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We have original short fiction from Gemma Files (“Little Horn”) and Simon Gilbert (“Perfect Water”). Our Horror Lab originals include a poem (“Possession”) from Martins Deep and a flash story (“NotRob”) from Isabel Cañas. Nicholas Belardes discusses birds in the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word.” Plus we have author spotlights with our authors, and a de•crypt•ed discussion of the horror canon from Joe Koch.
Cover art by Danilo Sanino / Shutterstock
Halloween is the perfect time to try on your dark side for a few hours. In honor of the holiday, this month’s issue is all about our dark sides. It’s packed with eerie doubles, demons, and devils, all stand-ins for our worst impulses and unrestrained ids.
Horror has always been where I saw myself reflected most accurately, from a pretty early age. Over the last fifteen years, I’ve come to understand that that probably has a lot to do with my having always been an undiagnosed neurodivergent woman in a neurotypically-inclined world.
This poem was born after a strange empathy opened my eyes to Matthew 12:43-45—the Bible passage where Jesus teaches about demons wandering in the wilderness after a demon-possessed man is healed. Here, I tried to capture the persona’s body as a living space.
Birds aren’t monsters. Then again, maybe? Every mammal, fish, or insect has the ability to stimulate our imaginations—I’ll give animalia that. But birds, something special about them has the ability to tap into the darker depths of our creative core.
The whole idea for the story sprang from a visit to North Wales for a friend’s wedding, in a really rugged, scenic spot along the coast. I was travelling back with friends and we stopped to wander about on the cliffs and the idea for a ghost story began to take root!
When my daughter was a newborn, I found I only had the attention span to write micro and flash; I wrote a lot of it. I was also sleeping very little at night and crashed most afternoons, which for me is when the weirdest dreams happen. “NotRob” was one of them.
This story’s been bothering me for a long time. It has the sort of title that sticks in your head: The Turn of the Screw. I knew the title before reading the book, or perhaps I read it and forgot, as I read so many books on the shelves of the rich whose houses my mother cleaned.
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