Grim Corps: Volume I

WELCOME TO THE DEBUT issue of Grim Corps Magazine. We have a great selection of dark short fiction for you to enjoy, but first I wanted to take a moment to talk about how this magazine came into existence, which seems like an appropriate topic for the introduction of a first issue.

I initially conceived of the name Grim Corps about thirteen years ago. There were a lot of different ideas in my head, but at the time, I wasn’t in a position to do anything about them. I registered the domain name, grimcorps.com and, for the exception of a two or three year lapse, I managed to hang onto the domain ever since, using the server space on my hosting account as a test bed while teaching myself HTML, CSS and graphics design. The web design skills came in handy on a few occasions where I was able to earn a little money on the side while pursing my own writing career, but I always had the sense that somewhere along the line they’d come in useful for something greater, whether it be as simple as promoting my own fiction or for a large-scale creative project, such as a magazine.

I made the decision to move forward with the idea of editing and publishing a magazine in August of 2012. Many factors, both in my personal life and in my career, indicated that the time was right to make it happen. I’d spent two decades writing fiction, mostly in obscurity while honing my craft and strengthening my self-editing skills before making any real effort at seeking publication. With my work finally making its way into small press markets, along with the advent of print-on-demand publishing, (which didn’t exist thirteen years ago) and the years of accumulated knowledge regarding web design and desktop publishing, I realized I had built up my skill-sets enough that I just might be able to pull this off, and with very little expense. There were still things I didn’t know, but being mostly self-taught, I was confident I could learn them quickly on-the-fly.

Of course, money was still a limiting factor, mostly because I had no interest in starting a free online e-zine that didn’t pay contributing writers and artists. But there’s this site called Kickstarter, which is a crowd-sourced funding platform for creative projects (another thing that didn’t exist thirteen years ago), and with a little social networking help from my friends—thank you, I’la!—we managed to raise enough money to produce a single issue.

So why the name Grim Corps? As we state on the About page of our website, the connotation of the word grim hardly needs explanation, as it immediately invokes a sense of the ghastly and the macabre. Corps (pronounced kor and not to be confused with corpse, even though a cadaver ironically fits our emphasis on the macabre) is a body of people associated together, as in a diplomatic corps, or the humanitarian organization known as The Peace Corps. Simply put, Grim Corps is a body of people associated together for the common cause of promoting and sharing our passion for dark literature, art and culture.

Like a lot of writers I’m very much an introvert, but I’ve come to view the project as an avenue for social interaction and community involvement. So far, it’s proven successful in this regards. I’ve made new friends and contacts over the last six months, and through them, I was introduced to Jenna Pitman who became my assistant editor.

Jenna has been a great help with moving this project forward, from sharing the workload as we read through story submissions to helping me throughout the editing phase. I’m especially grateful to her for patiently reading and responding to many long-winded emails in which I formulated or brainstormed ideas, or when I felt the need for objectivity while troubleshooting problems as they arose, perhaps saving me from a number of missteps along the way. It has been a tremendous pleasure working with her.

Now that you know a little bit about what has gone into producing this first issue, let me give you an idea about what’s in store for you. We bill ourselves as a biannual magazine of speculative, dark fantasy and horror short fiction, which as far as genre categories is concerned, encompasses many different story types and forms, all of them coming in a variety of flavors, from the quiet, literary horror story to the viscera-strewn hotel rooms and landscapes of stories often referred to as splatterpunk. Within this collection—and in issues to come—you’ll find more of the former rather than the latter, but most likely a range of stories that fall somewhere in between.

Our tastes as readers of dark fiction lean more towards stories that evoke a sense of dread or awe or the lingering disquiet that British horror novelist Ramsey Campbell speaks of in the epigraph found on the preceding page. (You can read the quote in its entirety on the homepage of his website.) I believe that the ten stories we’ve selected arouse these types of emotions, each in their own unique way, with Luke Spooner’s black-and-white illustrative artwork befittingly capturing the nuances of character, tone and theme.

Beginning with a darkly enchanting piece that reads like the literary equivalent of a Tim Burton short film and written by newly-published author Cory Cone, we move on to the childlike fears and rationalizations of the young narrator in Keith Komorowski’s Guardian Angel, which is followed by a conflicted vampire clinging to what’s left of her humanity in the aptly titled, Human, and then to Sarah Cypher’s poetic and psychological tale of an ancient horror that survives on blood and worship; John S. Barker’s When Mamma Comes to Visit contains a theme about family relations buried within a tale of supernatural horror, while Tim Jeffreys’s creepy flash fiction piece effectively delivers that aforementioned sense of dread in about four hundred words; Kristin Dearborn’s self-effacing narrator confronts her doppelgänger but not without consequence, and Therese Arkenberg’s story about the Brellin sisters addresses the universal fear of being alone; Getting the Meat has somewhat of a gross-out factor—as one would expect from a story featuring cannibalism—but it approaches the banquet table with humor and kinky sex in much the same way that the French film Delicatessen treated the subject of cannibalism with humor and pathos; and finally, Ian Kappos’s surreal story Till the Dogs Come Home, is at moments bizarre, but it manages to explore themes such as addiction, grief, identity, and Eastern vs. Western thought.

Assuming you enjoy these ten stories, what can you expect for our next issue? We’re already reading submissions for our second installment, and our hope is that this first issue will encourage more writers to submit their work. Our plan is to stuff issue #2 with even more quality dark fiction. Our desire is to do this while paying contributors even more for their work and also including more illustrations and artwork and upgrading to full-color.

But remember, we only raised enough funding for a single issue. Kickstarter was fun but also exhausting, and we have no desire to launch a new fundraising campaign for each issue. This means we’re depending on the sales of this issue to support the next one. So please, pass the word along and share us on your social networks, tell everyone you know that there’s this great new publication that has managed to get off the ground but could use some help if it’s going to stay aloft. Each issue is reasonably priced and available in both print and digital formats. Having delivered that little sales pitch, I will now let you get on with reading the stories. Please enjoy!

Charles Patrick Brownson

January 2013

THE BLACK PAGEANT

Cory Cone

MY COACH HAS BEEN dead for so long that time has reduced her to bones. Her frantic pacing is almost cartoonish. She places a skeletal finger to her click-clacking jaw.

You’ll do great, Jeanie dear, she says. Stand tall, and remember to twirl at the edge of the stage. They love a good twirl out there.

I brush away streaming tears and gape at the dust covered mirror. I look positively dismal in the ensemble they’ve given me to wear, a tattered black dress with black gloves, a black veil, and black shoes. Only an hour ago I was sleeping soundly in my bed with no thought in my mind of stepping before a crowd of the undead.

It’s cold, late October, and far in the distance I see the warm glow of someone’s house lights. I wish to cry out and make my unwitting captivity by these living skeletons known to any human soul who can hear. But my voice sticks in my