Fiction

A Magic Kingdom

When I worked at Disneyland in the summer of ’65, it was strange enough even without what I found in the dumpster. This was the sixties, and the Magic Kingdom, no matter how many long-haired hippies it denied admission to, couldn’t escape the decade.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 164 (May 2026)

Fiction

Hollow Cast

by Sarah Grey

Author spotlight

In Sunnyhaven, we were all equally unique—and we’d been that way for years, the morning the New Girl arrived. Now, any of us would’ve admitted it: Sunnyhaven wasn’t perfect. There were no public parks or pools, no families walking their dogs down ash-lined greenbelts.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 164 (May 2026)

Fiction

We Are All in the Same Boat

by Avi Burton

Author spotlight

We pull in the first wrong thing at two a.m., under a choppy wind and reddening moon. It’s not discovered until two fifty-five a.m, after the great nets have been poured through the processing machines and seas of pelagic fish spill over the lip of the conveyor belt. It’s an apprentice who spots it.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 163 (April 2026)

Fiction

The Spiders You Swallow in Your Sleep

by Wendy Nikel

The image flashes only briefly on the television screen, but that’s all it takes. In that millisecond before Libby squeezes her eyes shut, the spiders are already at work in her mind, weaving sticky new synaptic bridges. They twist and shape the unlikely connections.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 163 (April 2026)

Fiction

The Final Girl Trap

by A.C. Wise

Author spotlight

You can know something is a trap and walk right into it anyway. There’s a vicious kind of glee in the snap of steel jaws springing closed, biting through skin and splintering bone. You can think aha, I knew it as you swallow the pain.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 163 (April 2026)

Fiction

Her Dark Places

by Adam-Troy Castro

Author spotlight

My wife sometimes asked what had gone wrong with us. She had always been our bank of compassion, the caretaker of our marriage, the one who diagnosed what was needed to keep us on track, and made sure that it was provided. I evaded the question. How could I tell her that somehow, along the way, she had transformed from the most beautiful person I had ever known to a grotesquerie, something it hurt me to even look at?

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 162 (March 2026)

Fiction

The Doll Problem

by Angela Liu

No one knows where the doll came from. With its blue glass eyes and ribboned hair, it looks like the ones you see at department stores and wonder who the hell buys them. “It’s gonna kill us in our sleep,” Kathy says, slapping Yuki’s hand away when he tries to play with the doll’s horsetail hair.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 162 (March 2026)

Fiction

Will the Last One to Leave Please Turn Out the Lights?

by Gordon B. White

Author spotlight

The Idiot looms like a tumorous moon in the morning sky as Morris County Animal Control Officer Bailey Butler passes Stantonsville’s last operating gas station and turns off onto Franklin Road. For a merciful half-mile, a run of white ash and pignut hickory screens the Idiot from her sight until the canopy recedes, but then there it is again. Its enormous shadow haunts the feet of the western hills.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 162 (March 2026)

Fiction

Twelve Facts About the Dermestid Beetle

by Marisca Pichette

Author spotlight

1. There is no better friend than the dermestid. I found them first in the woods, adorning the staring sockets of a coyote skull. So small I could have crushed them, they accomplished more than my child hands could—crawling, chewing, cleaning better than any household sponge or brush.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 161 (February 2026)

Fiction

Rest Stop

by Pedro Iniguez

They were on their way to El Paso when Yolanda asked Bernard to pull over. He choked the steering wheel until his fingers turned white. “Are you fucking serious?” “It’s okay,” she said shrinking into her seat, her hands rubbing together nervously between her thighs. “I can hold it.”

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 161 (February 2026)