Image copyright: Ellen Pace

It is with great pleasure and equally sizable pride that Schlock welcomes you to this, our very first quarterly edition. This is a very exciting development for us, because it signals many firsts: we are featuring submissions by ‘external’ writers (and we got lucky with some brilliant writers the first time around), and we are bringing the whole issue together into a printer-friendly .pdf format, apart from it being available on the ever-dependable website.

The theme we have chosen to kick off this new format is ‘Song’. Why have we opted to start with this? Well, as a genre fiction publication, we’ve always prided ourselves with being able to offer stuff that brushes shoulders with the most ghettoised of genres, as well as that hard-to-define thing some tendentiously refer to as ‘the mainstream’. Schlock aims to be inclusive of all genres and styles, and we don’t want our themes to be restrictive to the author. So we thought it would be refreshing to have an issue dedicated to and inspired by music.

We don’t think that one needs to know much about music production in order to experience it as a springboard for images and ideas. What turns up is often irrelevant to the song or the music, but it’s triggered by them in some strange, primitive, emotional way. Sometimes it’s the whole mood, a lyric sung slightly off-key, or even something about the title before the track starts up in your ears on the bus home. Once some vague picture or word starts pacing back and forth across your forehead like a badly-drawn cartoon, it’s time to bring some other elements in and strain like hell to suck it out without too much damage to the original. It is these impressions, and others, that we hope this issue conveys.

Download the PDF, or browse below.

CONTENTS

?Stories

Her Song by Peter Farrugia
Canoodle, K-neadle, or The Esurience by Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone
Lambi by Gordon Calleja
Exalted by Elisabeth Hegmann
The Burial of Sir Dean by Lara Schembri
Again by Daniel Vella
The description of a haunting by Teodor Reljic
The Volcano by Kelinu Vella

Comic
The Moustacheoed Mata Hari written by Bettina Borg Cardona, illustrated by Noel Tanti

Poems
black holes are made of these by Michelle Hartman
[Countrylife]Butterscones for Tea by Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone
The Road to Albany by Judy Swann

Articles
Eleanor Rigby: The Final Cut by David Macpherson
How the Velvet Underground and Nico will change your Life! by Robert Pisani