Welcome to issue #157 of Nightmare Magazine. We turn thirteen this October, which seems like a pretty significant number in our genre. Good luck? Bad luck? I guess we’ll find out!

We always try to pull out the stops in our birthday issues, and this year is no different. There’s no real theme this month—although regret and reparation loom large—but every single piece is out to squeeze your heart or slap you across the face.

Or both.

We kick off the month with brand-new fiction from Sam J. Miller: “Courtney Lovecraft’s Book of the Dead,” where America’s greatest drag queen-turned-medium shares a lesson we all need to hear. Osahon Ize-Iyamu has penned a tale of self-hatred and self-love in his new short “Body? Glass,” and Aimee Ogden serves up an equally bloody flash story about hating yourself in “The Versions of Yourself That You’re Better Off Without.” We wrap up the creative work with “Stillborn,” a powerful ecological poem by Shantell Powell.

Our nonfiction might all be short, but it punches above its weight class, especially our powerful new essay from Beatrice Winifred Iker: “The H Word: Horror Needs Hoodoo.” Alex Puncekar sat down with up-and-coming new author Carson Faust to discuss their approach to horror writing, and of course our author spotlight interview team quizzed our short story writers about their projects, too.

Actually, you might notice a theme connecting this month’s writers: Not only are all of them talented and terrifying, they have found that their identities and their communities provide a profound source of meaning and inspiration. When they are creating, they are creating from their very fullest selves. And horror needs these rich, full voices because we live in a diverse, challenging world with many incredible ways to be terrified.

Let’s celebrate each different, amazing scare, and let’s make the world a place where each and every creator is as free to create from their heart as the writers in this issue have been. Because horror is for everyone—and so is Nightmare Magazine.

Here’s to another thirteen years!