News You Can Bruise for 2009 September 26

It's the boffo 39th anniversary issue, and despite a lot of big names, there's not much that holds up twenty years later. Clive Barker's gross-out "How Spoilers Bleed" is disqualified for the sentence "Now those tribes were all but decimated." Frederik Pohl's "The Star War" has a cool setup but doesn't deliver beyond some stale snark.

On the plus side, Ray Bradbury's "Lafayette Farewell" is amazing, easily the best thing in the issue, and infuriating given that he probably wrote it in forty-five minutes based on a conversation he had with a friend. Wayne Wightman's "Rat Run" is worth reading if only because it totally slams the town of Coalinga. I didn't like Lucius Shepard's "A Wooden Tiger" as a story, but it was really well written.

No cover photo this time because I'm lazy and the art is nothing special. No good ads in this issue, either, thought there is a video club selling Star Trek episodes on a subscription model: $25 for each two-episode tape.