The Thousands

After three years, seven issues and a smorgasbord of contributions from writers near and far, illustrious and unknown, the Torpedo fiction quarterly has decided to call it a day. But with a name like that, don’t expect it to go out with a whimper. Editor Chris Flynn has teamed up with the folks at Hunter Publishing, and now we have a Greatest Hits anthology in lovely paperback to send it off in style.

Right, that’s the preamble done. Now for the hard part: how do you neatly sum up 25 short stories, giving fair weight to each author, in under 200 words? (And now with less than 100 to go! Gulp.) The answer? You look for a common thread.

Here’s one: the majority of characters bedding down between the book’s covers are a messed up bunch. We have a woman with a desire to whittle herself miniature with a potato peeler, a forgetful organ harvester, a jewellery huckster, a wife/pet bird murderer, and a confused ‘canosapien’ (that’s a robot-dog butler, FYI). Torpedo might be finished, but it’s certainly made an impact on the literary scene. KA-BOOM!!!