Issue #8 of Cyber-Psychos arrived in 1998 and continued the zine's new perfect-bound 140 page format, chock fulla the weirdness, esoterica, and cultural extremism that fueled editor Jasmine Sailing. In this issue, you get another stack of fascinating feature articles on major figures in the late 90s underground: a wide-ranging interview with the supremely creepy Belgian prog-rock band (an offshoot of legends Univers Zero), discussing their background and musical aesthetics amongst most of the band lineup; this one is highly recommended reading for fans of the Zeuhl-informed spookprog that I've raved about elsewhere here at C-Blast. Sailing also does a big interview with Mason Jones of Charnel Music / psych guitar industrial project Trance / heavy space rockers Subarachnoid Space which provides plenty of insight into Jones' seemingly unstoppable creative supernova, including the underground magazines Ongoku Otaku and Morbid Realities ; everything this guys has his hands on is worth checking out, if not full-on worship. Little Fyodor returns with a collection of profiles of assorted eccentrics and heretics, including outsider musician John Bartles, Adam Bohman of improv-noise band Morphogenesis, Johnny Dowd and his unique Sothern-Gothic blues/folk, and oddball vocalist Winona Righteous. Michael Moynihan (Blood Axis) is interviewed regarding the original publication of his infamous black metal history Lords Of Chaos; an enthusiastic rundown of the inaugural Death Equinox convention / gathering. "Bad Craziness" is a transcript of a live Readercon panel on the topic of subversive / transgressive literature with Paul Di Filippo, Lance Olsen, The Joey Zone, & Jasmine Sailing all on board; this is a great one that gets pretty deep. An article on author Doug Rice delivered in fragmentary form by Don Harrold; there’s also a long multi-author retrospective on the work of William S. Burroughs. An interview with author and assemblage artist Andi Olsen interrogates her fascinations with the "freak show", outrageous human behavior, and the image of the monstrous. Underground Denver comics collective Hector get interviewed by Bruce Young; an article on the agrarian life of cult horror/slipstream/ uncatagorizeable prose-poet Misha. There's more non-fiction via an autobiographical journal entry on Elvis and misspent musical misadventure from Sallee, too.

Lots of dark and provocative original fiction as always: Surreal horror from Mark McLaughlin's "Cinema Diabolique" presented in television script format; Uncle River brings another short-short blast of oddball cyberpunk ("The Honest Teacher")'; Geoff Jackson's grotesque "Time Of The Tape"; Christopher Morris gets even more repulsive with his cannibalistic slice-of-life "The Life Of Death"; Kurt Newton's "Taboo" and Kerry Knudsen's "Plaything" are for the unflappable dark fic reader only, with pitch-black visions of depravity; only slightly less insolent, DF Lewis's "A Little Girl Forever" opens the door on a bizarrely erotic glimpse of an absurd space-faring future. Wayne Allen Sallee wanders into one of his paranoid otherworlds with "Carrion Luggage". Deborah Hunt's "Glass" is one of the best stories to appear in the whole run of this zine, poetic and horrifying. Jeffrey Thomas delves into real nightmare regions of sexual aberration with "Dust". First Contact goes awry in Bo Vilmos Widerberg's "A Handshake, A Farewell". More horror from Erik Rush ("Subjects").

After the opening two-page "Editorial Babble", Sailing unleashes a ton of rad interview and article material as mentioned previously; there's the latest "CyberCents" column that keeps pushing further into truly clandestine territory with a how-to for "homemade lubricant" that seems primed to cause some major industrial / mechanical chaos; Sailing steps in with her own film column "Sex And The Silver Screen" to review stuff like Cronenberg's Crash and Lynch's Lost Highway, with some more commercial offings intermixed. The "Personal Reality" essays touch on modern death rituals, and a semi-chaos magick-tinged rumination on self-realization. And the reviews, good god the reviews....lengthy dives into albums from Brighter Death Now and Slogun, Puissance and Lee "Scratch" Perry, Burzum and Oxbow and all points between; the infamous Affliction VHS from Mark Hejnar; underground lit and hardcore horror and histories of rock and roll "erotica"; Peter Sotos' Special; warped noir, books on Guy Debord and Jane County; Keel's Mothman Prophecies and other Forteana, loads of edgy lit zines and horror short fic zines and cutting-edge adult comics.

The rest of the issue is splattered with angry punk poetry from Kerry Knudsen and Paul Weinman, and moody lines from Scott Urban, Bruce Boston, and Uncle River, surreal poetry from Tom Hamill; and the latest installment of the Schism comic.