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We have original short fiction from Shannon Scott (“My Containment”) and James Tatam (“Backseat Kiss”). Our Horror Lab originals include a flash story (“There are three children jumping over a can outside a bodega”) from Mark Galarrita and a poem (“Ensabled Night”) from John R. Turner. 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 Sonora Taylor.
Cover art by Linda Bestwick / Shutterstock Images
Welcome to Issue #139 of Nightmare Magazine! And happy April, a month so delightful Shakespeare was both born and died in it. I like to think that if Shakespeare was working in 2024, he would be writing horror—after all, the genre is full of witches, ghosts, murder, and double-crosses, some of his favorite material.
When the American saw me sitting on a stone in the river, his mouth opened and closed, a brown trout caught on a fishing line. He kept his eyes on me as he hurried to pull off his socks and shoes, as if I would vanish otherwise. Then he rolled up the cuffs of his pants and waded into the shallow water.
Grief causes us to make questionable decisions or judgements. When we’re grieving we do risky things and often trust the wrong people because nothing seems to matter, or maybe anything is better than what we’re currently feeling or experiencing. Romance and sex can be a wonderful distraction.
In early 2022, there was a comedian on TikTok, or at least I thought they were a comedian, who said, and I’m paraphrasing here: My biggest fear living in the city today is not crime or something scary happening—it’s actually some person with a camera and a mic running up to me, asking me to do something for a dollar.
I like to start my short stories by immediately taking a plunge with my audience, a phrase or a certain voice or tone that lets them know what kind of tale they’re getting into and to trust this voice. This notion, supported with a sense of immediate urgency, i.e., give them something or someone interesting to latch onto—guides most of my work.
Cemeteries don’t need the supernatural to terrify. Zombies and revenants aren’t required to raise gooseflesh along our necks. Ghosts don’t have to peer out from mausoleums to sink that stone of dread into our guts. King’s Pet Sematary is a great example of the fear that has been associated with graveyards in the horror genre.
CW: violence, blood, death. It didn’t come as a surprise when AJ told me she wanted to open our relationship. We’d been an item for four years, but by the middle of the third year the two of us had long since checked out. You could feel it in the air: a static, something pushing […]
Given the modern problems of dating and such, I have my suspicions, but can you tell us a bit about what inspired “Backseat Kiss”? This story went through a few iterations. At first, I wanted to use a relationship to explore power dynamics, and originally the story was going to be about cuckoldry. That then […]
The opening line is my riff on Bach’s chorale prelude “Come, Sweet Death,” one of his most profound. The foxfur wings I feel come from Well’s “In the Avu Observatory,” a surrealistic short story where an astronomer in the islands of Indonesia is attacked by a large flying bat-creature.
I think the short story is the most effective form of horror. This is not to say a horror novel can’t be scary or great—there are many great horror novels—but the brevity of the short story serves to heighten the fear because, like a knife in the dark, it’s fast, it’s sudden, it’s unexpected, and you don’t have time to recover once it appears.
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