Welcome to Issue #148 of Nightmare Magazine!
January always begins with calls to make changes in our lives, to improve our situations, our routines, our bodies. It’s impossible to escape the dull roar of self-improvement and forced positivity, but no matter how loud those voices might become, we all know that making real, measurable changes is no easy thing. Change isn’t a matter of willpower, not really. Most of us are very tightly locked into the structure of our lives by our past choices and our current circumstances. None of us are free agents—every last one of us is bound at some point, or many points, in a social web that can be as sticky and as unbudging as any spider’s.
The stories in this issue are about these bonds—bonds we choose, bonds we outgrow, bonds we are forced into. And they’re about the awful things that happen to people who are so trapped by their bonds that they are forced to take drastic measures to change their lives.
We start the issue with an original short story from Katharine Tyndall: “The Morning Room.” The narrator of this tale lives in a wonderful house with a morning room perfect for working from home. But when she and her wife begin to argue about the strange smells coming out of the room’s trapdoor, the narrator finds herself more and more miserable. Leyla Hamedi’s story “Karabasan” starts a bit more dramatically when the narrator meets the man her father has arranged for her to marry. To be herself, this woman must escape the bonds of both marriage and family . . . through supernatural bondage. In the Horror Lab, Osahon Ize-Iyamu brings us a lighter take on social bonds in his flash story “They Bought a House” (both ghosts and difficult neighbors are involved), and Anuel Rodriguez contemplates the painful loss of a loved one in his beautiful poem “Annihilation of Red.”
Our nonfiction this month includes an interview with Toby Poser, an independent filmmaker creating horror films with her family. We continue our discussion of film with Jamie Zaccaria’s essay for “The H Word” column, which explores the costuming of Final Girls in horror movies. We also have spotlight interviews with our short fiction writers.
It’s a terrific issue, and we’re beyond grateful that you are joining us for another year of dark fiction. We here at Nightmare know that this month marks a transformational shift in power and policy that begins in the United States, but will certainly affect the entire globe. No matter where you live, we will all be forced to see how tightly we are bound together by the forces of economics, international law, and the ecological systems that allow us to live on this beautiful blue and green marble hurtling through space. I hope these bonds do not turn to bondage, these ties to garrotes.
I hope.
