With BONES ARE MADE TO BE BROKEN Anderson announces himself as a major talent in the dark fiction realm, capable of fashioning imaginative, bold visions and conceits powerful enough to “subdue the confident bluster of our day,” stop us in our tracks, and provoke us to consider the existential conundrums we can only really grapple with when we’ve been jolted outside of the constructs of our normal everyday experience.  – Shawn Macomber, Fangoria*

So.

That happened.

The magazine, that I’d read for ten years, reviewed my book.  The magazine that, through their book reviews led me to picking up Jonathan Maberry’s Patient Zero, Dan Wells’s I Am Not a Serial Killer, and David Wong’s John Dies at the End, reviewed Bones Are Made to be Broken…and liked it.  Indirectly, Fango led to my friendship with Maberry and, directly, led me to suggesting I Am Not a Serial Killer to student after student for the past seven years, which then led them to the rest of the trilogy.  (Even more indirectly, it led me to suggesting Maberry’s Rot & Ruin series to a kid and my school library to buying the whole series; they’ve since had to buy the series twice more because they’ve been read to tatters.)

It comes more mixed than it would’ve otherwise; Fangoria has not had the best few years, he says with something like an understatement, and they haven’t printed an issue in a long time.  There are a fuck-tonne of reasons, but I’m not in-the-know enough to speak on them with any degree of confidence.  Google that sucker.  You’ll find all the info you need, often from the mouths of people who’ve actually worked for the magazine, and you can draw your own conclusions.

It’s not bias or slant when I say that Fangoria isn’t what it once was and, if there is a slant there, it’s one with sadness.  Fango was the one magazine I read regularly.  The only magazine I had a goddamned subscription to, for years.  Most of the time, I pick up a magazine issue that interests me.  Not so with Fango; every issue had something for me.  I still have a stack of issues on my shelf that I’ll pull down and read periodically.

So, a bit of sadness at the state it now exists in.  I’m not alone when I hold out hope that’ll it climb itself out of whatever hole it’s in .  But Fangoria still holds a sway over my thoughts that, when I found out the review had been published, I squee’ed.  I couldn’t help it and, in my head, it still feels surreal.  (Of course, I found out at work, where the network firewall prevented me from reading the damned thing; the same firewall also prevents me from going to Dead End Follies.)

Fangoria fucking reviewed me.  Goddamn, son. Another “Are you fucking kidding me?” review, on top of all the others I’ve gotten (it is not bullshit to say that every review has surprised the fuck out of me in its content, thrust, and point).

You can, of course, pick up Bones Are Made to be Broken here and here.

*FULL DISCLOSURE: Shawn Macomber, the reviewer, is a regular writer and worker at Fangoria; he and I also shared TOC pages in the anthology Savage Beasts, edited by Sharon Lawson and Anthony Rivera.