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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.
Welcome to issue 103 of Nightmare! I don’t set out to create a theme for each issue, but as I read submissions and compare new pieces to stories I’ve bought along the way, I find that stories tend to have a distinct “taste” that compels me to group them together. Sometimes I’m not even sure what that flavor is until I’ve put together the issue and sat down at my desk to write the editorial—and then the flavor leaps out at me, as obvious as the blood on a murderer’s hands.
I wrote the first draft of this story in Clarion West in 2017. Each week at the workshop I challenged myself to write something I’ve never tried before. “Family in the Adit” was my week five story and I wanted to try my hand at horror because I had never successfully written a terror and gore story before. I don’t remember exactly what the inspiration was for using a dinner party as the basis for the story, but I remember latching onto the idea because I could use the meal courses as natural section breaks.
Our reviewer checked out the movie Hunter Hunter. Would he recommend it? You’ll have to read to find out!
I really enjoyed your play on Marie Kondo and the sometimes predatory, sometimes powerful nature of “self-help” material. What drew you to the subject? Thank you! Even as someone who doesn’t follow the self-help world, I was aware of that question to ask about your possessions: “Does it bring you joy?” It’s a pithy question […]
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