Welcome to issue #158 of Nightmare Magazine! It’s November, so that means it’s once again time for our Dark Fantasy issue.

I have lost count of the number of discussions I’ve had about what the difference between horror and dark fantasy might be. Plenty of people have very crisp definitions and think applying them helps them better understand dark fiction. Me? I have a tougher time every year. I’m inclined to say that dark fantasy is the stuff that when you finish, you care more about what couldn’t be explained than the parts that were trying to make you feel uneasy, tense, despairing, grossed out, or downright scared. Can a vampire story be a dark fantasy? Absolutely! Can a slasher story be a dark fantasy? I don’t know! There are certainly some fantasy elements to a lot of slasher stories (there’s definitely some weird magic going on with Michael Myers), but they usually leave less of an impact than the gruesome kills, suspenseful moments, and thrilling scares.

I think the work in this month’s issue will leave you musing about the inexplicable more than feeling terrified. While there are plenty of gross moments in both of our short stories—James L. Sutter’s story “Make of Your Chest a Place for Birds” takes its titles quite literally, with all the bird emissions and bugs you might expect, and “Bleed For Me, Bro,” by Sharang Biswas is about a romance within a very un-squeamish magic-using BDSM community—they are also both works more grounded in love and wonder than in fear. Some people might argue that Erica Ruppert’s flash story “Primordium,” a grim meditation on murder and vengeance, is more of a horror piece than a dark fantasy tale, but I really appreciated its message about the healing power of community—and I thought its mechanism had the vibe of a fairy tale. You might not agree!

Our poem this month is Betsy Aoki’s “Futakuchi onna speaks of the Kamaitachi,” an unsettling work about unpleasant beings from Japanese folklore. Over at the H Word, Nigerian writer Samuel Peters writes about the eeriness of forests. And Lisa Morton returns to share her expertise on ghost hunting fiction—you don’t want to miss her book and story recommendations! We also have spotlight interviews with our wonderful short fiction writers.

I hope this issue whisks you into the realm of the darkly fantastic. No matter how you define dark fantasy, I think we can all agree that it’s a delicious kind of magic.