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We have original short fiction from Ozzie M. Gartrell (“The Seconds Between Light and Sound”) and Neal Auch (“and its place remembers it no more”). Our Horror Lab originals include a poem (“Bog Girls”) from Maureen O’Leary and a flash story (“They Say”) from Matt Dovey. We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, and a media review from Adam-Troy Castro.
Cover art by jdrv / Adobe Stock Image
One of the things I love best about my life is that I get to be a part of the amazing, weird, and wonderful horror community. The horror community is a place for fans of all kinds—from folks who enjoy watching the occasional Netflix release all the way through people who obsessively collect and comment on special issues of whatever medium or merch calls their name. Every horror creator I’ve met has been a fan of the genre in some way, shape, or form.
The drums sound at first light but you are already awake. Today is the day you will finally meet the Goddess. She’ll either embrace you, ripping you apart and reforming you into a being of magic and flame, as mercurial as the sea, or She’ll withhold her blessing and never again will you walk upon land. You take a breath and hold the humid, tropical air deep in your lungs before releasing it and dressing in your ceremonial leathers. You knot the leather straps around your chest, replicating the geometric patterns favored by your beloved cousin, Sindr. The one who disappeared.
This is one of the worlds I’ve spent numerous years crafting. I love worldbuilding and I wanted to create an intricate world where many different types of stories could reside. As a kid, I loved Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis’ Dragonlance universe, I loved the Forgotten Realms universe. Each time I read a new book set in those worlds, I knew I wanted to write something like that. I wanted a versatile world where the adventures that take place there could range from dark to lighthearted, from epic high fantasy to adrenaline-pumping sword and sorcery.
I was inspired to write this poem after a day of birdwatching at the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge with my husband and oldest daughter. As a fan of Karen Russell’s short fiction, I love her story “The Bog Girl.” Though this poem is not about that story, I am intrigued by the idea of being preserved by the natural world to be observed and wondered about after death.
This is a story about fear that begins with its absence. Are there people who truly don’t get scared, and what can they teach us about horror? I’m not talking about the sweaty bravado of “Us wasn’t that scary.” I’m talking about having a gun jammed into your temple and not feeling the adrenaline spill into your blood. Such people are rare. They probably don’t read Nightmare, or Clive Barker, or Koji Suzuki (although they still should), but they do exist.
Centuries of war, conquest, and foreign invasion have drawn and redrawn the map of Argia countless times, leaving the country’s boundaries ambiguous and ill-defined. It was in the summer of his fortieth year that Franz Sieber found himself in that contested region, escorted by a small team of mercenaries, guides, and translators. He had come in search of flowers. According to local legend, the outskirts of Argia were home to the Hyacinthus mercedes—a rare breed whose pollen plays a crucial role in the manufacture of certain microchips.
At the heart of this story there’s a connection between flesh and flowers, which is an explicitly biblical notion. Indeed, the title of the piece comes directly from Psalm 106: “As for man, his days are like grass—he blooms like a flower of the field; when the wind passes over, it vanishes, and its place remembers it no more.” This same connection between flowers and mortality reappears in the floral still life arrangements of the Dutch Golden Age, which have been hugely influential on me as an artist.
The first draft of this came out of my head in November 2016, for obvious contemporaneous reasons. As is often the way of stories, though, it took a while before I realised what I was really telling myself in the writing. I’ve been on a journey of self-acceptance for my neurodivergence these last couple of years, and part of that is trying to break myself of the cringing need for everyone to love and understand me: to learn, instead, that if I am to love myself, my true self, I have to accept that I will never be able to prove myself to some people.
You can reduce the vampire to a snarling beast who slits throats, but—the energy invested in any fresh iteration aside—the trope is much more interesting in terms of control; sometimes driven by outright mind control, and sometimes in more subtle terms, such as the seductive voice whispering blandishments that the given victim cannot resist. This time out we have two vampire stories (Night’s Edge, a novel by Liz Kerin, and Renfield, a film) about co-dependent, toxic relationships, as poisoned by love as they are by supernatural power.
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