Black Candies: Surveillance
edited by Ryan Bradford
So Say We all, 2015
94 pages / $15 Buy from Amazon
If you were to ask me what my top five literary magazines are right now, Black Candies would definitely be on that list, and Ryan Bradford’s editorship is a huge part of that. A journal of literary horror needs someone at the helm with a pedigree in the spooky, and Bradford is no slouch. He wrote an accomplished horror novel, Horror Business, that’s steeped in the tropes of the genre. To call something a love letter to the horror genre feels a bit tired, but, nonetheless, Bradford’s work is a love letter to all things horror.
Lit journals tend to be inconsistent. They either have great art but their fiction is weak, or they have a superb cover but their interior art is lacking. Black Candies has that wonderful sort of alchemy where the art and the stories are in perfect concert with one another, and the fiction is top notch to boot. It takes a truly skilled editor to curate such a consistently quality publication.
And perhaps the best part of Black Candies is the gamut that “literary horror” covers. There are stories about men turning into deer and stories about suicidal selfies in this issue. There are all types of speculative fiction–from cynical splatter to magical realism—leaving something for everyone’s tastes.
Black Candies: Surveillance is the newest volume, but the previous volumes are worth tracking down, too. It’s that great of a journal, and Bradford’s a big part of that.
There’s only a week left until Halloween! In addition to the #VERYSCARY series, we’ll be featuring some capsule reviews this week of some of the spookier books that have come out this year to get you prepped for the best day of the year.