Hooray! Issue #114 of the Iconoclast is finally out and available in print! Why am I so damn excited about that? Because my short story, “Finally” is smack dab in the middle of the magazine! Yee-Haw! A twisted tale about a mentally ill homeless man who picks Christmas Eve as the time to turn himself from being a failure into a success. Yes, he finally does it! At least according to how his pickled egg of a brain works. But his horrible actions are the absolute antithesis of Christmas. The narrative is purposely a bit choppy to bring the reader into Robert’s (the main character) head.

Weird, strange, sad, with some social commentary thrown into the mix “Finally” is more than just a scary story. It is a peek into the heads of the people who walk around many neighborhoods in America today because of so many mental health service facilities being consolidated and put out of reach. Things are too busy, high tech, and none of us know who is safe to talk to on the street anymore. Kindness is not always enough, as poor Mikey Hoolihan finds out. I don’t know what the answer is to the “Roberts” out there, but I do know that pretending they don’t exist isn’t working.

The Iconoclast is a cool independent literary journal that is done totally old school by Editor Phil Wagner. All submissions are mailed in hard copies, as are your communications with the editor. If you’re not a patient person, don’t bother Phil. But, if you are, and you’ve always dreamed of writing like Jack Kerouac or Ray Bradbury on a clanking typewriter and mailing it off with high hopes to a magazine, you might like this. If you write strong poetry and want to see it in print, this is also a good place to try. Single copies of the Iconoclast are $5.00 but the better deal is subscribing and enjoying the slightly irregular appearances of the journal in your mailbox. Lots of good reading and this journal has been a starting point for some famous names as well!

The address for Iconoclast is: the Iconoclast
1675 Amazon Road
Mohegan Lake, NY 10547-1804
please make checks payable to: Phil Wagner
single issue $5
subscription: $20 for 6 issues (great deal!)

The magazine is standard magazine rack size and printed on thick heavy paper. A nice bonus, is that it is not plastic coated, so can be recycled easily, should you wish to do that. Most importantly, by supporting the Iconoclast, we are supporting ourselves as writers and keeping an indie magazine going!

If you do buy a copy and read my story, please let me know what you think! Thanks and good writing-Brian James Lewis