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Once you reach a certain point in your friendship, Horror grows up and becomes a teenager. It’s no longer the BFF you spent the night with, eating cereal and reading comic books. It’s a young adult with grand ideas, mostly about itself. “I’m a statement about our society,” it explains, breaking your heart. “People watch me because I help exorcise their fears.”
Here in Oregon, we’re facing a statewide drought, and authorities are already concerned about the potential of violent clashes over water rights. Homicide has hit levels not seen in Portland for twenty-five years. And the elastic in my favorite running shorts is starting to give out. But enough about the bad stuff! Is horror literature smoking hot this year, or what?!?
Ali is a rich, intricate character, shadowed by Eleanor—the woman she was and the woman she wasn’t. What was it like writing your way into the head of a changeling and skinwalker, someone who can change her appearance yet still wants to be unseen? Truthfully, I didn’t think of her in any of those ways. […]
This month, Adam-Troy Castro reviews Stephen King’s latest book (Later) and Sarah Gailey’s new novel, The Echo Wife.
In fiction and true crime, it seems so easy to spot the difference between a right and wrong choice. But in real life, in the moment, things are murky. I have an obsession with those urban legend type stories where women subtly rescue other women from bad situations based on the tiniest detail they noticed, like pretending to be best friends to help a stranger get away from a creepy guy. The stories are usually told with this secret-sisterhood bent.
The standard formula for a slasher movie is to find something the culture takes for granted, and then have a killer rampage through it. The iconic slashers find something we rely on and take it away from us. John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) is about the idyllic suburbs and holiday festivities becoming a playground for a masked killer. Friday the 13th (1980) effectively ruined camping for a generation by putting a dangerous stranger in the woods.
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.
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