Your companions drag the coolie girl to her feet. Some two-cent girl with rags for clothes and hair hanging across her face in tangled strings. Her eyelids flutter but do not open, revealing only the white crescents of her sclera. Blood trickles from a gash across her forehead. The ragged skin sickens you like the Devil. Her skull peeks through. This is a lynching.

The engines echo across the emptiness of the plain like a chorale, individual melodies weaving together to create a tune in the voiceless air. We hear them miles away, aeons in the distance, giving us time to prepare for their arrival. By the scratch-wounded clouds of the sunset and the throat-clawing grasp of the grass, we will prepare the house for them.

I took the rats with me when Ilona kicked me out because I knew she loved them. She’d hold them, caressing their pink tails as she fed them pierogi, their large front teeth scraping against the pads of her fingers. Anton was her favorite, a big black rat that she’d stuff between her breasts and carry around the apartment while reading about microeconomic determinants.

It’s another terrific issue, packed full of great insights, blood, magic, and creepy rats. I think it’s the perfect counter to room temperature potato salad and overcooked hamburgers. I hope you think so, too!

“Women’s issues horror fiction” has bloomed into its own hot subgenre, and no one is more thrilled than me. On some level, this subgenre arches back across generations (see: the gothic novel)—but I’m referring more specifically the spate of novels that has crashed onto the market since 2021 or so.

Chloe Lauter is a writer and publicist based in Los Angeles. Her debut novel is The Flayed Man, a July 21, 2026 release from Penguin Random House’s Skull House Press imprint.

They say a mountain vista looks loveliest in the golden hour, and
lunar landscapes most fully reveal themselves in quarter moons;
light and dark embrace to lift each other.