Welcome to issue twenty-one of Nightmare!

Some good news to report this month on the awards front: “57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides” by Sam J. Miller (Nightmare, December 2013) has been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award! The winners will be announced at Readercon in Burlington, MA on July 13, 2014. You can learn more about the award and see the full list of nominees (which includes a story from our sister-magazine, Lightspeed), at shirleyjacksonawards.org. Congratulations to Sam and to all of the other finalists!

In other awards news, the Nebula Awards were presented in mid-May by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Lightspeed had four nominees this year: two finalists in the short story category and two in novelette. That of course meant that everyone knew going into it that—barring any ties—Lightspeed was going to lose at least twice. Overachievers that they are, they managed to lose all four! That makes Lightspeed 0-for-11 in the Nebulas all-time. But truly, it is an honor to be nominated, and hey—eleven Nebula nominations in just four years is not too shabby!

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Speaking of Lightspeed, this month marks the publication of its special, double-sized fourth anniversary issue—the guest-edited, crowdfunded phenomenon: Women Destroy Science Fiction! It was a project so monumental that it spawned two other special issues—Women Destroy Fantasy! and Women Destroy Horror! You’ll have to wait until October for those two specials, but Women Destroy Science Fiction! is available now—in both ebook and print formats! To learn more about the issue, or to order it, visit lightspeedmagazine.com/wdsf.

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In other news, my anthology Dead Man’s Hand came out last month, but it’s still so new it still has that new anthology smell! It’s full of weird-western goodness, and it has a great lineup, featuring all-new, never-before-published stories by Kelley Armstrong, Seanan McGuire, Elizabeth Bear, Alastair Reynolds, Jonathan Maberry, Joe R. Lansdale, Tad Williams, Hugh Howey, and many more. If you’d like a sneak peek at the anthology, the complete text of Rajan Khanna’s story, “Second Hand,” appears in Lightspeed’s May issue. Additionally, Fred Van Lente’s story in the May Lightspeed (“Willful Weapon”) takes place in the same world as his Dead Man’s Hand story, “Neversleeps.” Plus there’s a bunch of “free reads”—and additional information about the book—available at johnjosephadams.com/dead-mans-hand.

Speaking of my anthologies, The End is Nigh, volume one of The Apocalypse Triptych, came out in March, but it was exclusive on Kindle for 90 days so we could take advantage of the Kindle Select program. If you’re a non-Kindle ebook reader, then we have some good news for you: Sometime in June, The End is Nigh should become available in other ebook marketplaces, like Nook, iBooks, Kobo, etc. To help celebrate that, we’re reprinting one of the stories from the anthology here in Nightmare—the one that seemed to be the consensus pick for creepiest damn thing in the book, “Spores” by Seanan McGuire.

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With our announcements out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month:

We have original fiction from Łukasz Orbitowski (“Don’t Go”) and H.L. Nelson (“Dirtman”), along with reprints Michael Cisco (“Machines of Concrete Light and Dark ”) and the aforementioned Seanan McGuire story, “Spores.”

We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview with Mark Morris.

That’s about all I have for you this month. Thanks for reading!