Nightmare Magazine

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Nonfiction

Nonfiction

Interview: Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is not only one of the most acclaimed authors of our time—her more-than-forty novels, novellas, plays, short stories, poetry, and nonfiction works have earned her a National Book Award, two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination—but she’s also an acclaimed horror and suspense author who is a multiple winner of the Bram Stoker Award, a recipient of the World Fantasy Award, and the first female author to receive the Horror Writers Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Artist Showcase

Artists Showcase: Five Women Artists Who Are Destroying Horror Art

I love artists. They are the best kind of people. I highly recommend you take any opportunity you can to find yourself in a room full of them (preferably when they happen to have sketchbooks in hand). When I was asked if I could find a few amazing women to do the artwork for the Women Destroy Horror! issue of NIGHTMARE, I happened to be attending the Illustration Masters Class. I looked up from my laptop, glanced around the studio I was working in, and immediately emailed back “Why yes, I think I can.”

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Livia Llewellyn

would like to destroy this notion that some editors have that there seems to be a lack of women writing horror (not “dark fiction.” I mean horror. Real. Damn. Horror.), or that they’re unable to find new and different women writers to contribute to their various anthologies, which is why they can only invite the same two or three women to contribute to their anthologies…. Well, I guarantee that more than two or three women are writing horror—women all over the world are writing the fuck out of horror and knocking it out of the ballpark.

Nonfiction

The H Word: The H is for Harassment (a/k/a Horror’s Misogyny Problem)

It’s well known within the field that horror, in both movies and novels, has a long history of often (perhaps too often, some would argue) being misogynist, relying on extreme rape as a plot device. Although the victims sometimes seek revenge in a one-dimensional pursuit, more frequently it’s used to prove the masculinity of the male protagonist or to offer him a revenge motive. Other times it is simply used for shock value.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: A.R. Morlan

I used mythology in this work as a metaphor for the type of power some people have in regard to their wealth and the attributes of theirs which helped them achieve that degree of wealth and power in the first place. That level of power would, I thought, culminate in a desire to not only control, but totally dominate another living creature . . . and in this situation, I thought the ultimate show of power would be to bring down and thoroughly subdue a being (or beings) more inherently powerful than the man of power.

Editorial

Editorial, October 2014: Women Destroy Horror!

Welcome to issue twenty-five of NIGHTMARE MAGAZINE — Women Destroy Horror!, a special double issue that celebrates the women writing and editing horror. For this issue, we’ve brought on a special guest editor to run the show: the multi-award-winning Ellen Datlow. She and Nonfiction Editor Lisa Morton have lined up an impressive array of chilling reads. Check out the Editorial for their perspectives on the issue.

Editorial

Preface

Welcome to issue twenty-five of NIGHTMARE! You may have noticed that this issue is a little heftier than usual—that’s because it’s Women Destroy Horror!, a special double issue that celebrates the women writing and editing horror.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Gemma Files

Mythology is something that’s fascinated me since childhood, especially the ways in which societal power-shifts can cause myths to mutate. The worship of Persephone, for example, was a mystery religion long before Dionysus came on the scene, one reserved specifically for women, and if you trace the Persephonean myth back far enough, you’ll find that she transmutes into a sort of “death queen” goddess who actually pre-dates both her supposed husband, Hades, and the sacrificial son-lover figure of Dionysus or Attis.

Nonfiction

Interview: Cecil Baldwin

Actor Cecil Baldwin is the voice of the wildly popular podcast WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE, written by Joseph Fink and Jeffery Cranor. Cecil plays Cecil Palmer, a radio host who reports on the strange goings-on in Night Vale, a desert community where monsters and conspiracies are just daily occurrences.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Lisa Tuttle

The original inspiration was the photograph of one of the “bog bodies”—ancient, mummified corpses found in a Danish peat-bog. I don’t know much about them, although there have been books written about them, but my memory of it is that there were different theories about how they came to be there—some thought they were ritual sacrifices, others that they’d been executed for some crime and then dumped in the bog, where the effect of minerals in the soil kept them in an amazing state of preservation for centuries.