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Fiction: Ramsey Campbell (“At Lorn Hall), Desirina Boskovich (“Construction Project”), Joe Haldeman (“Graves”), Poppy Z. Brite (“The Ash of Memory, the Dust of Desire”).
Nonfiction: Editorial by John Joseph Adams, The H Word: The Ghosts of November by R.J. Sevin, Artist Showcase: Maxim Verehin, Interview: Peter Straub (part 2).
Cover art by Maxim Verehin
Welcome to issue number two of Nightmare! We’ve got a great issue for you, so click through to see what we have in store for you this month.
We begin in August, when the summer nights are ripe and voluptuous. Moths beat against the window, seeking solace from the darkness. August brings violent thunderstorms; cut power lines draw the darkness closer. We cup a flickering flame and make love that brings purple bruises.
I think the uncanny and the horrific are seen most powerfully from the edges of society. Because of this, I often choose narrators who are marginalized in some way, or whose connections to mainstream culture are for some reason tenuous.
I have this persistent sleep disorder that makes life difficult for me, but still I want to keep it. Boy, do I want to keep it. It goes back twenty years, to Vietnam. To Graves.
Vietnam gave me the central image for “Graves.” We were airlifted into an area that included a graveyard, which had been extensively shelled. Plenty of moldy old corpses. Very different from the fresh ones we normally dealt with.
October: The whole damned month is ours, and we make it last. November 1st does not come at the stroke of midnight—not at all. Hallowe’en owns the night, and the first of November arrives with the sun, bringing with it the sudden, sobering intrusion of the real world.
Once, I thought I knew something about love. Once, I could stand on the roof of the tallest skyscraper in the city and look out across the shimmering candyscape of nighttime lights without thinking of what went on down in the black canyons between the buildings: the grand melodramatic murders, the willful and deliberate hurt, the commonplace pettiness. To live is to betray. But why do some have to do it with such pleasure?
Character always drove everything for me. A good setting becomes a kind of character.
I do like to draw a variety of subjects, but I’m not really sure why I favor drawing dark things. I don’t really like to get introspective about it because I might just conclude that I’m actually psychotic.
Randolph hadn’t expected the map to misrepresent the route to the motorway quite so much. The roads were considerably straighter on the page. The high beams roused swarms of shadows in the hedges and glinted on elongated warnings of bends ahead, and then the light found a signpost. It pointed down a lane to somewhere called Lorn Hall.
[Setting is] pretty crucial ever since Ann Radcliffe used it as a source of atmosphere in her novels. The method was refined and focused by Poe—look at “The Fall of the House of Usher,” where the setting can even be said to share its spirit with those who dwell there. Several of Lovecraft’s greatest tales are inspired by real American locations, while others have their roots in his imaginative notions of places he hadn’t visited—Australia, the Antarctic.
What I would say to the young me is, “Don’t be a snob. Acknowledge that work done in the genre can be just as beautiful and literary as any book by your favorite mainstream writer, Updike, Roth, Bellow. If there has not yet been a Scott Fitzgerald of horror fiction, there ought to be one day. Do what you can and don’t worry so much. As long as you bring forth what is in you, everything is going to be all right. You’re going to be surprised.”
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