If there’s one thing I learned this summer, it’s that we need each other more than ever. There are so many terrible things happening, and there’s no way we can survive all of them without a helping hand. We must invest our time and our energy into our relationships.

Many of us are feeling anxious about what’s going to happen to each other and our beautiful planet. I sometimes lose heart, myself! But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from working with so many amazing horror writers over the years, it’s that when things get dark, humans have the capacity to come together and shine.

Luckily for me, the ghosts in my house aren’t nearly as toxic as the ones in this month’s issue. Sure, we sometimes wake in the night to feel phantom dogs jumping on the bed to join our pup (who seems unfussed by these strangers).

Welcome to what might be our most meta issue ever. I’m no expert on postmodernism (seriously, I fell asleep every session of my 20^th Century Philosophy class), but I do love fiction that recognizes it’s working within a larger schema of texts all inescapably linked by culture.

Welcome to Issue #152 of Nightmare Magazine! And if you’re a subscriber reading this on release day, then happy May Day—a day where many cultures in the Northern Hemisphere celebrate the high point of spring, a day of fertility and growth.

David Lynch did not come up with the line “The owls are not what they seem.” It was co-creator Mark Frost who wrote the teleplay for that episode of Twin Peaks. But seemings and doublings are a primary occupation of Lynch’s work. That’s why when I sat down to write about this month’s issue, I immediately thought of him—and the owls. These stories and this poem are also not what they seem.

There’s a special kind of darkness in each of this issue’s pieces that is made out of both our struggle to understand each other and our failures to be what other people want us to be. It’s art that feels like sunshine on what the meteorologist predicted would be the worst day of the year—or vice versa.

None of us are free agents—every last one of us is bound at some point, or many points, in a social web that can be as sticky and as unbudging as any spider’s. The stories in this issue are about these bonds—bonds we choose, bonds we outgrow, bonds we are forced into.

I’ll never stop believing that being scared (while doing something as safe as reading in a comfortable chair or watching a movie on a good couch) is absolutely restorative. Not everyone liked Longlegs or Late Night with the Devil, but after I saw those movies, I felt better about the world.