I guess I should mention that my story "Charmer" is up at Sideshow Fables. Sideshow Fables is a fledgling print/e-book magazine of circus and carnival fiction; you can get the e-book for $2 and both for $6 over at their store. My contributor copy is quite gorgeous, more so than what I would have expected from the PDF, although all the artwork and interior design is quite elegant.

Here’s a review of some of the stories inside–I skipped a few but I’ll come back and add them later.

I’m ignoring the first story in the issue (it’s "Charmer") but I will say that I love the interior artwork, three hooded cobras at the nexus of sound-wave ripples and white threads of streak lightning.

"Funhouse Mirror," Sam Virzi.
The very first paragraph of this story throws you into a tangle of high school politics; one spontaneous lie starts a series of complicated deceptions, all based on the self-important urgency of social status. Michelle and Sarah set up a fake date for a friend, Carter, in an attempt to attract the interest of Barbara. Normally I’d find their machinations ridiculous, but I’m drawn in by the narrative voice, understated but very self-aware. On the surface, it’s "Michelle told Sarah that she’d told Barbara", but at odd moments you see glimpses of something much more lyrical and bittersweet, like Carter’s observation that "seventeen years of smiling at inside jokes he didn’t understand had convinced him that the pain of having too much air in his lungs and nowhere to exhale would never subsist, or even decrease." Carter, innocent to the deceptions, is the emotional heart of this story, although you don’t realize it at first; he sort of creeps up on you and worms his way in.

"Mr. Wadsworth and the Flea Circus," Craig Wallwork.
Having created theater scene design models at 1:48 scale, I have an immediate visceral sympathy for the main character, a model designer who creates a miniature circus for an eccentric pharmaceutical CEO. This story could probably be classified as magical realism; it’s short and sweet and makes the mechanics of the plot clear without ever needing an explicit statement. The first line is rather weak, but, in contrast, the last line is my favorite–there’s some interesting ambiguity in the way it invokes suicide stories about bankrupt CEOs.

"The Peep Show," Tony Saenz.
Promising beginning and some interesting concepts, especially the gender-twist near the beginning, but the story broke down for me with the dialogue. It’s a bit trite, and there are a few punctuation errors that really broke my suspension of disbelief. The secret behind the mirrors is intriguing, but it’s all packed into a single chunk of exposition.

"Three-Dollar Oracle," Louise Morgan.
I absolutely love the opening of this story; something about the parantheticals and the staccato sentences just yanks me right in. Here’s the first few lines:

"Two please?"
(Car crash).
"Two adults, three children."
(Cancer. Hanging. Cancer–again? Must run in the family–fishing accident, overdose.)
The girl who sits in the ticket booth at the circus can see how you’re going to die.

 The ending is a little predictable, given the nature of the story, but it’s foreshadowed well. My only quibble was that, initially, I got the idea that she was selling tickets to foretell their deaths, a carnival-style fortune-telling gig, but really that intersection is just coincidence.

"What Broke the Line," Anica Lewis.
This one is simple and fast-paced, a nice contrast to the interior conflict of most of the other stories, focusing on an unknown monster which attacks a circus caravan. I enjoyed the juxtaposition of the ringmaster chatter with the introduction of the actual people, off-stage. I do think there were a few too many characters; we didn’t get to know any of them very well. Also, on principle I disapprove of the idea that a circus tiger would defend "its own," especially to the point of getting back into its cage. By chance, I was just reading Amy Sutherland’s Kicked, Bitten, and Scratched, about an exotic animal training school, so I recognize the myth of tamed tigers. No tiger is ever "your" tiger. But I’d guess that’s an occupational hazard, so to speak, of circus stories.