Welcome to issue #169 of Nightmare Magazine, and welcome to October! In our household, we’ve been preparing for this moment for months, planning, daydreaming, and crafting as we get ready for our annual Halloween party.

Here at Nightmare, we have also been preparing a kind of Halloween party—a literary one. We always try to pull out the stops to make our October issue extra fun, and this year, I think we’ve really succeeded. We’ve drawn work from across the spooky spectrum, bringing you tragic and disgusting work inspired by real life like Kurt Fawver’s new short story “An Unavoidable Consequence of . . . ” and Natalie Wang’s poem “There Is Blood Coming Through the Ceiling of My House.” Mari Ness has created a grisly dark fantasy flash story (“The Taker”) that will send a magical shiver up your spine. And we have “Shambling Groaning Brain-Dead Endocannibal of Exeter Street,” a short story from Ferdison Cayetano that both draws on and critiques the kind of colonial fiction Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft were writing at the beginning of the twentieth century—in a bloody and delightful way.

Our nonfiction team has knocked it out of the park with a riveting interview with weird fiction writer Michael Wehunt, as well as spotlight interviews with our short fiction writers. And in our The H Word column, author Tanya Pell talks about fifty years of changes in our understanding of the Final Girl.

It’s a veritable festival of horror, and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as we did making it!