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Death is a business. Some of the highest grossing podcasts are dedicated to covering true crime, and those podcasts are downloaded millions of times each month, and often rank in best of year lists. There are even true crime specific podcast categories that make it easy to select from which hosts, topic, and murder you would like to listen to during your morning’s commute, or as you prepare dinner for your children.
I spend a good chunk of time every day outside alone or with only my dog, and I like it a lot. When I’m in the garden or taking a run, I feel completely absorbed in the world, connected to the creatures I see and the plants I’m near. I never feel lonely when I’m out in nature. The same cannot be said for the time I spend with other people. There are times when a person can be surrounded by friends and still feel deeply, deeply lonely.
I think the idea of messing with the perception of time grew out of the realization of just how often gialli are reliant on memory; specifically, the protagonist struggling to remember some small detail they’ve seen that will somehow make the solution click into place. So, while they’re a detective story, the solution is often already there inside their head, they’re just trying to find a way to make it come into focus.
Zin E. Rocklyn is a contributor to Bram Stoker-nominated and This is Horror Award-winning Nox Pareidolia, KaijuRising II: Reign of Monsters, Brigands: A Blackguards Anthology, and Forever Vacancy anthologies and Weird Luck Tales No. 7 zine. Their story “Summer Skin” in the Bram Stoker-nominated anthology Sycorax’s Daughters received an honorable mention for Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year, Volume Ten. Zin contributed the nonfiction essay […]
This was one of those stories that I only had a title and a first line, and then just kind of went for it. But really, I think the beating heart under it all is that childhood is ripe with horror. Kids experience the world on a smaller, more intense scale. They never doubt that there are monsters. I wanted to give that intensity a physical presence and put it in the framework of a semi-rural childhood I was familiar with. I spent a lot of time riding around my neighborhood with a pack of other kids.
The urgency that pushed many of us into quarantine last March has dissipated considerably. Still, it’s not hard to recall the surge of panic we felt at the unprecedented panic buying and orders to shelter in place. “It’s like the plot of Contagion,” our friends on social media exclaimed. And indeed, despite the spring of 2020 unfolding like nothing any of us had ever experienced, there was something about the start of the pandemic that felt eerily familiar.
To be alive is to be constantly confronted by loss, and a large measure of who we are stems from our responses to it. When you’ve lost something you care about, how do you respond? How do you keep loss from hollowing you into a shell? Do you let it make you mean? Do you turn hard, or do you crumble and find yourself adrift? Do you count your scars, and if you do, do you revel in them or do you gently massage vitamin E into their silvery tissues? This month’s issue features four very different snapshots of loss and human response to it.
The polar ice has been used throughout literature as something of a liminal space, where the veils between this world and death, or the supernatural, have grown thin—it’s very memorably portrayed in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Captain of the Polestar” as a place of supernatural encounters. I wanted to play with that a little by injecting a more cosmic horror, so the “thinness” is between our Earth and something lying far beyond.
This month, Terence Taylor digs into works that explore the theme of communication: a new novel, Smithy, from Amanda Desiree, and a nonfiction book, The Madman’s Library, by Edward Brooke-Hitching.
I want to believe in ghosts more than I actually do believe. Of course, I want to do lots of things more that I actually do them, so maybe that says something about me? My dad grew up in rural North Carolina, and so I grew up hearing a lot of ghost stories from him. All of them, of course, were “true.” As a testament to his gift as a storyteller, even now I don’t know which were actually true.
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