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Fiction: Matt Williamson (“On Murder Island”), Tamsyn Muir (“Chew”), Lucius Shepard (“The Ease with Which We Freed the Beast”), Lisa Tuttle (“Need”).
Nonfiction: Editorial by John Joseph Adams, The H Word: Choosing Gruesome Subjects by John Langan, Artist Showcase: Chelsea Knight, Interview: Ellen Datlow.
Cover art by Chelsea Knight
Happy new year, and welcome to issue number four of Nightmare! We’ve got another great issue for you this month; read the editorial to see what we’ve got on tap.
The north wind’s been spraying Mainland Runoff in our faces for days, but that’s nothing new, nothing worth complaining about. Here on Murder Island, we have a little saying: “If ever you don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes and you’ll be murdered.” Or as the Weatherman likes to say: “Radar’s telling us to brace for more hot gusty winds, Mainland Runoff, and murder.” The forecast never changes.
The story reads, at times, like something for children, but it’s unwholesome even apart from its violence—and that confusion of tone and subject matter seems video-gamey to me. The story as a whole is like a weird dream someone might have after playing Grand Theft Auto while listening to an audiobook of Peter Pan on loop for twenty hours.
After ballet, Corey liked to walk home through the cemetery. The grounds were large and well tended and offered the visitor a wealth of picturesque monuments and sentimental gravestone inscriptions, some of them dating back before the Civil War. There were columns, slabs, and spheres in abundance of the pinkish marble that was quarried locally, and among the mausoleums built to look like temples, chapels and houses was one defiant pink pyramid.
I often draw on experiences from my own life for inspiration, but as a writer of fiction I am not bound to stick to things that really happened. Dreams, daydreams, music, art, books, other people’s lives—these things and more give me ideas for what to write.
To me [horror is] the genre of unease. It makes me feel really uneasy and it gives me kind of a creepy feeling. It can border on wanting to look away, it can border on disgust—but that’s a type of horror. Horror can be any genre. There’s science fiction horror, there’s dark fantasy that’s really really dark, there can be mysteries that converge on horror. It depends on how far you want to go down the path of darkness.
Anton’s American soldier had whipped out the torn front page of the newspaper for him to translate the headline. His German was very bad and Anton’s English worse, but they worked it out anyhow, repeating it back and forth to each other until they were satisfied with the results. He admired the headline mainly because the American was his friend, then asked for chewing gum.
It’s easy to write a WWII story, especially one set in Germany, and have it be an easy-out in terms of insta-setting. It evokes an immediate response of pain and despair. But that doesn’t mean WWII is not what it is, a giant psychic scar, and thus an opening for horror and the numinous. Just because the war’s over doesn’t mean the scar is gone.
I discovered photography when I was around fourteen. I used a throw-away camera first and discovered that my mother had a very simple digital camera. From then on I saved my money to purchase my own Canon. My dad gave me his old Canon F-1 film camera and, ever since, photography has grown into my primary artistic passion.
Me and Molly Bruin were lying on our stomachs atop a sea cliff overlooking Droughans Beach, fresh from a fuck and lolling there, our skins stuck with bits from the weeds and tall grasses that cloaked our sin, with the wind in our faces and our lives yet to be lived.
Stories just come to me, sometimes over a period of years, sometimes over a few days. I’m not into self-analysis, so I don’t explore their origins, but in this case it was obvious. I was an abused child, and a very angry teenager and young man. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten over being angry—so in this case I was more or less blending some autobiographical stuff with fantasy. When I was a kid, I believed anger was magic of a kind, power, and I wanted to convey that feeling in the main character. I got angry when I was writing it.
It’s not the first time that I’ve been asked, “Why do you write that stuff?” It’s typically been voiced by those who are friendly to me but not particularly close: colleagues at the school where I teach; the parents of my younger son’s classmates; the people who stop to talk to me at bookstores or libraries or conventions, when I’m signing books or after I’ve finished giving a reading or sitting on a panel. After years of hearing this, I still don’t have a good answer.
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This issue's cover art by
Joelee Creative / Adobe Stock.
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