ANNOUNCEMENT: We’ll be launching our first Kickstarter campaign in more than a decade, to fund Year 17 of Lightspeed and Year 15 of Nightmare. Clicking nightmare-magazine.com/kickstarter will take you to the campaign pre-launch page. Once you’re there, click the NOTIFY ME ON LAUNCH button so you’ll be notified when the campaign goes live on September […]

My foot is hidden under a pile of fallen leaves in a ditch near the highway. My hand, a mile or so away, buried under a shallow layer of dirt in what will be someone’s tulip bed next spring. My head—I don’t know where it is. Strange. Surely it’s what I’m using to think? I focus and my hand lurches, shakes off a coating of soil, lifts onto its fingertips and straggles into the driveway.

There is a place that doesn’t exist. Or rather, the hotel exists only in the moments where existence itself hesitates: between one time zone and the next, between the breath then the decision, between the life left and the one not found yet. It appears at the stroke of midnight for those who are neither here nor there. There are travellers mid-journey, refugees between borders.

Gardens are pumping out the juiciest tomatoes, corn on the cob is at its peak, and every melon is bulging with sugar water. The days might be the hottest, but with fall on the horizon, the nights are growing longer—and there’s a real sense of eeriness in the lengthening darkness. This month’s offerings celebrate potent sensory experience set against a heightened light and dark.

We live in politically combustible times, when social media posts ignite wars and half of the Western world’s populace seems determined to usher in an apocalypse if only to spite their perceived enemies. Under such fraught circumstances, it might be tempting to disregard writing, reading, and viewing horror fiction and film as relatively feckless pursuits.

“I’m gonna spit!” Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) shouts in Scarface (1932) when first getting his hands on a Tommy Gun, before ripping gunfire into a wall. This scene in an early sound-era gangster film (with masturbatory undertones) presents the Chicago hood on the rise in his crime syndicate as a nightmarish machine of destruction.

Your clients are—more often than not—
helpless, a stack of unsorted organs
kept pulsating by the will locked inside