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Nov. 2023 (Issue 134)

It’s our first-ever all dark fantasy issue! Check out original short fiction from Sharang Biswas (“Waiting for Jonah”) and Woody Dismukes (“The Curse of the Boto Boy”). Our Horror Lab originals include a poem (“Awakening”) from Tiffany Morris and a flash story (“Whatever Takes Us”) from Aigner Loren Wilson. We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors. Also, find out why critically acclaimed editor and author Shane Hawk loves Stephen Graham Jones’s The Babysitter Lives, a novella originally released only in audio.

Cover art by Dark Illusion / Adobe Stock Images

Nov. 2023 (Issue 134)

Editorial

Editorial: November 2023

by Wendy N. Wagner

November inspires me to bring out the fuzzy blankets and all my favorite comfort reads, like the fantasy novels that inspired me to get into writing in the first place (Pamela Dean and Charles L. Grant, I am looking at you). Which is why I’m extremely glad that way, way back in the spring, I decided to make November our first-ever all dark fantasy issue.

Fiction

Waiting for Jonah

by Sharang Biswas

Author spotlight

Once upon a time, there was you and there was Jonah. “Jonah!” you would call out. “Jonah, it’s me! Let me in!” But he’d never let you in. Before you turned ten, the inside of Jonah’s room remained as opaque as the inside of his thoughts. And he would always, always make you wait. You’d stand there, bouncing on your toes.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Sharang Biswas

by Mayookh Barua

I was moved to write not a dark fairy tale itself, but a dark story about fairy tales. My starting point was, “what if someone became obsessed with fairy stories, what then?” This made me think about the infamous Cottingley fairies, and the attempts to discover “real” fairies. I imagined an old French woman painstakingly hunting for real magic in her life.

Poetry

Awakening

by Tiffany Morris

Fairy tales approach revenge in such interesting ways—there is often a sense of catharsis and ordering the universe in these acts, especially since they tend to appear at the story’s conclusion. I wanted to write a horror poem with a sense of ambiguity about what happened so that the focus becomes the process of self-creation through revenge.

Nonfiction

The H Word: Bartleby and the Weird

by Zachary Gillan

Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” ( bit.ly/3PIvslrgutenberg) first published in 1853, is not typically considered a work of horror. The tale of a law clerk who absents himself from his duties at work, then from the outside world, then from life itself, it presents itself as a work of realism with no gore, no horror, terror, nothing of the supernatural or the monstrous about it.

Fiction

The Curse of the Boto Boy

by Woody Dismukes

Author spotlight

Even before my son was born, my village had made of me a black sheep. When I was young, I would slither between the grasp of the Elders and flitter into the jungle unabated. I would storm past the hills of fire ants to leap atop the trunks of fallen trees before catching ahold of a veritable vine like some kind of red-assed macaco.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Woody Dismukes

by Dawn Davis

I’ve been meaning to write a boto story for so long—like years—but I could never really find the right entry point for it. There’s a really great Atlantic article by Sushma Subramanian called “The Dolphin Myth that Refuses to Die” that explores the origins and perpetuation of the boto myth in the Amazon. That article really got me thinking about my adoption.

Fiction

Whatever Takes Us

by Aigner Loren Wilson

I had two things in mind while writing this story: anti-trans legislature targeting trans, nonbinary, gender queer, and two-spirited people and all the moments I was bullied in the bathroom as a child for not looking girl enough. If this story can do anything beyond entertain, I hope it makes you speak up and act out against bigotry in all forms.

Nonfiction

de•crypt•ed: Hawk on Jones

by Shane Hawk

Find out why critically acclaimed editor and author Shane Hawk loves Stephen Graham Jones’s The Babysitter Lives, a novella originally released only in audio.

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