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Welcome to issue 105 of Nightmare, and welcome to summer! Summer is the perfect time to strip off some layers—to risk revealing a bit more than you might in winter’s chill. When we first take off our sweaters and long-sleeved tees, our skin is pale and tender, like a grub exposed from its rocky shelter. Thin and pasty, it chaps quickly in the breeze. Our hearts quiver at the new sensations on our delicate flesh.
We have a mink, numerous house cats, hawks, coyotes, foxes, and owls as regular visitors on our thoroughly suburban (but adequately wooded, apparently) property, so I find pieces of dead animals on the reg. It’s not always unsettling . . . but it usually is.
There’s something big in the horror field going on in Pittsburgh that few fans of the genre are aware of, but should be: the University of Pittsburgh has set out to create the world’s largest special collection of material related to the genre. As overseen by librarian Benjamin Rubin and visiting researcher/film professor Adam Hart, the archive started with the acquisition of George A. Romero’s collection of materials related to his career; now, Ben and Adam hope to expand beyond Romero.
A lot of the markers of what publishing as a whole considers to be “agency” feel utterly unrealistic to me—making decisions without any real fear of consequences. Navigating each new situation with a plan and from a place of supreme confidence; being able to react in a “smart” fashion to completely foreign—and dangerous—circumstances as if you yourself grasped the levers of power. And there is very little tolerance for depicting the effects of trauma in anything more than an aesthetic sense.
Those four words alone establish a tone and a structure. They are completely open ended but so familiar that even a deviation from the form would seem played out to you. We know that the next two words will name a place, whether it’s a bar or a saloon or a fishmonger, we know it’s […]
Sometimes you need to feel bad. Really bad. Like, you just broke up with your significant other (who took your pets and the coffee maker), and now you have to put on The Cure’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me and cry on your bedroom floor. Because sometimes the only way to feel better is to feel a whole lot worse. If you’ve ever been there—and I imagine most of us have—then you know what I mean.
I love how second person creates an atmosphere of clinical detachment, a numbing, chilly distance between story and reader. Readers are constantly being told that they are this character doing, thinking, and feeling these things, when they know damn well they aren’t. This creates a cognitive dissonance that I find suits weird horror quite well. If a story I’m writing deals with distance or alienation of some kind, I might decide to use second person right from the beginning.
This month, Terence Taylor reviews two works that tap in our era’s mixed feelings about science: new novel Bela Lugosi’s Dead (by Robert Guffey) and the serialized story Spider King, by Justin C. Key. If you ever wanted to be a mad scientist, these reads are for you!
I wrote several stories set on Kauai, and I tried to make sure that none of them was about Hawaiian culture, but more about the aspects I was comfortable exploring—namely tourism, misunderstanding, things you can encounter anywhere. I suppose the horror here emerges once things have run out of control, when no one but the reader has all the pieces available to see the big picture. There’s no familiar supernatural agency at work, no Hawaiian deities or Kahuna magic, just an idle prank, a bit of creative tomfoolery. Lots of things start this way.
As a kid, I found my mother’s childhood home both exhilarating and terrifying. Mysterious humps bulged beneath the kitchen tile. Doors along the shotgun hallway opened reluctantly or not at all. My grandmother’s mirrored closet reflected her skirt suits, floral scarves, and Sunday hats in a strange, bluish light. But nothing delighted me more than the room at the shotgun’s barrel, where my youngest aunt, Eunice, had slept as a girl. This room, my mother said, had been haunted once.
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