Nightmare Magazine

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Feb. 2019 (Issue 77)

This month, we have original fiction from Micah Dean Hicks (“Quiet the Dead”) and Rafeeat Aliyu (“58 Rules To Ensure Your Husband Loves You Forever”), along with reprints by Kelley Armstrong (“We Are All Monsters Here”) and Nick Mamatas (“The Glottal Stop”). In the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” Richard Thomas discusses new, exciting trends in horror films. Plus we have author spotlights with our authors, and a panel interview with some amazing women in the horror industry.

Cover art by Grandfailure / Fotolia

Feb. 2019 (Issue 77)

Editorial

Editorial: February 2019

by John Joseph Adams

Be sure to read the editorial for a discussion of this month’s content and to get all our news and updates.

Fiction

Quiet the Dead

by Micah Dean Hicks

Author spotlight

Stray spirits stirred in the dark. They lay like oil slicks across the asphalt, pulled their misty bodies in and out of the doors of Swine Hill’s pork processing plant, and drifted storm-like in Kay’s wake. Her every hot breath was full of the dead. The man had crossed her. Had shouldered into her on the crowded butchery floor where she leaned over a workstation and hacked through bone and bleeding pig meat. Had stolen knives and gloves from the locker that everyone knew was hers.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Micah Dean Hicks

by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor

I’m from rural Arkansas, and small, dying towns are a feature of the landscape. I think I’ve been troubled by places like Swine Hill ever since I was a kid. In some towns, there’s a palpable mood that things are bad and getting worse all the time. Obviously that’s not true across the state, and some places are doing fine. But many communities are in deep decline. The past feels heavy there. It’s hard not to see my home state as a little haunted.

Fiction

We Are All Monsters Here

by Kelley Armstrong

So disappointing. After decades of movies and TV shows and books filled with creatures by turns terrifying and tempting, it was a guarantee that the real thing could never live up to the hype. We knew that. Yet we were still disappointed. When the first stories hit the news—always from some distant place we’d never visited or planned to visit—the jokes followed. Late-night comedy routines, YouTube videos, Internet memes . . . people had a blast mocking the reality of vampires.

Nonfiction

The H Word: How The Witch and Get Out Helped Usher in the New Wave of Elevated Horror

by Richard Thomas

If you haven’t seen The Witch (2015) and Get Out (2017), you must have been living under a rock. The former was a breakout title for A24 Films, becoming the fifth highest grossing movie they’ve put out to date (with over $25 million dollars in earnings). And the latter was nominated for several Golden Globe and Academy Awards, winning the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Two very different films, they both took chances at the box office—with their stories, images, themes, settings, and overall experiences.

Fiction

58 Rules to Ensure Your Husband Loves You Forever

by Rafeeat Aliyu

Author spotlight

(23) No man jokes with food. Does your husband like a kind of food? Try to change your cooking. Rumour has it that in the early mornings, the expressways of Abuja are littered with dead bodies. Iman’s Toyota cut through the dusty fog of the early morning, the dark outside her windscreen occasionally broken by the few working streetlights. Never passing the forty km speed limit, Iman drove down Nnamdi Azikiwe Expressway till it became Shehu Yar’Adua Way.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Rafeeat Aliyu

by Tonia Ransom

Shortly before I started writing this story, there was a viral message being forwarded via WhatsApp. I believe the message originated here in Nigeria, but I’ve heard that it has made rounds in other countries, too. It was a set of rules advising women on how to be good and “godly” wives. This list was really long, and several points in it were backed by Bible verses. These rules perfectly highlighted some of the pressure women face in Nigeria, so I decided to borrow some of them to tell this story. That said, the number in the title is arbitrary.

Fiction

The Glottal Stop

by Nick Mamatas

Dating cis was rough, no doubt. For any woman, but especially for Beatriz Almonte, a living meme who had several years ago made a mistake and gained the attention of a secret bulletin board full of trolls for whom harassing her was a vocation not dissimilar from the priesthood. She had no more free background checks left on Spinstr, but was bored and horny enough to do without just this once and press *sm00ch* on some guy’s face. Another mistake.

Nonfiction

Roundtable Interview with Women in Horror

by Lisa Morton

To celebrate Women in Horror Month 2019, I asked four excellent female writers and horror experts to join me for a roundtable discussion. Given how the genre seems to be expanding rapidly to include more women at all levels of experience and publishing, I tried to gather a group of women with a range of talents and experience: Linda Addison, Joanna Parypinski, Becky Spratford, and Kaaron Warren.