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Fashion is, and always has been, about expression; what you wear can send a message about who you are. For entertainment like film and television, it’s a way to explain to the audience who your characters are immediately and without subterfuge. It’s the “show, not tell” of characterization and this is especially true for films in the horror genre.
None of us are free agents—every last one of us is bound at some point, or many points, in a social web that can be as sticky and as unbudging as any spider’s. The stories in this issue are about these bonds—bonds we choose, bonds we outgrow, bonds we are forced into.
I wrote this story over Christmas at my childhood home. The house is from the 1800s and has the type of basement that you can’t bear to spend more than a few seconds in. When I was little, if I had to get something from the basement, I would run down the stairs holding my breath and try to make it back up the stairs before I had to breathe again.
This month Adam-Troy Castro dives into two upcoming novels—one by horror legend Robert McCammon (Leviathan, the final volume in his Matthew Corbett series), one by legend-in-the-making Clay McLeod Chapman (Wake Up and Open Your Eyes). Find out why you’ll want to read ’em!
I’ve lost a large number of people in my life: my wife, a child, both parents, a brother, a succession of close friends. When you get to be my age the losses come sometimes at an alarming rate. I recently turned seventy-four, with some health issues of my own, so mortality is a very real issue.
You are seven. Perhaps nine, or even thirteen. In the earliest hours of a sleepless night-turned-morning, a figure you cannot see (but you can feel, their very existence heavy on your skin and you do not have to see, your bones howl that you are not alone) leans low, low, low over your bed.
I’ll never stop believing that being scared (while doing something as safe as reading in a comfortable chair or watching a movie on a good couch) is absolutely restorative. Not everyone liked Longlegs or Late Night with the Devil, but after I saw those movies, I felt better about the world.
With a story like Amelia’s, the lack of a coherent explanation is the nightmare fuel. I promise you that even if readers don’t concoct something specific, they nevertheless feel the shape of an explanation too terrible to be borne. This tends to work better in horror than in science fiction.
Nino Cipri is a queer and trans/nonbinary writer, editor, and educator. A graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop and University of Kansas’s MFA program, Nino’s fiction has been nominated for the Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy, Lambda, Nebula, and Hugo Awards.
I like princesses, but I love them even more in their depraved and murderous states. I just really wanted to write in the perspective of a gross princess character, and I wanted her to be unapologetically messy.
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