The July 1998 edition of this digest magazine was a special issue. The cover price of the magazine increased to $3.50 from $2.99. The length held steady at 164 pages counting the covers. Gordon Van Gelder had been editor for a year now, having taken over from Kristine Kathryn Rusch in June 1997.

There were only 4 fiction stories in this issue, although it was chockful of other things that had various amounts of disinterest from me. Many short pieces by many authors of what their favorite films were or what books should be made or remade into films and endless speculation about who should be cast in them. Mind numbing stuff truly. As is usual, the in depth book review columns by Charles de Lint and Michelle West were excellent focusing on books by Dean Koontz, Graham Joyce, Jonathan Carroll, Sean Stewart, Richard Grant and Mary Doria Russell. Also as usual even though this is over 20 years old now, there are now several more books for me to look for (the title by the way of de Lint's column) where my interest has been sufficiently stoked.

The four fiction stories were:

Auteur Theory • novelette by Richard Chwedyk
Goobers • short story by Harvey Jacobs
Incident at Oak Ridge • novelette by Terry Bisson
The Curse of the Demon • novelette by Ron Goulart

Each of these stories were very good and different from the other. The Bisson story was written in the form of a film script and was surprisingly effective. Goulart's story was a fantasy horror story that played on the movie film theme of the issue.

The good parts of this issue outweighed the dreck. ( )