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We have original short fiction from Adam-Troy Castro (“Amelia’s Story”) and Steve Rasnic Tem (“Before and After”). Our Horror Lab originals include a flash story (“Wait, Our Lord the Flayed One Comes”) from Tania Chen and a poem (“Mnemonic Burning”) from Angela Liu. Lora Senf pens the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus of course we have author spotlights with our authors, and reviewer Adam-Troy Castro recommends new books.
Cover art by zlikovec / Shutterstock
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.
Early Wednesday morning, after a long weekend devoted to the search for her, twelve-year-old Amelia is spotted wandering home on the main highway out of town. She has at that point been missing since the previous Friday.
With a story like Amelia’s, the lack of a coherent explanation is the nightmare fuel. I promise you that even if readers don’t concoct something specific, they nevertheless feel the shape of an explanation too terrible to be borne. This tends to work better in horror than in science fiction.
This piece was one of my Clarion West Workshop stories, for one of the days we issued a challenge in the group to write something erotic for a particular week (shout out to Samit for being amazing during “Chaos week”) and this was the result of it.
You are seven. Perhaps nine, or even thirteen. In the earliest hours of a sleepless night-turned-morning, a figure you cannot see (but you can feel, their very existence heavy on your skin and you do not have to see, your bones howl that you are not alone) leans low, low, low over your bed.
I’ve lost a large number of people in my life: my wife, a child, both parents, a brother, a succession of close friends. When you get to be my age the losses come sometimes at an alarming rate. I recently turned seventy-four, with some health issues of my own, so mortality is a very real issue.
Some days I felt close to that line where awareness ends. Beyond that border I would become someone else’s memory. I knew eventually even that erratic existence would fade. I knew you went through this, and I wondered what you saw and what you felt, lying there with your eyes closed.
As someone who has had many family members lose their memory to disease, I wanted to write a poem where there isn’t exactly hope, but at least autonomy in memory loss—that instead of walking down a dimming path where you eventually lose your way home, it could be more like an act of burning your own memories to light the way to a different future.
This month Adam-Troy Castro dives into two upcoming novels—one by horror legend Robert McCammon (Leviathan, the final volume in his Matthew Corbett series), one by legend-in-the-making Clay McLeod Chapman (Wake Up and Open Your Eyes). Find out why you’ll want to read ’em!
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