Nightmare Magazine

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Mar. 2024 (Issue 138)

We have original short fiction from Keith Rosson (“Second Deaths”) and Fatima Taqvi (“Our Very Best Selves!”). Our Horror Lab originals include a flash story (“A Guide To Camping In The Forest”) from Oyedotun Damilola Muees and a poem (“The Let Go”) from E. Catherine Tobler.  We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors. Adam-Troy Castro looks at two new novels about haunts and houses: Elizabeth Hand’s A Haunting on the Hill and Gwendolyn Kiste’s The Haunting of Velkwood.

Cover art by Wilqkuku / Shutterstock Images

Mar. 2024 (Issue 138)

Editorial

Editorial: March 2024

by Wendy N. Wagner

Sometimes people just suck. Let me clarify. Lest you think I’ve been mainlining cable news or perhaps just reading a lot of Sartre (who hurt you, Jean-Paul, to make you say, “Hell is other people”?), I mostly believe in human goodness and expect the best from people. But I think we can all agree that when people decide to be mean, it hurts like nothing else.

Fiction

Second Deaths

by Keith Rosson

Author spotlight

Chuck was wire-sick again, so he hobbled up onto Jerome’s porch one sunny afternoon, need curling his spine like a bent clothes hanger. Jerome was the guy who could get you whatever you needed, as long as what you needed was wire, or crank, or a pallet of Captain Chompberry cereal, or twenty cartons of stolen Lithuanian cigarettes.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Keith Rosson

by Xander Odell

I like grimy stuff. Dirty, menacing, quick-witted exchanges between folks. I like crime fiction and horror that refuses to get world-rending, to get huge, that sticks to singular people. I love writing shakedowns, and that’s what happens to Chuck in that first scene. He’s got a need, and that need gets exploited

Fiction

A Guide to Camping in the Forest

by Oyedotun Damilola Muees

Before we left camp, we were informed about the dos and donts for living in our respective communities, considering we were strangers. Happenings that we newcomers saw as strange should not be enough reason to contravene the laws of the land.

Nonfiction

The H Word: Scream & the Joy of Cheap Thrills

by J.D. Harlock

“What’s your favorite scary movie?” It’s a question I’m often asked, and, for the longest time, I never had an answer to it. In a genre as storied and diverse as horror, anyone would be hard-pressed for a response. What’s certain, though, is few if any, casual viewers would pick a slasher film.

Fiction

Our Very Best Selves!

by Fatima Taqvi

Author spotlight

I like car journeys in the passenger’s seat. They give me time to think and rethink things beyond the shape of my life. I’m not allowed to play music, but I can in my head. Places blur. Memories tangle. Pitying voices from long ago garble in my ear on the thickened tongue of regret. “Muniza,” my husband says, eyes on the road. “Your skin is slipping.”

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Fatima Taqvi

by Xander Odell

I think it started out in my head with the scene where the eyeball falls out of Muniza’s socket, and this almost sitcom style uh-oh moment where there’s just the worst person in the world witnessing that. The shame of falling apart while under intense, unsympathetic scrutiny. Then I got to thinking: what are the emotional stakes of that situation?

Poetry

The Let Go

by E. Catherine Tobler

I wrote this to explore how we change in a relationship, how it isn’t always healthy or best for us—or necessarily consensual. We give pieces of ourselves away, we have pieces taken, we cut ourselves down to nothing in the name of love, and it is both a horror and a revelation.

Nonfiction

Book Reviews: New Novels by Hand & Kiste

by Adam-Troy Castro

Adam-Troy Castro looks at two new novels about haunts and houses: Elizabeth Hand’s A Haunting on the Hill and Gwendolyn Kiste’s The Haunting of Velkwood.

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