TITLE: Three Lobed Burning Eye
ISSUE: #20
DATE: October 2010
WEBSITE:  www.3lobedmag.com

Three Lobed Burning Eye takes its name from a line in H.P. Lovecraft’s story “Haunter of the Dark.” In it, a man reports his terror at being pursued in a blackout by a huge creature with black wings that can only travel in the dark. The fiction found within the magazine definitely holds to this standard of surreal horror. The stories all have a dark bent, exploiting speculative fiction tropes to tell stories of the macabre.

Issue #20 begins with the short tale, “The Birdstories of Jaywalker” by Jennifer Stakes, wherein a bird-man by the name of Jay attends a story telling festival in order to collect stories to bring to his masters who use them as a form of currency.  Stakes sensory language is well deployed and we get a sense of the festival being a kind of sustenance to those to attend.  We are left intrigued by the metaphor of language as currency and what kind of higher level beings are responsible for this system. “Birdstories” is a strong lead off to the issue.

“Kohl-Lined” by Shweta Narayan doesn’t invite the reader to share as much in the story as “Birdstories.” It focuses on some kind of ritualized dance led by an enigmatic band called Kali and the Backup Smurfs. We are led to believe that there are two kinds of people engaging in this activity, those who are modded and those who are not. Beyond that, “Kohl-Lined” becomes a mash of clashing visuals, suggesting technology and biology and supernatural ecstasy. As such, it is difficult to arrange a picture of the scene in the mind’s eye and the story remains mostly opaque.

“The Edge of the World” by DeAnna Knippling is one of the two longer fiction pieces in the issue. It concerns itself with a human being dragged back into fairyland against their will to perform one last unsavory act. We follow the first person narrator as he (or she, the gender is never specified) is brought to witness the burning of his former captor’s body. Fairies require human subjects in order to keep alive their spiritual link to the mortal world and thus preserve their own lives.  Our hero is then press-ganged into resuming his tormentor’s former employment, kidnapping babies. Knippling does an admirable job of suggesting the roots of her characters without subjecting us to infodumping or allowing the dialogue to become disjointed but the writing falls down somewhat when it tries to suggest a speaking tone that throws us out of the story.

“Totentanz” by Justin Lee is a colorful tale of a tormented man who has drawn a clergyman to his garden with ill intentions. The story is written as a monologue of the narrator speaking to his prisoner.  The language is baroque and purple but it goes a long way to suggesting the character of the narrator, giving us a look inside his twisted mind. It’s unclear whether this is a treatise for or against religion or simply a spooky tale though I suspect it could be read successfully in all three ways depending on the readers bias.

“No Signal” by Seth Cadin is the most light-hearted of the stories in this issue.  Set on a remote planet of surreal wonders, we ostensibly follow a group of travelers who’ve crashed landed and have lost the use of their ship due to the appetites of a great buffalo. I immediately associated this tale as a fantasy look at the problem of consumption, a sort of fever-dream Inconvenient Truth. The language here is more straight forward and is the better for it, especially the closing line: “..(W)hen the buffalo eats the mountain, we’ll go home.”

A few years back, it was posited that man-eating catfish in the Great Kali River had developed a taste for human flesh after decades of Indians burning their dead over the water. In “Inside the Ganges” by Jennifer Hollie Bowles, this notion is developed supernaturally as Jones the scientist encounters a bizarre presence in the eponymous river.  Bowles suggests a telepathic monster, rippling with the limbs of its food-supply, that, in true Lovecraftian fashion, confounds the minds of those who look upon it.  As Jones tries to uncover the mystery of the creature, we are never sure whether he is lucid or mad, awake or dreaming, until the bloody end.

Three Lobed Burning Eye states in it’s submission guidelines that they are only interested in stories that are “distinct and remarkable, tales that the reader cannot forget.” In Issue #20 they’ve packaged a unique blend of horror, fantasy, and surreal fiction that is sure to satisfy discriminating readers.

Each issue is available online for free. A PDF copy is available for $3.