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Nonfiction

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: David Sklar

A lot of things went into this story, but the main thing was reading a news article about transgender teens using online games to explore gender identity. At the time, I’d recently written a story in which a man takes on a female identity online for practical purposes so he could post things he perceived as “girly” without attracting attention. But it hadn’t occurred to me that an online gender swap could be such a powerful tool of self-discovery. So I wanted to explore that.

Artist Showcase

Artist Showcase: Jeff Simpson

Jeff Simpson is a concept artist and illustrator living in Montreal Canada, currently working for Ubisoft Montreal. His previous clients include Eidos Montreal (Deus Ex Next Gen), Ubisoft Montreal (Assassins Creed: Revelations, Assassins Creed: 3, Assassins Creed: Unity), Universal Pictures (Snow White and the Huntsman), Lionsgate (The Last Witch Hunter), MovingPictureCompany (various films to be announced), The Mill (VFX concept for several advertisements), Wizards of the Coast (Magic The Gathering).

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Karin Tidbeck

I think there are a lot of clichés about trauma and how you’re supposed to respond to it. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” carries with it the expectation that if something doesn’t make you stronger, you’ve failed. Another one is that hardship is a gift/challenge/etc., that is, something you should be grateful for and have to learn from. While it’s true that a lot of people come through a trauma or an illness stronger, countless others are worn down or broken. Many live and cope with pain but do so as very fragile people. Are they strong? What is “strong,” for that matter?

Editorial

Editorial, November 2014

Check out the Editorial for new, updates, and a run-down of this month’s terrifying content.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Maria Dahvana Headley

The Victorian death photos are straight out of my own childhood. I found a book of them in an Idaho library when I was little. I’m pretty sure I’ve been ruined ever since. They were on a bottom shelf. There were no names in the checkout log. Unlike the narrator here, I didn’t steal the book, but oh, oh, I thought about it.

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.

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