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Fiction: Ted Kosmatka (“Cry Room”), Sarah Langan (“Sacred Cows”), Margo Lanagan (“The Goosle”), Norman Partridge (“Blackbirds”).
Nonfiction: Editorial by John Joseph Adams, The H Word: The Failure of Fear by Dale Bailey, Artist Showcase: Sergio Diaz, Interview: Caitlin R. Kiernan.
Cover art by Sergio Diaz
Welcome to issue number five of Nightmare! We’ve got another great issue for you this month; read the editorial to see what we’ve got on tap.
Clara Maloney peered down the long Brooklyn block. She and baby Sally had been waiting in the cold for twenty minutes, and still no sign of Pop. Figured. Even to pick out his wife’s casket, the old man was late.
I find that I want to be good at everything I do, but it’s impossible. Every day, I fail someone I love, on some level, and that includes failing at my own career ambitions. But that’s life. I can’t be good at half the jobs I have.
What drew me to “Hansel and Gretel” was a Yiddish word, “gunsel,” that I happened upon in the dictionary. One of its several definitions went something like, “a youth, particularly a homosexual one, kept by a tramp.” So there’d been a time and place in which tramps commonly kept boys for sexual purposes—so commonly that there was a word for it? I immediately wanted to set a story there, and to tell it from the point of view of a gunsel.
The house looked just as it did in my memory: the crumbling, glittery yellow walls, the dreadful roof sealed with drippy white mud. My tongue rubbed the roof of my mouth just looking. It is crisp as wafer-biscuit on the outside, that mud. You bite through to a sweetish sand inside. You are frightened it will choke you, but you cannot stop eating.
Let me make a confession here: I haven’t been truly scared by a work of literary or cinematic horror in a long time—perhaps only once in my adult lifetime.
The church looked normal from the outside. All steepled and angular in the way of good, rural Indiana churches of a certain age. Red brick and stained glass, St. Thomas Aquinas, surrounded on three sides by hot asphalt parking.
The premise was drawn, as you might expect, from my experiences trying to deal with a toddler in church. When you are getting glared at by a hundred old people, your mind begins searching for any escape, and somehow this story kind of appeared in my head during the course of one very traumatizing baptism.
I don’t think there is a prevailing “Argentinian attitude” toward horror in art. I know some who are drawn to it (like me), some who are indifferent to it, some who are repulsed by it. At least that’s all I can tell you based on my personal experience. In Argentina there are exceptional artists whose work is based in horror and they’ve earned public acceptance.
On an August morning in the summer of 1960, a man dressed in black shattered the kitchen window at the Peterson home.
As a writer I don’t always like to answer all the questions a story presents, or every question readers might have. Of course, I want the logic of the story to operate . . . but I want to leave room for a few mysteries, too. To me, that’s a key element to much of the horror fiction I enjoy—the questions that keep readers coming back to a piece, especially the ones that might make them see it a little differently the next time they read it.
I’m good at this, and I can—just barely—make a living doing this. Now, I try to do it very well, as well as I can do it. There’s no point doing anything unless you bring your best to the effort, and I care very deeply about literature. So, I’m not cranking out crap for a paycheck. I’m bashing my head against a keyboard for a paycheck. I’m scraping out my brain and soul for a paycheck, and I don’t care who finds that analogy overwrought or melodramatic.
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This issue's cover art by
Joelee Creative / Adobe Stock.
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