Welcome to Issue #132 of Nightmare Magazine! We’re wrapping up our eleventh year of publication, so it seems like a good time to get closure on a perennial shadow over our genre: Lovecraftiana.
H.P. Lovecraft is a hard topic for me to discuss with any clarity. I came to horror via the stalwarts of the 1980s—Stephen King, Dean Koontz (there was an “R.” in there back when I was a regular reader), and Charles L. Grant—and while I enjoyed the genre, I never delved more deeply than the shelves of my local library and my parents’s dusty volume of the collected Edgar Allan Poe. I didn’t attempt to learn more about horror’s roots and history until I started writing, and all the writing advice told me I needed a solid understanding of the genre. I started with H.P. Lovecraft for two reasons: I had seen a plush Cthulhu at my local game shop, and I’d seen flyers for the local H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival.
If you don’t live in Portland, you might not know how terrific that film festival is. It’s held in our city’s most magical movie theater, a Spanish colonial confection living up to the epithet “movie palace,” with literary and social events unfolding at the nearby library and across several bars. Independent filmmakers rub shoulders with authors. Hollywood directors do Q&As. Jeffrey Combs shows up regularly, and still takes a selfie in front of the grand marquee. There are tentacles on everything and everyone.
It’s a heady brew, and since I grew up reading current writers without knowing anything about their influences, I found myself swimming in waters that were both new and yet comfortingly familiar. And there was something for every one of my taste buds! Was I feeling enamored of the Gothic? I could read “The Rats” or “The Outsider”! If I wanted something with a dark fantasy flavor? I could enjoy the ghouls of “Pickman’s Model” or any of the stories set in the wondrous realms of the Dreamlands. And since I was obsessed with mixing science fiction with my horror, you better believe I fell hook, line, and eldritch sinker for the Cthulhu Mythos’s saga of aliens and evolution, ranging from “The Color Out of Space” to At the Mountains of Madness.
If you’re not sure that I was a Lovecraft junkie, just look at my bibliography. I have at least thirteen short works published in Lovecraftian-themed anthologies. That’s around 20% of my production! Which wouldn’t be a problem if Lovecraft wasn’t a total shitheel.
I don’t need to dig into Lovecraft’s backstory. If you don’t know that he’s a deeply racist person who let his problematic ideas bleed cruelty all over the horror genre, you’ve either been asleep for a few decades or you just started reading this stuff. His presence has hurt horror writers and fans of color, and the fact that there’s a huge swathe of literature branded with his name means his toxic legacy just keeps spreading. I even spread it myself when I reached out to some of my favorite writers and asked them for “Lovecraftian” fiction.
But as I was editing this issue, I decided I’m never using that adjective again. After all, it’s a lazy one. If I want to read Gothic work, I can ask for Gothic work. If I want to read horror that blends into a certain awe-compelling strain of science fiction, I can look for cosmic horror. And if I want to read dark fantasy about ghouls and strange dreams, I can use those very same words.
That’s not to say that I’ll stop putting the Elder Sign on my Solstice Tree or that I’ll never finish playing the video game Call of Cthulhu (well, I might never finish because it’s really hard!). And I’ll never stop going to the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival. But I will place HPL where he belongs: in history. And then I’ll work harder to magnify the new voices in our genre who are working in the tentacled or haunted textures that I love best.
So I don’t give you The Lovecraftian Issue.
I give you the Wendy’s Favorite Things Issue.
It’s packed with those classic horror flavors that drew me into the genre in the first place, and every work was written by an author I’ve loved working with here at Nightmare. Pedro Iniguez returns with a full-length short story about an invasive species from beyond the stars: “Nightmare of a Million Faces.” In her new short story “The Ascension of Magdalene,” Donyae Coles brings us an unsettling Gothic tale of gender dynamics. Ashley Deng takes us into the dark side of college life in her inventive flash story “Student Living.” And our darkly delicious poem is “A Trick of The Night’s Hunger” by Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan.
On the nonfiction front, Adam-Troy Castro reviews a new novel by Chuck Wendig, L. Marie Wood returns to the H Word to talk about why change is so terrifying, and of course our author spotlight team has delved into the psyche of our writers. It’s another fantastic issue wrestling with what makes the horror and dark fantasy genres so decadent and delightful, and we couldn’t be happier to share it with you.
Think of it as a hug from all of us to all of you—and please, don’t mind the suckers on our arms.
