Welcome to issue #163 of Nightmare Magazine. Or should I say: Salvete! That’s Latin for “welcome, y’all.”
A few years after I graduated from college, I signed up for a six-week-long Introduction to Latin class offered by the community education department at the local community college. About half of the folks in the class were there in the hopes learning Latin would give them a leg up on the vocabulary section of some kind of standardized test, and the other were either language or history lovers who thought studying a dead language would be “fun.” (I justified taking the class to do better on the GRE, a test I still haven’t taken—so I suspect I actually fell into the second camp.) While in the class, we learned a lot of basic verbs, how to sing “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” in Latin, and a handful of fun phrases that aren’t actually Latin, but are simply puns Latin language-learners enjoy. My favorite was “Semper ubi sub ubi,” which means nothing in Latin, but if you translate each word into English, translates into “Always where under where,” which is hilarious to say out loud!
This kind of dog Latin has existed for centuries, and will probably continue to bloom and grow as long as we continue to believe that saying things in Latin makes us sound smarter. Luckily for us here at Nightmare, the theme of this month’s issue is also a well-known piece of Latin doggerel: Illegitimi non carborundum. Or: DON’T LET THE BASTARDS GRIND YOU DOWN.
Yes, our fiction and poem this month are all about the forces of the world that grind us down and make us smaller. We kick off the month with a new short story by A.C. Wise: “The Final Girl Trap.” Final Girls are all about the fight to stay strong in the face of crushing forces, and this story does an amazing job exploring what that does to the inside of a Final Girl’s head. It’s a meta-horror tale that’s smart and visceral.
Avi Burton’s new story “We Are All in the Same Boat” puts us on an isolated fishing vessel with a quota to fill. What does that mean to the people on board, even when weird things begin to happen? You’ll have to read it to find out!
Our Horror Lab pieces include a flash story from Wendy Nikel (“The Spiders You Swallow in Your Sleep”) that explores the pressure cooker atmosphere of high school. Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe brings us a new poem, “graveyard of butterflies,” about what long-term depression does to a person.
RSL returns to our H Word column to discuss the ways the Weird helps us navigate a brutal world, and Alex Puncekar sat down with Dan Coxon to talk about editing short fiction and writing dark literature. We also have some great author spotlight interviews to help you dive beneath the surface of our short stories.
We are so proud of this issue and the amazing team behind it. Here at Nightmare, 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—and it’s creativity that humanity will need to move forward in a time of conflict and environmental degradation. We’re not just here to entertain you; we are here to keep the bastards from grinding you down.
