Original Archives - Nightmare Magazine

Fiction

I have told this story before, and I will tell it again, and each telling grows more teeth. Sometimes thirty-four, thirty-six. Sometimes they multiply faster than your science allows, like every word you made me swallow coming back to bite you.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 165 (June 2026)

Poetry

consumed

by Ash Vale

my lover has peculiar tastes;
her cravings are unnatural.
she apologises for her appetite

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 164 (May 2026)

Nonfiction

Art the Clown attends the Jane Hirschfield poetry reading at the Anchorage Museum

by Audrey Coble

Author spotlight

On September 28th, 2023, Art the Clown from the Terrifier movies accompanies me to poet Jane Hirschfield’s reading at the Anchorage Museum. Sitting next to me in a blue, padded fold-down theater seat, he wears his usual outfit.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 164 (May 2026)

Fiction

A Magic Kingdom

by Bruce McAllister

When I worked at Disneyland in the summer of ’65, it was strange enough even without what I found in the dumpster. This was the sixties, and the Magic Kingdom, no matter how many long-haired hippies it denied admission to, couldn’t escape the decade.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 164 (May 2026)

Fiction

Hollow Cast

by Sarah Grey

Author spotlight

In Sunnyhaven, we were all equally unique—and we’d been that way for years, the morning the New Girl arrived. Now, any of us would’ve admitted it: Sunnyhaven wasn’t perfect. There were no public parks or pools, no families walking their dogs down ash-lined greenbelts.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 164 (May 2026)

Poetry

graveyard of butterflies

by Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe

in my vision, I taste happiness. I watch the sun’s dance & listen to the music of laughter. I run through a garden & somehow, I am a child again, trying to catch butterflies but they keep slipping through my fingers; like happiness, like love, like everything else I chase.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 163 (April 2026)

Fiction

We Are All in the Same Boat

by Avi Burton

Author spotlight

We pull in the first wrong thing at two a.m., under a choppy wind and reddening moon. It’s not discovered until two fifty-five a.m, after the great nets have been poured through the processing machines and seas of pelagic fish spill over the lip of the conveyor belt. It’s an apprentice who spots it.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 163 (April 2026)

Fiction

The Final Girl Trap

by A.C. Wise

Author spotlight

You can know something is a trap and walk right into it anyway. There’s a vicious kind of glee in the snap of steel jaws springing closed, biting through skin and splintering bone. You can think aha, I knew it as you swallow the pain.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 163 (April 2026)

Poetry

Zooming Past Shotgun Houses

by Eva Roslin

I captured the sorrow you sent me
like a star
it burned my palm
when it promised to nourish

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 162 (March 2026)

Fiction

Her Dark Places

by Adam-Troy Castro

Author spotlight

My wife sometimes asked what had gone wrong with us. She had always been our bank of compassion, the caretaker of our marriage, the one who diagnosed what was needed to keep us on track, and made sure that it was provided. I evaded the question. How could I tell her that somehow, along the way, she had transformed from the most beautiful person I had ever known to a grotesquerie, something it hurt me to even look at?

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 162 (March 2026)