Magazine Of The Month - 3-Lobed Burning Eye #41
This is a new thing I'm trying, wherein each month I'm going to pick a literary magazine at random to read and then write about it on the blog. Mainly this is because I really love short fiction and I'd like to stay current with what's happening in it, but there are simply too many publications that I'd like to read for me to ever hope to be able to keep up with - not just because of time but also financially. This blog series will, in theory, at least help me feel like I'm staying current. I've made a new page here to keep track of all these posts, and they'll go up roughly monthly.
Where the rest of this blog largely takes the form of Actual Reviews I'm going to try to keep these posts a bit more casual. The blog is very casual anyway, since it's mostly for my own benefit as a way of tracking my reading and I don't really expect that anyone is reading it, but I want to keep the tone loose for these magazine posts. Short fiction magazines are a different beast to commercially published novels (especially those from the bigger publishers). They're often run on a shoe-string by people working functionally for free, and the writers aren't earning much of a living from their work. Where I'm quite happy to write a critical review of an Actual Novel if I didn't enjoy it, I don't think anybody is particularly well served by me talking shit about short fiction in independent magazines. (Short fiction as a field also feels very similar to tabletop RPGs, and I think there might be some latent trauma here from my past attempts to do critical work in that field.)
Rather than try to choose which magazine to read each month myself I'm turning to my trusty book-tracking and -choosing spreadsheet to pick one at random for me, and this month it's chosen Three-Lobed Burning Eye (3LBE from hereon out). At the time of writing this the most current issue is issue 41, published in March 2024, so that's the one I read.
3LBE has been around since 1999 and publishes "stories of horror, wonder, and the weird". Before I was an RPG writer I tried (and failed) to break into short fiction and 3LBE was one of the magazines I read religiously back then, so it feels fitting to come back to reading shorts by seeing what they're up to these days. Thanks, spreadsheet.
There are four stories in 3LBE, and two of them stood out to me in particular. The issue starts strong, Avra Margariti's Over the Yiousouri Tree kicking things off with one of the best opening lines I've read in a long time: "There is a tree in the sea and it births monsters". Many years ago, in a rejection letter from a now-defunct magazine that I dearly wish I'd managed to sell a story to, I was told that my story suffered from the Ghost Pigs problem. The key takeaway from that post I've just linked to, which is somehow still alive, is "There is no reason not to open with: GHOSTPIGS MOTHERFUCKERS". Margariti opens with MONSTERTREE, MOTHERFUCKERS.
This story is great. It's grisly, gruesome, and weird. It's nasty in the good way. There's a mystery here that unravels slowly - but it's not a mystery at all, because we know that there's a tree under the sea that births monsters. It's just that it takes us some time to fully learn what that means, as the main character and her (its?) mother bob around in the sea in a little wooden boat and slowly shift in front of our eyes. And as we sink to the bottom of the sea and finally set eyes on the GHOSTPIGS tree that births monsters, we realise that this isn't really a monster story at all. This is about families, and generational trauma, and the way we inflict the same harms on our kids as our parents inflicted on us, even when we tell ourselves we won't turn into our parents.
I have a memory condition, and I forget a lot of things (I wrote some words about that a few years ago over here), so I'm a sucker for any story about memory and the horror of forgetting. Enter Ann LeBlanc's Memories Held Against a Hungry Mouth, in which a researcher eats a sandwich in a weird epistemological blankspot that eats concepts. As the blank grows more things are erased from the world - Professor Iris' supervisor, her partner's gender, the idea of pigs - leaving only the blank spaces left in their wake as the evidence that they ever existed.
It's a weird, slow burn, but I was hooked from the word go. In particular I was really drawn to Iris' very human desire to keep poking at the wound to see if it still hurts, each time going a little bit further in order to see what happens. Cosmic horror - and this is cosmic horror, really - often deals with characters who become inexplicably obsessed with what they're experiencing, but here the obsession feels very real and the horror of it lies in the casual mundanity with which Iris experiences it and relates it. LeBlanc's debut novella - The Transitive Properties of Cheese, one of the best titles I've ever heard - is forthcoming from Neon Hemlock Press, who never ever miss, and I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for that when it lands.
The other two stories that round out the issue - Richard Thomas' Kuebiko and Erica Clashe's Not the Act - are both good reads that are well worth checking out, but I wanted to highlight these two stories in particular because I really loved them.
At the time of this post going live issue 41 is the most current issue, but according to 3LBE's Bluesky the new issue is coming in just a couple of days, and I think I'm very likely to be picking it up.
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