Nightmare Magazine

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Nightmare Magazine, Issue 163 (April 2026)

On offer this month: Original short fiction from A.C. Wise (“The Final Girl Trap”) and Avi Burton (“We Are All in The Same Boat”). Our Horror Lab originals include flash fiction (“The Spiders You Swallow in Your Sleep”) from Wendy Nikel and a poem (“graveyard of butterflies”) from Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe. We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, and a feature interview with Dan Coxon.

Cover art by Joe Therasakdhi / Adobe Stock

Nightmare Magazine, Issue 163 (April 2026)

Editorial

Editorial: April 2026

by Wendy N. Wagner

We firmly believe that dark fiction is a bulwark against the forces of the world eager to reduce our human experience to dollars and cents. Horror, dark fantasy, and all kinds of weird and bizarre literature is powerful nutrition for the creative soul.

Fiction

The Final Girl Trap

by A.C. Wise

Author spotlight

You can know something is a trap and walk right into it anyway. There’s a vicious kind of glee in the snap of steel jaws springing closed, biting through skin and splintering bone. You can think aha, I knew it as you swallow the pain.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: A.C. Wise

by Clay Vermulm

I think there’s definitely something to the cyclical nature of trope and subversion within storytelling, whether it’s in horror, comedy, romance, or any other genre. The saying goes that there are no new stories under the sun, but there’s always a new way to tell them.

Fiction

The Spiders You Swallow in Your Sleep

by Wendy Nikel

The image flashes only briefly on the television screen, but that’s all it takes. In that millisecond before Libby squeezes her eyes shut, the spiders are already at work in her mind, weaving sticky new synaptic bridges. They twist and shape the unlikely connections.

Nonfiction

The H Word: Why Do We Like the Weird?

by RSL

I, like many of us, am always scared. A friend of mine once asked me why. And the first thing that came to my head was to show him Junji Ito’s “The Enigma of Amigara Fault.”

Fiction

We Are All in the Same Boat

by Avi Burton

Author spotlight

We pull in the first wrong thing at two a.m., under a choppy wind and reddening moon. It’s not discovered until two fifty-five a.m, after the great nets have been poured through the processing machines and seas of pelagic fish spill over the lip of the conveyor belt. It’s an apprentice who spots it.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Avi Burton

by Devin Marcus

The big thing is that fish are gross. They are slimy and weird and I hate their creepy eyeballs. They scare me and I think they should scare you, too.

Poetry

graveyard of butterflies

by Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe

in my vision, I taste happiness. I watch the sun’s dance & listen to the music of laughter. I run through a garden & somehow, I am a child again, trying to catch butterflies but they keep slipping through my fingers; like happiness, like love, like everything else I chase.

Nonfiction

Interview: Dan Coxon

by Alex Puncekar

Dan Coxon has won a World Fantasy Award (Heartwood: A Mythago Wood Anthology), a Saboteur Award (Being Dad) and two British Fantasy Awards (Writing the Uncanny and Writing the Future, both co-edited with Richard V. Hirst). He has been shortlisted for the British Fantasy Awards a total of eight times, and was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Awards.