There was a door.

That’s the best place to start, I guess, given that there’s no good place to start.

Luke and I were drinking bourbon and smoking in his attic bedroom. He’d brought me to his family compound in northwest Wyoming right after we were discharged.

Your heart stopped cold when you were walking to school in knee-high snow the morning after your parents separated. Maybe because you didn’t zip that padded snowsuit all the way up and your fur scarf was in the wash and the windchill of -10°F nipped your neck and seeped down your ribcage. Maybe because all night you believed that things would be back to normal in the morning.

When I was eight years old, two things happened to me: I realized I wanted to hurt my cousin, and in that same moment God or the Devil or some other force in the universe kicked my consciousness out of my human body and into a fly that circled and alighted on her jam sandwich, circled and alighted, circled and alighted, tasting in the tentative way that flies taste.

Welcome to issue #168 of Nightmare Magazine. It’s back-to-school season around here, which means new notebooks, cooler evenings, and a sudden overwhelming craving for apples. If you’re like me, September also makes you more excited about reading great new fiction!

When horror focuses on middle-class homelife, family values often prevail, with the monstrous threat defeated by the end. Unless a progressive take on the genre shows the traditional home and its family unit to be sources of terror (think of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s family dinner from hell). But the road stop diner, which offers a meal but little comfort, has also been ripe for terror.