Nightmare Magazine, Issue 167 (August 2026)

We have original short fiction from Quincy Lee (“The Dark Follows Me”) and Georgina Kamsika (“Room 602 at the Hotel In-Between”). Our Horror Lab originals include a poem (“Shapeshifting Recovery Staff”) from Bogi Takács and a flash piece (“My Parts, Collected”) from Melissa A. Watkins. Our nonfiction includes a new H Word essay from Kurt Fawver and a Plumbing the Depths book list about gangster horror.

Cover art by Joe Therasakdhi / Adobe Stock

Nightmare Magazine, Issue 167 (August 2026)

Editorial

Editorial: August 2026

by Wendy N. Wagner

Gardens are pumping out the juiciest tomatoes, corn on the cob is at its peak, and every melon is bulging with sugar water. The days might be the hottest, but with fall on the horizon, the nights are growing longer—and there’s a real sense of eeriness in the lengthening darkness. This month’s offerings celebrate potent sensory experience set against a heightened light and dark.

Publishes Online on 8/5

Editorial

Announcement: We’re Launching a New Kickstarter Soon. Sign up to be notified when it launches!

by John Joseph Adams

On September 15, 2026, we’ll be launching our first Kickstarter campaign in more than a decade, to fund Year 15 of Nightmare and Year 17 of Lightspeed. Join us for a year of new short fiction from some of the biggest stars in science fiction, fantasy, and horror, including: Travis Baldree Olivie Blake P. Djèlí […]

Fiction

The Dark Follows Me

by Quincy Lee

ANNOUNCEMENT: We’ll be launching our first Kickstarter campaign in more than a decade, to fund Year 17 of Lightspeed and Year 15 of Nightmare. Clicking nightmare-magazine.com/kickstarter will take you to the campaign pre-launch page. Once you’re there, click the NOTIFY ME ON LAUNCH button so you’ll be notified when the campaign goes live on September […]

Publishes Online on 8/5

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Quincy Lee

by Alex Puncekar

I was one of the interpreters/co-navigators with a DeafBlind writer at a residency program, so we spent a lot of time together, and in between chatting about books and writing, we folded origami. I’d grown up folding paper cranes, but to fold with my DeafBlind friend required different techniques than making the folds by sight.

Publishes Online on 8/5

Fiction

My Parts, Collected

by Melissa A Watkins

My foot is hidden under a pile of fallen leaves in a ditch near the highway. My hand, a mile or so away, buried under a shallow layer of dirt in what will be someone’s tulip bed next spring. My head—I don’t know where it is. Strange. Surely it’s what I’m using to think? I focus and my hand lurches, shakes off a coating of soil, lifts onto its fingertips and straggles into the driveway.

Publishes Online on 8/12

Nonfiction

The H Word: The Revolution Will Be Horrorized

by Kurt Fawver

We live in politically combustible times, when social media posts ignite wars and half of the Western world’s populace seems determined to usher in an apocalypse if only to spite their perceived enemies. Under such fraught circumstances, it might be tempting to disregard writing, reading, and viewing horror fiction and film as relatively feckless pursuits.

Publishes Online on 8/12

Fiction

Room 602 at the Hotel In-Between

by Georgina Kamsika

There is a place that doesn’t exist. Or rather, the hotel exists only in the moments where existence itself hesitates: between one time zone and the next, between the breath then the decision, between the life left and the one not found yet. It appears at the stroke of midnight for those who are neither here nor there. There are travellers mid-journey, refugees between borders.

Publishes Online on 8/19

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Georgina Kamsika

by Alex Puncekar

I was also thinking of how predatory nostalgia can be. It can be comforting to sink into remakes and sequels and old favourites and I’m as guilty of this as anyone. But that comfort can also be a trap. Christie’s replica bedroom is one example, as are the other guests feasting on their past. The Concierge is a manifestation of the temptation to live in eternal stasis.

Publishes Online on 8/19

Poetry

Shapeshifting Recovery Staff

by Bogi Takács

Your clients are—more often than not—
helpless, a stack of unsorted organs
kept pulsating by the will locked inside

Publishes Online on 8/26

Nonfiction

Plumbing the Depths: Beasts in the City—Horror Meets the Gangster

by Matthew Sorrento

“I’m gonna spit!” Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) shouts in Scarface (1932) when first getting his hands on a Tommy Gun, before ripping gunfire into a wall. This scene in an early sound-era gangster film (with masturbatory undertones) presents the Chicago hood on the rise in his crime syndicate as a nightmarish machine of destruction.

Publishes Online on 8/26