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This month, Terence Taylor reviews two works that tap in our era’s mixed feelings about science: new novel Bela Lugosi’s Dead (by Robert Guffey) and the serialized story Spider King, by Justin C. Key. If you ever wanted to be a mad scientist, these reads are for you!
I wrote several stories set on Kauai, and I tried to make sure that none of them was about Hawaiian culture, but more about the aspects I was comfortable exploring—namely tourism, misunderstanding, things you can encounter anywhere. I suppose the horror here emerges once things have run out of control, when no one but the reader has all the pieces available to see the big picture. There’s no familiar supernatural agency at work, no Hawaiian deities or Kahuna magic, just an idle prank, a bit of creative tomfoolery. Lots of things start this way.
As a kid, I found my mother’s childhood home both exhilarating and terrifying. Mysterious humps bulged beneath the kitchen tile. Doors along the shotgun hallway opened reluctantly or not at all. My grandmother’s mirrored closet reflected her skirt suits, floral scarves, and Sunday hats in a strange, bluish light. But nothing delighted me more than the room at the shotgun’s barrel, where my youngest aunt, Eunice, had slept as a girl. This room, my mother said, had been haunted once.
Welcome to issue 103 of Nightmare! I don’t set out to create a theme for each issue, but as I read submissions and compare new pieces to stories I’ve bought along the way, I find that stories tend to have a distinct “taste” that compels me to group them together. Sometimes I’m not even sure what that flavor is until I’ve put together the issue and sat down at my desk to write the editorial—and then the flavor leaps out at me, as obvious as the blood on a murderer’s hands.
I wrote the first draft of this story in Clarion West in 2017. Each week at the workshop I challenged myself to write something I’ve never tried before. “Family in the Adit” was my week five story and I wanted to try my hand at horror because I had never successfully written a terror and gore story before. I don’t remember exactly what the inspiration was for using a dinner party as the basis for the story, but I remember latching onto the idea because I could use the meal courses as natural section breaks.
Our reviewer checked out the movie Hunter Hunter. Would he recommend it? You’ll have to read to find out!
I really enjoyed your play on Marie Kondo and the sometimes predatory, sometimes powerful nature of “self-help” material. What drew you to the subject? Thank you! Even as someone who doesn’t follow the self-help world, I was aware of that question to ask about your possessions: “Does it bring you joy?” It’s a pithy question […]
About a decade ago, my friend drove me through what remains of Pilgrim State Hospital, an area filled with derelict structures that look as inviting as prisons. One structure, a cylindrical brick building, stands in an otherwise empty field, like a watchful creature waiting to pounce. The structures fascinated me as much as they intimidated me. As someone with mental illness, my relationship with the landscape was an odd one. It is not inconceivable that in a time before antidepressants I could have ended up in those buildings back when they operated.
Welcome to issue 102 of Nightmare! In the Northern hemisphere, March is the first month of spring. Where I live, it’s the month when the dead gray sticks surrounding the house suddenly transform into living trees, all green leaves and pink flowers. Perennials spring up from the dull muddy earth, turning brown to viridian. It is a season of transformation, when magic feels possible, and anything might happen. The work in this month’s issue all touches on transformation and change.
I probably don’t need to summarize here how black and brown bodies have been portrayed historically in the media. We’re criminals, vagrants, drug dealers, and whores. So, I really wanted to play with the idea of villainy in this story by choosing an archetype for the protagonist that was unequivocally represented as evil in other media. This was yet another opportunity to force the reader to confront their own prejudice.
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This issue's cover art by
ddraw / Adobe Stock Images.
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