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We have original fiction from Cadwell Turnbull (“Loneliness is in Your Blood”) and Carrie Vaughn (“Redcap”), along with reprints by Lilliam Rivera (“The H8te”) and Ashok Banker (“Blood Mangoes”). In our nonfiction department, author Kat Howard talks about the terror of changelings in the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word.” Plus we have author spotlights with our authors and a feature interview with Mira Grant.
Cover art by annamei / Adobe Stock
Be sure to read the Editorial for a run-down of this month’s terrifying content and to get all our latest news.
This is how you live forever. You cup your fingers under your chin, dig your nails into the soft meat and peel your skin away. First up and over your head, letting it fall on your back like a hood, and then sliding your fingers beneath the skin on your clavicle and slipping the lifted layers of tissue over the curve of your shoulders. You squirm and shimmy and writhe, curling your skin away from the sticky braids of muscle on your arms, your ribs, your stomach, your hips, your thighs. You let the wet membrane fall in a heap, stepping out of it like clothes.
I grew up in the Caribbean. My family is from the Caribbean. It is home for me. It will always feel like home. I find that even in memory I know it more intimately than anywhere else I’ve been. I’m also just really interested in the Caribbean as a place: its complicated relationship with colonialism, its unique relationship with race, its particular prejudices, its variation. I mostly write about the Virgin Islands because it is what I know, but I have family from all over the Caribbean, so I feel connected to those places as well. When I write about other places, I often bring that Caribbean perspective to those locales.
I give the chain attached to the radiator in her bedroom another tug. There’s enough slack for her to move about the room but not enough for her to get out. Her breath stinks like spoiled milk, so I inhale through my mouth. I try my best not to look directly at her face because if I do I won’t be able to go through with it. There are two thick layers of aluminum foil and garbage bags covering her bedroom windows. To secure the layers tight, I nail the quilt from off my bed to the wall. This has to work. Tomorrow I go back to school.
I remember reading a newspaper article when I was young about a family who chained their daughter to the radiator because they believed she was possessed. The story stayed with me all those years and I tried to imagine what that would be like if the roles were reversed, if a teenager had to do that to their parents. What types of choices would that young person have to make when their parents are no longer able to parent?
When writing horror stories, fairies may not be the first thing that comes to mind. Fairies are perhaps more associated with the idea of fairy tales, with the strong connotation of a happy ending. But just as fairy tales have their elements of horror—even Cinderella has stepsisters who cut off parts of their own feet to fit them in the glass slipper, whose eyes are plucked out by doves at the wedding—fairies as a part of the supernatural have their own tradition of horror, too.
Three poor sisters lived in a cottage at the edge of a wild place. The elder, Rose and Lily, started each day in a furious bustle, storming around the kitchen before dawn preparing for the day, frying bread for breakfast, slicing cheese for lunch, scrubbing the table, which was already clean, and pestering the youngest, Violet, about her chores. Had she collected the eggs yet, had she milked the cow, had she made sure the iron and rowan were still above all the doors to protect them from the Fair Folk so the hens would keep laying and the cow keep giving milk?
It sounds like you got from the story exactly what I was trying to evoke! I think the story has several creative roots, but one of the main ones is thinking about what the cap of a Redcap would actually be like. They’re often illustrated with bright red caps, naturally. But if they’re really, actually, dipping their caps in blood as the stories say they do, the cap wouldn’t be red at all. It would be dark, brownish, sticky, dripping, possibly covered in flies, and very stinky. So I wanted to write a story about that. And the fear that the really old fairy stories reference.
The minute Shanti saw the dead fruit seller, she knew her prayers had been answered. She had been praying for this particular miracle all her short life. She had even done the unthinkable on her eighth birthday last month. Despite all the taboos drilled into her since she was old enough to go to temple, she had dared to prostrate herself before the dark goddess, the one whose name Maa had warned her never to speak aloud. The one whose effigy was kept in a separate altar, behind the main temple. Shanti had left her pallet at night, crawling past her six siblings, parents, grandparents and uncle.
To be human is to be afraid constantly, if not for yourself at that moment, then for someone you care about deeply. Anyone who’s been a parent, or even a pet owner, or a caregiver, knows constant anxiety. Only the very naive, young and lavishly entitled—or hardcore addicts—live without fear. The most effective horror story captures this sense of constant dread, the anxieties of everyday living, the fear of being victimized by a changing political situation, of being run over while crossing the street, losing a loved one to a terrorist attack or natural disaster.
Since her first novel Rosemary and Rue was published in 2009, Seanan McGuire has written scores of short stories, non-fiction essays, songs, and nearly two-dozen novels . . . and that’s just under her own name. As Mira Grant, she has written the popular Newsflesh and Parasitology series, which include more medical horror than the works attributed to Seanan McGuire. A fan of both science and folklore, Seanan’s books include ten volumes in the October Daye urban fantasy series, the Incryptid series (which explores cryptozoology), the Wayward Children series from Tor, and the Velveteen Vs. superhero stories.
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