Welcome to issue #168 of Nightmare Magazine. It’s back-to-school season around here, which means new notebooks, cooler evenings, and a sudden overwhelming craving for apples. If you’re like me, September also makes you more excited about reading great new fiction!

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.

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 […]

It’s another terrific issue, packed full of great insights, blood, magic, and creepy rats. I think it’s the perfect counter to room temperature potato salad and overcooked hamburgers. I hope you think so, too!

Remember the first time you ever saw the Xenomorph’s mouth? Those silver, almost human-shaped teeth? The pooling saliva as the maw slowly opened, revealing not a tongue, but a projectile mouth-within-a-mouth? What kind of monster is so hungry it needs a mouth inside its mouth?

During my tenure as a Portland metro-area resident, I’ve had memberships at my neighborhood video stores, including Hollywood Video (RIP), Blockbuster Video (RIP), Clinton Street Video (RIP), and most recently, Great American Video & Espresso.

We firmly believe that dark fiction is a bulwark against the forces of the world eager to reduce our human experience to dollars and cents. Horror, dark fantasy, and all kinds of weird and bizarre literature is powerful nutrition for the creative soul.

As violence, corporate greed, and international tension rise, we are all asking: What’s really going on beneath the surface of our society? Are we really as safe as we have been led to believe? And holy crap, how f*cked up is everything, really?

Making a horror magazine is a real labor of love, and February is the season where we celebrate all things loving and relation-full. This issue really dives into the language of the heart.

In a time when most of us are surrounded by bland, corporate big box buildings and bombarded with thoughtless, empty “content,” our writers are surgically extracting their inner worlds and offering them to you, our readers, so you can have a genuine, powerful experience.