Nightmare Magazine

ADVERTISEMENT: Text reads Robert W. Chambers: The King in Yellow; illustrated deluxe edition, October 2025.

Advertisement

Nonfiction

Editorial

Editorial, September 2015

Be sure to read the Editorial for all our news and updates, as well as a run-down of this month’s content.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Vajra Chandrasekera

I wanted to write about a particular time and place, but in a short story you don’t have space to actually explain the history and if it’s not one of the handful of historical contexts you can generally expect a broad anglophone readership to be familiar with, then you might as well write it as an SFnal secondary-world fantasy. So I did.

Nonfiction

Interview: Clive Barker

Most people never expected me to go back to Pinhead in literary form; the expectation was that I would go back to him in a movie. That never felt right to me. Pinhead is a rather literary figure. He speaks with a Shakespearean cadence, so I wanted to make sure that was in the performance, if you will, of his farewell, and I couldn’t do that on a movie screen.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Molly Tanzer

“Qi Sport” is set in the same world as my novel VERMILION, and shares a character — Lou Merriwether. Lou’s a professional psychopomp, which is rather like being a Ghost Buster, in that she escorts, or compels in some cases, lingering undead to leave our world and move into the afterlife. She deals with ghosts and shades, and also geung si, which are a Chinese monster sort of somewhere in between a vampire and a zombie.

Artist Showcase

Artist Showcase: Carlos Villa

Carlos Fabián Villa is a professional artist living in Mexico. His work can be found at antiherobrush.com and zano.deviantart.com. First off I’d like to ask you a question in the spirit of Nightmare: What scares you the most? My biggest nightmare — and the most boring answer I can give you — is of course waking up […]

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Megan Arkenberg

I don’t think that I, personally, am very susceptible to haunting. I love mysteries — I’ll devour any online article titled “Five Weird Unsolved Mysteries!” or “Ten Events Science Can’t Explain!” — but while that kind of thing creeps the hell out of me in the moment, it doesn’t stick with me for long. Having said that, the two “real-life ghost stories” that I have are both included in “And This is the Song it Sings.” I’ll leave it to readers to guess which they are.

Nonfiction

The H Word: Following the Symptoms

Have you heard of the Black Death? I’d be willing to wager that you have, since it’s taught as a major part of European history, and European history is one of those subjects that’s virtually impossible to avoid (although the Black Death did enormous amounts of damage in Asia and the Middle East as well as in Europe; this was not a disease which respected borders). Most people know it as another name for the bubonic plague, that flea-borne disease that still haunts the West Coast of the United States.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Steve Rasnic Tem

I think a focus on detail just naturally works for a horror writer in several different ways. During periods of high emotion or trauma (in this case the end of a marriage, possibly the end of a life) we tend to either lose the details of our environment to an overall fuzziness, or we feel them much more acutely. It’s like the conspiracy theorist who obsesses over every little detail of a tragedy looking for causality.

Editorial

Editorial, August 2015

Be sure to read the Editorial for updates, news, and a run-down of this month’s content.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Nathaniel Lee

Years and years ago, I read one of Roger Zelazny’s essays on writing in which he categorized his stories as generally coming from a strong character, a striking image, or a necessary plot, and that sometimes one-third would hang around waiting for at least one of the other two to show up. I’ve found that to be fairly accurate for me as well. “Where It Lives” started with the image from the final scene, of the house crammed full of swollen, cancerous flesh, paired with the phrase “It grows to fill where it lives.”

Discord header
ADVERTISEMENT: Robot Wizard Zombie Crit! Newsletter (for Lightspeed, Nightmare, and John Joseph Adams' Anthologies)
Keep up with Nightmare, Lightspeed, and John Joseph Adams' anthologies—as well as SF/F news and reviews, discussion of RPGs, and other fun stuff.

Delivered to your inbox once a week. Subscribers also get a free ebook anthology for signing up.
Join the Nightmare Discord server to chat and share opinions with fellow Nightmare readers.

Discord is basically like a cross between a instant messenger and an old-school web forum.

Join to chat about horror (and SF/F) short stories, books, movies, tv, games, and more!