The fifth issue of Innsmouth Magazine was published in October 2010 and was edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles. It contains seven stories of high quality Lovecraftian fiction and opens with "The Night We Burned Our Hearts Out" by Paul Jessup. This is a short, off-centre fantasy that is difficult to follow and was probably the wrong choice with which to open the magazine. Kenneth Yu's "The Concierto of Señor Lorenzo" sees a strange gentleman, who describes himself as an "amateur musician" arriving at an out-of-the-way boarding house and looking to rent the oddly-angled attic room where he hopes to practice his strange, screeching Concierto. This is a good tale and despite it being reasonably obvious where it's headed it is still full of creepy incidental detail and a doomed inevitability. "Beneath the Cold Black Sea" by Martin Hayes is a hugely enjoyable horror pulp yarn that is set "halfway through the fierce winter of 1942 when the monsters came to Blackwater". Next up is "The Green World" by Julio Toro San Martin, which is a beautifully written and evocative story about unquenchable love, wild green nature, the Horned God of the Woods and "the ugly hold of death". In the short story "Borgan's Deli" by Jarrid Deaton a health inspector investigates the sudden destruction of a new deli business that may have drawn a large number of tourists to an "oh-so-special little area" in rural Massachusetts. James Lecky's "The Song of Tussagaroth" tells the story of Ekarius the Scholar who has retreated into comfortable solitude in the Black City. When a long-lost friend, arrives at his home with an ancient tome called "The Book of Dark Days", Ekarius finds himself sucked into a quest that sees him confronting Tussagaroth, Lord of the Frozen Dark. Finally "Nibbling" by Cheryl McCreary tells of a doomed academic who hides away in a bunker in a vain attempt to avoid the approach of a writhing mass of worms. This is a short story that accommodates some clever backstory and that is written with a horrific inevitability and ends in a strange revelation that leaves the narrator stating: "Were I to still have a face, I would smile". This is a very good issue of “Innsmouth Magazine” with the vast majority of the stories being of the highest quality and running the gamut of Lovecraftian styles. The writing is very good and consistent, despite the different styles and voices – all-in-all an excellent and highly enjoyable issue. I read the issue as part of the “Collected Issues: 5 – 7” anthology. ( )