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We have original fiction from Isabel Yap (“Have You Heard the One About Anamaria Marquez”) and Genevieve Valentine (“A Dweller in Amenty”), along with reprints by Glen Hirshberg (“I am Coming to Live in Your Mouth”) and Nathan Ballingrud (“Sunbleached”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview with Bram Stoker nominated author Jeff Strand.
I wrote this for week three at the Clarion Workshop last summer. I kept trying to write another story that I had fleshed out more, but it was going nowhere and I needed to submit something the next morning. I put that story aside, went online, and pestered my best friends back in Manila to tell me the ghost stories they remembered from our Catholic girls’ school.
But I’ve always said I’ve never written a vampire story and I’ve never written a werewolf story, and I when I’m doing supernatural, I’m trying to look for some different thing, some new approach to it that you haven’t seen before. And in this book the supernatural entities are something you haven’t seen before…
I think death and grief are huge things, and when there is something huge, it can break language. We all know that, “I’m so sorry for your loss,” no matter how genuinely meant, no matter how much love is beneath those words, is never enough.
Find a way to do what you love, never give up and be insanely persistent about it to make it happen. I am living my dream: I make art, I live from it, I support my family by doing what I love the most to do, and I hope for it to continue ‘til the day I die . . . and after.
Yes, I have an idea what his life was like, but in the microcosm of the story, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is how this man reacts to the current circumstances, whether or not he rallies or crumbles … it’s what his reactions in the moment reveal about his true Stuff.
Ideas just come to me, and this one did. I think the grimace on the gorgon masks (especially the ancient Rome variety) may have influenced me with some ideas of pain, and frustration. The hero is an American … But the rest simply … arrived.
Whenever anyone who creates horror fiction says they don’t, it simply confirms me in my commitment to the field. No doubt they have their reasons, but I have mine, which is to support the kind of fiction I’ve loved pretty well ever since I can remember.
We have original fiction from Adam-Troy Castro (“The Totals”) and Kat Howard (“Dreaming Like a Ghost”), along with reprints by Gary Braunbeck (“We Now Pause for Station Identification”) and Tanith Lee (“The Gorgon”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview with legendary master of horror Dean Koontz.
I like to surprise myself. I like to surprise my readers. I want every story to be different from the story before it. I want to avoid the existence of a “typical” Adam-Troy Castro story. So I don’t just change genres. I change styles.
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© 2014 Nightmare Magazine
