Zine Review: Townies Issue 1 by Various

• Size: 8″ x 10″
• Pages: 34
• Published: May 2017
• Available: Not sure, maybe at zine fests or bookstores
• Price: $5-10

When I was tabling at the Betty Zine Fest 2017, I had the chance to wander around the fest and I saw this zine. The zine’s cover didn’t particularly catch my eye, as it is traditionally printed and glossy (I tend to prefer handmade zines), but when I saw the description of the zine I bought a copy. Townies is a zine about being a person of color and/or LGBTQIA+ in suburban, rural, and small town America. That describes me, which is what did catch my attention. This may not be a traditional zine; I mean, it even has an ISBN, but it still has a sort of modern DIY aesthetic and was self-published, and it calls itself a zine, so I’m going to call it a zine as well.

This zine is not printed like a magazine, though it has a similar number of pages to a magazine. It is more like a very short paperback book. The contents are a mixture of art, photography, and writings. There are some pages absolutely filled by walls of text, which may be a little bit intimidating to some readers.

The art in the zine is a mixture of paintings, collage, and edited photos. I don’t know much about commenting on visual art, but I can say that I felt some emotions when I looked at a collage of a bunch of white celebrities who have all been X-ed out with a black marker, titled “Killing Idols for Personal Growth.” Most of them are from 80s and 90s TV and movies, which were indeed very white.

The first long piece in the zine is called Home Now, which is a bit difficult to describe, but is written in prose reminiscent of a fever dream and a bunch of strange things “happen” alongside the mundane. It expresses feelings about feeling like one doesn’t fit in in one’s family and town, as well as the experience of having parents who came to the US from another country and losing one’s ancestral language.

The next longer piece was easier to understand, a personal account of growing up Native American and Cape Verdean and experiencing micro and macroagressions from white peers and even teachers, feeling the pressure to conform, to close off herself from her cultural heritage, and gradually gaining back her love for her cultures and her body as she gets older.

I didn’t really get the last story in the zine, about two young girls, one non-speaking. They were friends, but the speaking girl frequently committed cruelties against the other girl and obsessed over learning to ice skate. The entire story had an eerie feel to it. I didn’t quite know what to make of it, but for the most part it was well written, though there was one part where it seemed that something had been placed out of order or was missing, and there was a typo. But this is a zine, so that’s generally acceptable.

The zine finishes with a poem titled “Flux.” It is free verse and uses a lot of comparisons of the body with the cosmos, using these metaphors to combat body shame. One section of the poem seems to suggest the unity of identity, despite attempts by others to divide people up into small, digestible pieces. It reveals itself near the end that this poem is about queerness, about gender, about the expanses within ourselves that will not bend to oppression. The language used is very beautiful. This was my favorite piece in the zine.

While I wish there were more personal essays in this zine that talked concretely about being queer and/or a POC in rural, suburban, and small town America, this zine is still worth picking up. All the contributors fit that description themselves.

Zine Review: The Lantern Vol. 1 by Entropic Press

• Size: 1/2 size
• Pages: 28
• Published: January 2018
• Available: On Etsy
• Price: $3

I just traded for this brand new zine of short bizarre horror fiction, which sounded right up my alley, as I’ve also written a zine of weird short fiction. This was also the first trade I’ve made through my Zines and Zinesters Discord server, and I believe my first trade of 2018. The zine contains four super short stories: Reunion, Cicada’s Song, The Retreat, and Roll Credits. The zine is laid out very simply with a typewriter font on white paper, and the stories are only broken up by a single cartoon. This makes it easier to read, and the font is not too small.

The cover of the zine suggests cosmic horrors, so I was a bit surprised when the first story was something that could happen in real life, though it did have a distinctly “gray”, creepy vibe, like ashes of unknown origin. It is about a son meeting up with his father for the first time in years to empty out a storage unit of his late mother’s old things. The writing is very good and polished, the dialogue and character actions believable, and the tone is set very well. As I read the second story I noticed overarching themes of nostalgia and cleaning up after the dead. Cicada’s Song was also more traditionally a horror story, with a creepy ending after a beginning that was pretty similar to the first story.

The next story is a mixture of horror and the mundane, involving a team-building retreat that turns into something more bizarre, I do feel like it ended a little abruptly though, and that the sinister stuff that was occurring sort of fizzled out. Alternatively, it can be read as more of a dark comedy, in which case the ending works better. The last story is my favorite. It starts out as a normal-seeming horror story about a guy getting the night shift at a movie theater, complete with jumpscares. Then it takes a wild twist that I never would have expected, which I won’t spoil here. This story doesn’t quite fit in with the others, but in my opinion it’s the best of the bunch.

Overall, this is a great little collection of super short stories that, while they aren’t the cosmic horror suggested by the cover, are still worth reading.