Welcome to Issue #129 of Nightmare Magazine!

One of the things I love best about my life is that I get to be a part of the amazing, weird, and wonderful horror community. The horror community is a place for fans of all kinds—from folks who enjoy watching the occasional Netflix release all the way through people who obsessively collect and comment on special issues of whatever medium or merch calls their name. Every horror creator I’ve met has been a fan of the genre in some way, shape, or form, with most of them doubling not just as writers or filmmakers but also editors, critics, and curators. Most work in horror doesn’t just exist for itself: it also exists in order to be a part of the larger cultural project that is Horror.

I know the exact date I knew that I wanted to be not just a horror fan but also a community creator: October 3rd, 2009. Day two of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and CthulhuCon. On that beautiful, sun-bright October afternoon, I stepped into the dark lobby of the Hollywood Theater and found myself surrounded by horror lovers intent upon sharing their work, their thoughts, their favorite movies, their favorite books. The atmosphere was as intoxicating as the craft beer on tap, resonant with the CthulhuCon motto: “The only convention that understands.” I was understood! I belonged!

That wonderful feeling of belonging has helped me through a lot of tough moments in my life, as has the drive to create things for other horror fans to enjoy. Belonging is such an integral part of the human condition, and we are all hungry to belong to something larger than our own single existence. But that hunger brings with it danger. It’s easy to lose ourselves in our communities and our projects, or to overlook dangerous situations. It’s easy for hunger to turn to harm.

This month’s issue is organized around Belonging. We’ve got a beautiful dark fantasy tale of mer-pirates from Ozzie M. Gartrell (“The Seconds Between Light and Sound”) and the story of a botanical expedition gone horribly awry from Neal Auch (“and its place remembers it no more”). Maureen O’Leary takes us into Irish history with her poem “Bog Girls,” and Matt Dovey has a cautionary flash story: “They Say.”

Neurologist and horror fan (see? We have our tentacles everywhere!) Jonathan H. Smith brings us his medical expertise in his essay “The H Word: Neuroscience of Fear.” Of course our author spotlight team has interviewed our short fiction authors, and Adam-Troy Castro brings us a media and book pairing themed around vampires.

It’s been a long time since I realized I wanted to make a place for other horror lovers, and I like to think that this magazine is that place. Welcome home, friend. You belong here.

Publisher’s Note: Kindle Periodicals is Closing, and We Need Your Support More Than Ever.

Many of you have likely already heard about the new existential threat to Nightmare and all of the other digital magazines in the SF/F/H field: the impending closure, in September, of Amazon’s Kindle Periodicals program. They will be transitioning some magazines into Kindle Unlimited, and so in some respects things may continue as normal if you subscribe via Kindle Periodicals—but this shift will cut severely into the finances of any magazine currently using the service; Nightmare, for instance, will see our largest source of funding cut it in half. (For additional information about this seismic shift, you can see Neil Clarke’s deep dive into the details at neil-clarke.com/amazon-kindle-subscriptions.)

What We Can Do About This

The best thing you can do if you are a Kindle Periodicals subscriber is to migrate your subscription over to one of our other subscription options. Currently, we have the following options available:

1. Subscribe direct via our website: We have options for 6 month, 12 month, 24 month, and Lifetime subscriptions. We’re in the process of also bringing back the pay-as-you-go monthly subscriptions (i.e., the way Kindle Periodicals currently works) as well. Your issues can be delivered to your Kindle or Kindle app of choice the same way they are via Kindle Periodicals, though they’d appear on your device as regular eBooks rather than the special “periodical” format Kindle Periodicals forced us to use.
2. Subscribe via Weightless Books: Weightless Books’s subscriptions work exactly like our Direct subscriptions, though they only have 6 and 12 month options.
3. Become a Patreon patron: If you just want to support Nightmare and the other Adamant Press magazines (without getting ebooks in return), you can become one of our Patrons at Patreon. You’d be able to choose any amount that you’d like to pledge to support us, either monthly or annually.

Visit Nightmaremagazine.com/support for more info about all of the above.

Why We Need Your Support

There are no big companies supporting or funding Adamant Press’s magazines—and Adamant itself is kind of a two-person show—so the magazines really rely on reader support. Because of that, it’s vital for us to keep as many Kindle Periodicals subscribers—which is the vast majority of our subscribers are—as possible during this upheaval. So, please—if you care about the continuation of Nightmare and any other genre magazines you subscribe to, please take this to heart and help us make this transition.

Thank You for Being a Subscriber

Thanks so much for your generous support over the months or years you’ve been a subscriber. Together, we can ensure that Nightmare will continue coming to you every month for many years to come.