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Welcome to issue ninety-nine of Nightmare! This month, our original shorts circle around the theme of sisters. Our first piece is a spooky little story of truly missing people—“The Book of Drowned Sisters,” from Caspian Gray. Angela Slatter gives us a dark tale of family and revenge in “The Wrong Girl.” We also have reprints […]
Grief is often very lonely, and I really leaned into that as hard as I could. I think most people have had the experience of mourning something that was “too small” to mourn, or grieved for something “too hard” or “the wrong way,” and that can be really alienating. So, uh, I made some characters who were grieving people everyone else said didn’t even exist.
Alma Katsu found success as a writer after a long career as an intelligence analyst. Her first novel, The Taker (2011), gave birth to a series (the Immortals Trilogy), but her real breakthrough came in 2018 with The Hunger, a reimagining of the doomed Donner Party as the victims of supernatural forces. The Hunger won both praise and awards (in the suspense, horror, and western genres), and made numerous “best of the year” lists. Katsu followed that book up in March 2020 with another historical horror novel, The Deep, which weaves together the tragic fates of both the Titanic and its lesser-known sister ship the Britannic.
I’ve written several stories that are grounded in the academic world, either through plot or narration or setting. The contemporary idea of school is inherently a chaos unto itself, and there’s so much mystery in knowledge, so much potential for the unknown, the arcane, and the incomprehensible to rear their heads in learning, that the academic world lends itself to horror.
Haunted houses are places associated with endings—the end of a life, the end of a family. I wrote a story about haunting once. Called “The Knife Orchard,” it was based on a piece of family history when my mother, as a little girl and just come back from Sunday school, saw her mother being threatened with a knife. By her father. My grandparents. One was Irish Catholic, one an Irish Protestant. The problem was Sunday school; the knife a solution to going back.
Be sure to check out the editorial for a rundown of this month’s chilling content and for all our news and updates.
One of the best writing lessons I’ve learned (from the inimitable Elizabeth Hand) is that every word ought to punch above its weight. As you point out, it’s never just description. Ideally, every word pulls triple-or-quadruple duty. It’s setting, plot, character, theme, mood . . . all at the same time. Sometimes, it’s not possible, but I try to hang onto the principle.
This month Adam-Troy Castro dives into The Best of Michael Marshall Smith, a retrospective of the author’s short fiction. Should you read it? Find out!
This is a dark reply to recent obsession with the worst things creators have done, either in their personal lives or in their public pronouncements. I fear that, given what amounts to omniscience like the bookseller’s unspecified “sources,” damned few creators would survive with their reputations intact. And then there are the names of people safely dead, like the story’s specified Al Capp, whose deeds are downright sickening.
“I think I’m going to faint,” I whispered. My best friend nodded sympathetically, his face radiating concern. “Try not to knock over the popcorn,” he whispered back. We were in a movie theatre, back when one could visit such outlandish things, and the first Saw was playing. I was more terrified than my normal baseline of “extremely” and a loss of consciousness seemed not only likely, but imminent.
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