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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.
Most people who are asking for recommendations for terrifying books are bound to be disappointed. Responses to these posts germinate an exhaustive discourse around the subjectivity of fear but—it’s intriguing—there are little gems that pop up sometimes.
November is the month Nightmare goes all-out celebrating dark fantasy. That’s right, it’s our annual all-dark-fantasy issue, but don’t worry: just because it’s extra magical doesn’t mean it’s not horrifying.
Shape-changers exist in myth and legend all over the world, and, to me, there’s something inherently tragic about them. I think Ovid’s Metamorphoses in particular thinks about the idea of willing and unwilling shape change.
This story’s been bothering me for a long time. It has the sort of title that sticks in your head: The Turn of the Screw. I knew the title before reading the book, or perhaps I read it and forgot, as I read so many books on the shelves of the rich whose houses my mother cleaned.
The whole idea for the story sprang from a visit to North Wales for a friend’s wedding, in a really rugged, scenic spot along the coast. I was travelling back with friends and we stopped to wander about on the cliffs and the idea for a ghost story began to take root!
Birds aren’t monsters. Then again, maybe? Every mammal, fish, or insect has the ability to stimulate our imaginations—I’ll give animalia that. But birds, something special about them has the ability to tap into the darker depths of our creative core.
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