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We have original short fiction from George Sandison (“The Cut Cares Not for the Flesh”) and H. B. Menendez (“Preamble to the Death of a Small God”). Our Horror Lab originals include a flash story (“First Girls”) from Jessica Luke García and a poem (“The Mourning of Sam Lillow, the Gardener”) from Adriana C. Grigore. We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, and a book discussion from Sunny Moraine.
Cover art by Anya Juárez Tenorio / Pexels Stock Image
I don’t know what your local grocery store looks like this month, but when February rolls around, the Safeway up the street from my house nearly bursts open with pink stuffed animals, pink boxes of candy, pink accessories, and pink baked goods.
As Annie slips into the club, she grins at Robert, all trepidation and excitement. She hardly disturbs the velvet curtains with her passing, so their weight surprises him. He pushes at the fabric to force his way in. The atmosphere is muggy and heavy.
Extreme wealth seems to function as mental illness for many people, as it depends on a dehumanisation of everyone else to normalise the excess (like that hit documentary series, Succession). Perhaps it’s entitlement to power; perhaps it’s losing the perspective to see how unreal life becomes.
I wouldn’t survive a slasher film. When the killer comes to town and starts popping off fresh-faced coeds, I’d eat it before we hit Act II. I have a great affection for those initial victims who seem to linger hauntingly over the narrative.
It’s a quiet night at home. A woman watches a scary movie in a darkened room when a real-life killer appears. Screaming, she jumps from the couch, popcorn flying, and the chase begins. The mask-clad, knife-wielding killer pursues her.
Her fingers, then, had folded around the clay, her mind entranced. Her fingers traced the soft wetness, pressed gently, pressed firmly, bent, rolled, pulled, pushed. The clay yielded to her rough-skinned hands like a willing lover. She had bent closer to the orange-red clay and closed her eyes.
I’m pretty sure I still have a Post-It somewhere in my bedside table on which is scribbled in near-indecipherable handwriting “the witch falls in love with a GHOST,” that I think I wrote around 3 am one night when this story was just starting to float around in my head.
I used to have this illustrated version of Beauty and the Beast when I was little, which more often than not I used to retrace the drawings than reread the story, but I do remember it was my favourite version of the tale because it reserved several beautiful pages for the scene with the rose theft.
Let me begin as simply as I can: It’s really weird to revisit Stephen King’s The Stand in late 2023. Here’s where the simplicity stops, because said weirdness is multifaceted, and each facet is rooted in a variety of different variables.
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