Welcome to Issue #147 of Nightmare Magazine!
It’s been a pretty big year for us here at the magazine. Works from 2023, including Tiffany Morris’s poem “Awakening,” Kristina Ten’s story “The Dizzy Room,” and Rachael K. Jones’s story “The Sound of Children Screaming,” were nominated for just about every major genre fiction award, including the magazine’s first Hugo nomination. This spring, we made a huge change and began podcasting all of our fiction, flash stories, and poetry. And we struggled on in the face of Amazon’s new treatment of periodical submissions, which affected the majority of our subscribers and slashed our income.
It was also a hard year for me personally. In March, my mother died after an unpleasant series of health crises, including a stroke, and after I had become her primary caregiver. My cat died, and two other family members went through scary mental health crises that I needed to help with. All of this deeply affected my relationship with horror fiction. When we opened to fiction submissions in January 2024, I had no idea that in a few short months I would find myself unable to read stories or poems involving the topics of mothers, illness, or death—a surprisingly significant portion of the horror field. And it wasn’t simply that I would get upset reading these stories. No, my mental state was more pernicious than that. I could read these stories and enjoy them and even engage with the text, and then an hour later I couldn’t remember what I’d read. Or I would find myself unable to make decisions about what I read. For months, I could manage to read submissions one or two days of the month, and then I would just . . . shut down. I was always behind, and I dreaded going to work every day.
Yes, I had a therapist. Yes, I had staff who helped. But getting through my own personal darkness took time. It took patience and long walks in the woods, and you know what? It took horror.
Because there are plenty of stories in the realm of horror that aren’t metaphors for death or loss.
There was something so restorative about editing Gemma Files’s story “Little Horn,” with its over-the-top devil battle. Cody Goodfellow’s would-be heroic mother in the zany “Queen of the Rodeo” reminded me that moms can be full of life. Thomas Ha’s “Grottmata” might have been a tale of suffering, but it was a tale of suffering shared, and that helped connect me even more powerfully to my siblings and friends who were going through their own tough times. Erin Brown’s cosmically nasty “Butter” thrilled me and made me cheer. My work here at the magazine brought me all of that healing goodness while at the same time, other writers in the genre inspired me in new and delightful ways.
I’ll never stop believing that being scared (while doing something as safe as reading in a comfortable chair or watching a movie on a good couch) is absolutely restorative. Not everyone liked Longlegs or Late Night with the Devil, but after I saw those movies, I felt better about the world. I felt as if some place that had been hollowed out of me by stress and loss had somehow been a little bit refilled by a wonderful jolt of adrenaline. When I finished reading Paul Tremblay’s deeply unsettling novel Horror Movie, my heart was so full of those characters that my sadness was crowded into the corner, its edges softened and rendered more livable. When I got to read Paul Jessup’s tone poem of a novel Daughter of the Wormwood Star, my head spun from so much weirdness I forgot I was supposed to be unhappy.
Today, I am starting to feel better. I’m almost caught up on submissions, and I’m even okay with reading about dead cats and dying parents. I feel like I can straighten up and walk through the world without waiting for something to punch me in the gut.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been watching so many slasher movies that I’m now watching over my shoulder, ready for a knife in the back. Or maybe it’s because I’m so excited to see what the writers and human creators in this genre are going to come up with next.
What I do know is that this last issue of 2024 includes fiction that speaks to my personal journey through one monster year. Adam-Troy Castro’s latest work, “Amelia’s Story,” is the kind of wildly weird and terribly unsettling piece that saved me when I was feeling my worst. Steve Rasnic Tem’s story “Before and After” is an echo of how bad I felt when my cat died three months to the day after my mom. Tania Chen’s flash piece “Wait, Our Lord the Flayed One Comes” is bloody and bizarre, a tiny literary morsel written in the same over-the-top shades of Mandy, Panos Cosmatos’s ultra-colorful revenge flick that I finally saw this summer and which broke me open to the beauty of the world when I’d sealed myself shut against it. And “Mnemonic Burning,” the latest poem by Angela Liu, is lyrical and dark and, yes, ultimately restorative.
For nonfiction, we have author spotlight interviews, of course. In our “The H Word” column, Lora Senf writes about how her love of horror helped her defeat the boogeyman, and Adam-Troy Castro recommends some books in case you are looking for even more horror to read.
From poetry to nonfiction to this editorial, I’d say this issue is a love song to the genre and our commitment to it. I always like to say that our motto at Nightmare is that horror is for everyone. That means sometimes we publish work awards voters love, and sometimes we publish stories that speak to a very small niche audience (like Insane Clown Posse fans). Sometimes we publish extremely gruesome body horror pieces that will make all your sphincters go tight (and believe me, we’ve got one of those coming your way in a few months), and sometimes we publish classically flavored ghost stories (remember October’s “Perfect Water” by Simon Gilbert?). Maybe that means we’re too all-over-the-place to have a brand.
Or maybe it means we’re 100% committed to making a place for horror to live and grow.
I hope that in 2025 you’ll come along with us and discover what kind of horror is for you.
