Featured Zine: Flapperhouse #2

Flapperhouse #2

By Joseph P. O'Brien, FLAPPERHOUSE editor
QuailBellMagazine.com

FLAPPERHOUSE's primal desire is to propagate surreal, shadowy, sensual, and satirical literature. If FLAPPERHOUSE were a joke, the first line would be: "Dorothy Parker, Jorge Luis Borges, and H.P. Lovecraft walk into a speakeasy." While FLAPPERHOUSE does not consciously assemble its quarterly issues with any particular themes in mind, particular themes seem to subconsciously assemble themselves into each quarterly issue of FLAPPERHOUSE. For instance, FLAPPERHOUSE's current issue (#2, Summer 2014) happens to include multiple pieces involving twisted family relationships, supernatural metamorphosis, and mentally disturbed outcasts. If FLAPPERHOUSE were a joke, the punch line would make you laugh, then make you quiver, and, after lying dormant in the attic of your consciousness for several years, it would once again spring to mind, seemingly out of nowhere, and perhaps drive you a little mad.

Excerpts:

"Hypothetical Foundations of a Quantum Theory of Familial Social Physics"
Fiction by Joseph Tomaras

Though I started collecting secrets at the age of five, it was not until my last year of graduate studies in physics that I discovered a use for my hoard.

Under another name, I am well-known within a small community, that of high-energy physics. We are the ones who send 

atomic nuclei smashing against each other at near light speed to see what peculiar entities escape the wreckage. Much as fiction writers do with invented families: I realized this when procrastinating on my thesis with a binge of Raymond Carver.

No offense to you writers, though, but how much more valuable would the data be if it were based on actual collisions, not your more or less stereotyped models, or your real-life examples slightly falsified to protect egos and innocents? Once the basic analogy is made, the fundamental theory almost explains itself—to those with a sufficient understanding. Read More...

“Scars” 
 Fiction by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

Natalie didn't know where the musicians came from. When she woke from an ill-advised three-hour nap they were there in her spotless living room, their instruments strung out like her old college friends all over the brown plush carpet.

The empty carcasses of their instrument cases confused her. She stepped around them. She did not ask the musicians why they were there, but she did think it odd that they were not playing. Their instruments looked lonely leaning against her dusty elliptical, her empty bookcase—she had sold her books for cash at the local bookstore—her coffee table with the missing leg. As she stood in the kitchen door, which looked out at the living room, and shoveled peanut butter granola down her 

throat, she catalogued the instruments: one thick upright bass, one legless Casio keyboard, one worn acoustic guitar with a blue stripe down its middle, one tarnished brass trumpet, and one silver saxophone relaxing awkwardly on the couch beside a man whose dark fingers strangled its neck.

She looked, blurred by a nappy haze, from musician to musician, cataloguing them too, trying to place each man to his instrument. And they were all men, she realized with a start, five strange men in her home. Read More...

#Unreal #FeaturedZine #Zine #Zinesters #ZineCulture #OriginalZines #Flapperhouse #Fiction #NonFiction #LivingWriters
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