My ghost story, “The Man in the Mirror,” is in the first issue of Icarus, a new gay speculative fiction magazine, edited by Steve Berman, and releasing this month and also featuring work by Jeff Mann, Joel Lane, and Tom Cardamone. Icarus is a full-color quarterly, devoted to tales of gay fantasy, horror, science-fiction, and “everything else weird that falls through the cracks.” Craig Gidney is the assistant editor, Toby Johnson is the graphic designer, and Steve Berman and Lethe Press are the publishing forces behind the new magazine.“The Man in the Mirror” is about an aging British actor who is greeted by his doppelganger on the set of a TV pilot in Los Angeles. This short story sat in my laptop unfinished for many years because it was always one of those stories I had finished “writing in my head” and did not find the time to “put it down on paper.” Adrian Chase’s doppelganger is the herald of his death and his day on the set of the TV pilot is a comic reflection of his fleeting fame and missteps in his long acting career. In 2008, as I was putting together the stories that I would include in a projected collection of gay-themed ghost stories (The Haunted Heart and Other Tales, now releasing from Lethe in October of this year), I knew this story would offer a variety and distinction to the collection, and I finished writing it “on paper” towards the end of last year.
The single issue price of Icarus is $13 plus postage at http://lethepress.magcloud.com/. To order a year's subscription (4 issues), send $50 via Paypal to lethepress@aol.com. Subscription price includes free shipping and subscribers will receive a gratis copy of the latest edition of Wilde Stories, Lethe’s annual anthology of the year's best gay speculative fiction, with their second issue of Icarus. Electronic editions of Icarus are also available. Contact lethepress@aol.com for more information.
In the magazine, I also drew the accompanying artwork to the short story, a proud first and which definitely exercised a whole new set of brain muscles.
