Fiction

Your companions drag the coolie girl to her feet. Some two-cent girl with rags for clothes and hair hanging across her face in tangled strings. Her eyelids flutter but do not open, revealing only the white crescents of her sclera. Blood trickles from a gash across her forehead. The ragged skin sickens you like the Devil. Her skull peeks through. This is a lynching.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 166 (July 2026)

Fiction

Patterns of Dentition in Transgender Adults

by Izzy Wasserstein

Author spotlight

The dryer groans to life, then begins thumping ominously. Maddie, already halfway out of her building’s laundry room, swears under her breath. The machine grinds and shakes. She slams the stop button, trying not to think about what the landlord might charge.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 165 (June 2026)

Fiction

NoMouth

by Marianne Kirby

The videos show people kissing. They press their mouths together and open their lips. Their tongues move, wet and intrusive, less like they are tasting each other than like they want to lay eggs in the protected throats of their lovers.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 165 (June 2026)

Fiction

What Grows Back

by Aishatu Ado

Author spotlight

I have told this story before, and I will tell it again, and each telling grows more teeth. Sometimes thirty-four, thirty-six. Sometimes they multiply faster than your science allows, like every word you made me swallow coming back to bite you.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 165 (June 2026)

Fiction

A Magic Kingdom

by Bruce McAllister

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)