you’re not going to like it.” It comes from John Carpenter’s 1987 film Prince of Darkness, and it’s a precis of this excellent collection. In the film it is uttered by a…
Book Review: Antifa Splatterpunk edited by Eric Raglin – Review by Zachary Gillan
Antifa Splatterpunk, edited by Eric Raglin, is an anthology designed to strike a killing blow against the absurd truism that horror is an innately conservative genre. Splatterpunk, a violently transgressive, gore-drenched subgenre that sprang out of horror in the 1980s, isn’t really my thing. Explicitly leftist horror/weird fiction, on the other hand, very much is,…
Destituent Power and Divine Economy in Elden Ring by Simon McNeil
With a single run-through playtime approaching 120 hours, there are few pieces of art I’ve spent as long with as Elden Ring. This 2022 computer game from the famous Japanese company FromSoftware is an expansive open-world fantasy whose story was authored by Hidetaka Miyazaki and George R. R. Martin and its setting is rife with…
The Best Sci-fi, Fantasy and Horror at London Film Festival By Liam Macleod
Run in association with the British Film Institute, the London Film Festival premieres some of the biggest and most talked about films of the year. This includes those in the science fiction, fantasy and horror genre, with previous years having featured the likes of Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, Cartoon Saloon’s Wolfwalkers and…
Báthory: from the Witch’s Bite to the Vampiress’ Fangs by Rosemary Thorne
The most powerful witch of the East In the last quarter of the 16th century, two mighty “Elizabeths” loomed over the European nobility. Dominating the West, Elizabeth I, Queen of England and Ireland, challenged the patriarchal underpinnings of Europe’s monarchies and primogeniture. She died old and sickly, possibly the result of blood poisoning due to…
“Little Screams” by S. M. Hallow
Every Sunday, Maman marched us into the garden, where we knelt in the worm-fresh soil and screamed into holes she had dug for us. “You’ve got to get the poison out of you,” she said, without elaborating what the poison was. She didn’t have to. Inevitably my sister and I vomited fluid like tar, sticky…