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We have original short fiction from Dan Stintzi (“God of the Black Moon”) and Kelsea Yu (“In Our Skin”). Our Horror Lab originals include a poem (“in your mind they still dance”) from Ariya Bandy and a flash (“The Sound a Rabbit Might Make”) from Bruce McAllister. Neil McRobert brings us our first installment of our “Plumbing the Depths” column. Priya Chand talks about being buried alive in the “The H Word,” we have plus author spotlights with our authors.
Cover art by tdhster / Shutterstock
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.
I played around with several ways of portraying what the VHS tape actually contained. And while this might be an unsatisfying answer, most of the images in this sequence were pulled from my subconscious. I tried to let that scene unfold like a dream.
Inspiration: A relationship—everything but the drill.
Anyone who’s read Edgar Allan Poe knows that he was fascinated—alongside many others of his era—by the prospect of premature burial. It’s not hard to imagine why: prior to modern imaging equipment, and particularly in Western traditions where corpses were buried intact, a person could, at the hand of their own well-meaning family, end up interred and helpless.
I can think of two types of experiences where I’ve felt like an observer in my own life. One is when I’ve suffered bouts of sleep paralysis. Feeling aware of what’s happening (with heightened paranoia to make it more fun!) while simultaneously being completely unable to move your body is an experience I wish on no one.
What is storytelling if not our duty to necromancy? Our duty to bring life to ashes? This poem was largely inspired by society’s response to The Dancing Plague of 1518, a notable instance of the virus-like phenomenon of people frantically dancing themselves to collapse and even death. To this day, no one knows what caused these outbreaks, yet, centuries later, its nebulous and horrific occurrence continues to call scholars and artists to reanimate history into a mirror of the present.
Because all horror stories are about survival, aren’t they? It’s the shadow cast at the heart of the genre. The thing in the dark, in the closet, under our beds; the thing with the knife, the teeth . . . or the roaring chainsaw—they are all just different costumes draped upon the same bony shoulders. Death, that’s what’s wearing the shroud, and no one survives its slow pursuit forever.
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