The Yattering

Tabula Rasa#1, January 1994

Man is a growth as organic as fruit -- capable of colour, fragrance and sweetness. To meddle with him, to condition him is to turn him into a mechanical creation.
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess

Because of (or despite) our predilection for quotes there's something Clive Barker once said that doesn't really make for a nice succinct little excerpt, and which we'd like to share. He was talking about the celebration of horror - not about catharsis or purging the dark side of our nature -- but acknowledging and appreciating it (and she, blob, them, thing, beast with a thousand eyes and Shub Niggurath). So here we are.

Tabula Rasa is what happens when a certain Senator Schaht threatens David Carroll with unemployment and Kyla Ward says 'that sounds like a good idea' (the 'zine, that is). It all follows on from the timeline of horror we wrote for Burnt Toast 13 wherein we discovered a love of reference material and a compulsion to write it all down. This is a very different type of magazine to BT, and anything else being published in the Australian scene. After much debate we decided to forego fiction (though thanks to Mauri Himmelreich for the story which gave us serious pause) and print a minimum of reviews. Tabula Rasa is a history of horror, be it the last eight hundred years or the last four months.

It is planned to be a number of other things as well. We are quite pedantic in our attention to detail, but don't let it scare you (okay, just a bit - and corrections are welcome), we have no desire to emulate dry history texts. We want to make this sucker readable. We want it to come out quarterly, an irregular schedule suited previous projects admirably, but doesn't fit in well with the feel of this work.

It also is a magazine in search of an audience. Is this sustainable, and do people want to read it? If there's an issue two, that should be answer enough.