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Throughout its history, horror literature has frequently mediated its eponymous affect through an obsession with the act of writing. The field is replete with writer protagonists, with depictions of the writing act (through epistolary framing devices and metatextuality), and with written objects.
The narrator is driven to pursue her passion, but often our passions and the mundane need to make a living refuse to align. The termite lab is a space for dreams just fallen short. It’s close to the mark but still misses the heart.
Southern Gothic lingers impolitely in doorways. Forget theme; the genre itself is liminal, slouching somewhere between literary fiction and the h-word: lauded and discarded, high-brow and tawdry, praised and shamed. Tell about the South, right? But for all its liminality, Southern Gothic seems obsessed with physical location.
Making a horror magazine is a real labor of love, and February is the season where we celebrate all things loving and relation-full. This issue really dives into the language of the heart.
I love a haunted house story. And I always think about how if I were in a haunted house I would be like “okay, we can cohabitate in this space, there’s no need to be hostile.” So, for example, say a door weirdly pops open in my apartment, I’m always “oh, hey,” just in case someone’s there.
Johnny Compton is a Stoker Award nominated author whose short stories have appeared in Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, The No Sleep Podcast and several other publications. He is the author of The Spite House, Devils Kill Devils, and Dead First, as well as the short story collection Midnight Somewhere.
I’m interested in stories that excavate disgust and shame. I’ve always found those emotions very fascinating, to read and feel, to elicit in others through my writing. I find to go there, to write about whatever abnormal, unpleasant, secret, shameful thing, feels vulnerable and risky. I’m often very impressed by writers who do it.
The Faire gates swing wide to the tune of a jester and fairy blowing bubbles the size of beach balls. People laugh. Music drifts from every direction. Kids wave foam swords as the tantalizing smell of turkey legs and garlic mushrooms wafts through the walkway. Laughter echoes from the mud pit; a juggler drops a flaming torch and the crowd cheers as if it were intentional
In a time when most of us are surrounded by bland, corporate big box buildings and bombarded with thoughtless, empty “content,” our writers are surgically extracting their inner worlds and offering them to you, our readers, so you can have a genuine, powerful experience.
Sometimes we, as people, are hesitant to use tools of oppressors to eliminate said oppression. Often, we try to take an ethical or moral “high road” to distance ourselves from such oppressors. We don’t want to use extreme means to reach our ends, even if we truly believe those ends are noble or just.
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