I’ve got two book reviews in the current issue of The Wire, the one with Dave Lombardo of the band Slayer on the cover. I think this is the first time I’ve had two different articles in the same issue of the magazine.
The lead book review in the issue is of Spectral Sounds: Unquiet Tales of Acoustic Weird, published by the British Library and edited by Manon Burz-Labrande. It collects over a dozen old stories that have sound as their raw material, all unseen voices, eerie noises, and demonic instruments. There’s some Edgar Allan Poe in here, and Edith Wharton, but most of the old names were new to me. The primary observation I didn’t have room for in the review is that sound is so prevalent in horror that several of the other books in the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series, of which Spectral Sounds is part, employ it in the examples shown at the back of the book in the catalogue, and also on the publisher’s website. What distinguishes the stories in Spectral Sounds is that sound is central to each tale’s narrative, rather than just a colorful element of the mood-setting.
Also in the issue, my review of Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks – And What It Can Teach Us, written by Kim Haines-Eitzen and published by Princeton University Press. Major thanks to my old friend Erik Davis for having tipped me off to this.
The issue came out today. I’ll post the full text of the reviews on Disquiet.com when the next issue comes out.
I don’t suppose you know if it’s possible to buy a single issue of the magazine? Looks like subscriptions are the only option at a glance.
I think only on newsstands, but I’m not entirely sure.