Advertisement
We have original short fiction from R.A. Busby (“Ten Thousand Crawling Children”) and Andrew Snover (“The Forgetter”). Our Horror Lab originals include a creative essay (“Chase Scene”) from Megan Kiekel Anderson and a poem (“In Our Bodies, There Is Heat”) from Somto Ihezue. Kelsea Yu pens the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus we have author spotlights with our authors, and a feature interview with author V. Castro.
Cover art by Fran_Kie / Shutterstock Stock Image
Welcome to another year celebrating horror and dark fantasy fiction! We’re excited to scare, unsettle, nauseate, amuse, and depress you—because we believe in the power of horror to do all of those things. It’s truly a genre for everyone and every palate, the perfect realm to explore all the complicated, dark facets of the human condition.
Pregnancy is an infestation. A hidden invasion. An invisible operative sneaks inside you, planting a package of foreign genetic material and forcing you to replicate it trillions of times. Soon, your hostage cell floats down your fallopian tube to the womb to feed on the blood-bed of your uterine lining like a vicious little tick.
The other part was the frustration many of us feel if we’re able to become pregnant and our period is late, or we’re trying not to get pregnant for whatever reasons—that frustration of having no certainty about your very own body, no way to tell what’s going on in there, and that at any time, that bodily autonomy can be taken away from you.
I’ve been marathoning classic horror movies with my teenage daughter. Talking with her about how we both came to love the genre set off a rumination on the impact of a childhood of horror.
She might have siblings, cruel or kind, and a neglectful father wooed by the most wicked of stepmothers. Perhaps she’s a princess stuck in a castle, her father the king. Maybe she has jealous stepsiblings or a host of suitors ready to swoop in as soon as she’s of marriageable age. What she doesn’t have is a mother to keep her safe.
I work in a tall brick room with peaked cathedral ceilings. At one end of the room there is a brick-lined chute, chimneylike, that opens up out of the ceiling seventy-five or a hundred feet above a yawning pit in the floor. Every so often, without much warning, a body will fall from the chute and tumble through the air.
To live in the world today means accepting horrors as a matter of course, and the narrator certainly does that. I wanted it to read as if it’s all a big metaphor for something, but leave the something mysterious. That’s often how dreams feel to me, and sometimes the world feels that way too.
I was inspired by my body, and bodies in general. What it means for a body to exist in spaces that find it unworthy, unholy. And how sometimes, we also have to carry our ancestry, our birthplace, in these very bodies. So we have bodies weighted with history and ancestry, but still found sacrilegious. How does one reconcile that?
V. Castro is a two-time Bram Stoker Award-nominated Mexican American writer from San Antonio, Texas now residing in the UK. She writes horror, erotic horror, and science fiction. Her books include The Haunting of Alejandra, Alien: Vasquez, Mestiza Blood, The Queen of the Cicadas, Out of Aztlan, Las Posadas, and Goddess of Filth.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement