Author's Note

Venom: the Magazine of Killer Reviews appeared in 1981, a sportive little publication perpetrated by science fiction writers who remained anonymous somewhere in San Francisco. To be published in Venom, an author had to write a pseudonymous and nasty review of one of her or his own works. Then one was allowed to submit killer reviews of others' work. Unfortunately, by that fall, the magazine editors, overburdened with work, had quit publishing it and so this letter was never printed. I still think Elizabeth Lynn was involved. She won't say.

Dear Vipers,

Another of those forced marriages of brutality, gynecology, and Raymond Chandler came my way only two days before Venom appeared, one “Dark Angel” by Edward Bryant. In this one a witch (get that? that's what all this talk about Women's Lib comes to; give a woman any power at all and [a] she'll be irrational and dangerous and [b] up to no good) makes pregnant the man who got her pregnant twenty years before and then abandoned her. In Myrna Lamb's play “What Have You Done For Me Lately?,” which uses the same plot device, the man is a U.S. Senator who's led a public campaign against women's right to abortion (after abandoning the woman – a doctor, Edward, not a witch – who nearly died in labor with his child). But everybody knows what Women's Lib really wants – brutality, viciousness, and a prose style stolen from a Bogart flick, a bad one. “He hurried. I was dry and it hurt. I made him use spittle” (p. 163). “Everybody can have one mistake, I told myself. One only. I suddenly wanted to leave the elevator, the hotel, Phoenix. I didn't want to go back to Denver. I wanted to go anywhere else” (p. 171). Myrna Lamb provides her male character with an abortion, after an elaborate discussion of the ethics of abortion; Ed knows that's sentimentality and provides his with no birth canal and a pregnancy nobody but he and the witch can see. Yeah, I guess they get some weird kick out of it, but this one's got me so mad I can't even be witty about it.