Nightmare Magazine

ADVERT: The Time Traveler's Passport, curated by John Joseph Adams, published by Amazon Original Stories. Six short stories. Infinite possibilities. Stories by John Scalzi, R.F. Kuang, Olivie Blake, Kaliane Bradley, P. Djèlí Clark, and Peng Shepherd. Illustration of A multicolored mobius strip with folds and angles to it, with the silhouette of a person walking on one side of it.

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Fiction

Darkness Metastatic

by Sam J. Miller

Author spotlight

The land line rang. Its sound was invasive, all-consuming. A dying machine’s shriek. How had people lived like this for so long? And why the fuck did I still have a land line at all? But I knew why. Because Caleb had wanted one. And Caleb was long gone but the land line was still here, screaming me out of a sweet deep nap, the sound heavy with all the horrors that the call could bring. “Hello,” I said, four rings in. The thing would ring all night if we let it. My ex had hated voice mail, said he preferred “the hit-or-miss nature of pre-cell phone contact.” A man’s small voice asked: “Is Caleb there?”

In Jan. 2021 (Issue 100)

Fiction

How to Break into a Hotel Room

by Stephen Graham Jones

Author spotlight

Javi is short for Javier. Javier is short for Has the Perfect Scam. He hasn’t told anybody about it yet. Especially not the hotels. It’s not the kind of thing you get rich with—one fancy watch or a pair of earrings doesn’t exactly pay the rent—but it is the kind of thing that’s good enough for a smile at three in the morning.

In Jan. 2021 (Issue 100)

Fiction

Rotten Little Town: An Oral History (Abridged)

by Adam-Troy Castro

Author spotlight

t’s been over twenty years since the last episode of Rotten Little Town, the smash hit occult western that ran for six seasons between 1993 and 1999, plus one two-hour reunion movie released in 2000 that wrapped up most of the dangling storylines in such dramatic fashion that it remains highly debated today. Completing its planned arc despite the untimely deaths of one creator and two lead actors, plus multiple other mishaps, the show is still fondly remembered as the compelling story of Sheriff Horace T. Booker and his efforts to clean up the frontier town of Sawblade, New Mexico, which is beset by supernatural forces, at the height of the wild west.

In Jan. 2021 (Issue 100)

Fiction

The Wrong Girl

by Angela Slatter

Author spotlight

“The problem is,” she says as she spears a piece of crispy bacon skilfully enough that it doesn’t shatter, “you’ve got a revolving door for a heart.” He doesn’t like hearing things like this, mostly because she’s generally right. Ilsa’s clear-eyed about him. and that makes their friendship remarkably unfraught (apart from these moments). Unlike his other relationships. She sees him for who he is, but doesn’t stop talking to him, doesn’t judge him, not really, or if she does, she’s still friends with him. His father used to say he was his own worst enemy.

In Dec. 2020 (Issue 99)

Fiction

The Book of Drowned Sisters

by Caspian Gray

Author spotlight

They lived on the last street that had been constructed before investor money ran out, and behind their row of seven houses was a long unfenced field marked KEEP OUT, within it a little hill and little retaining pond, and a row of three streetlights along an unpaved road that stopped abruptly at the foot of the hill. Trees rimmed the field, and the streetlights still lit up, so there was a touch of Narnia in every evening. Even in the brilliant summer sun, the trees were thick enough to give the woods an inviting fairy tale darkness. | Copyright 2020 by Caspian Gray.

In Dec. 2020 (Issue 99)

Fiction

Introduction to the Horror Story, Day 1

by Kurt Fawver

Author spotlight

Welcome to Introduction to the Horror Story. This is an upper level course with extensive reading and writing assignments as well as a practical component. It has no prerequisites other than existence and consciousness, which I believe all of you possess, though I may be wrong.

In Nov. 2020 (Issue 98)

Fiction

Tiger’s Feast

by KT Bryski

Author spotlight

Every day after school, Emmy feeds the tiger with her sin. Deep in the park’s brush, past poison ivy and a rotting lawn chair and dented beer cans, the tiger dens under a dead tree. No matter what time Emmy arrives at the park, it’s always late afternoon in the tiger’s grove, tired light decaying to dusk. Under the tree gapes a great black mouth riddled with grubs. Yellow eyes gleam in the darkness. They would gobble Emmy up if she let them.

In Nov. 2020 (Issue 98)

Fiction

The Monkey Trap

by Adam-Troy Castro

Author spotlight

Amber needed a book. It was The Estates of Sarah Holliday, a delicate comedy of manners following a young woman’s trials and tribulations in 1870s New England, and it was the most obscure novel by one Charlotte Winsborough, a fussy and now almost completely forgotten nineteenth-century author Amber had chosen for her dissertation. Winsborough had enjoyed three decades of critical and commercial success in her own time, and was by about 1900 lionized as a female Twain.

In Oct. 2020 (Issue 97)

Fiction

Not Us

by David Tallerman

Author spotlight

When he comes home that evening, he wants to talk. He tells her about his day, about an argument with his boss, about the new contract. He relates a funny story narrated by a colleague. He wants her to react. She has difficulty feigning the correct demeanour, or even recalling what it should be. What does sympathetic annoyance look like on her face? How do her features register amused interest?

In Oct. 2020 (Issue 97)

Fiction

Tea with the Earl of Twilight

by Sonya Taaffe

Author spotlight

For the first week, she thought he belonged to the power plant; after that she knew better. She had read the obituaries. She saw him first as a silhouette, one more line of the industrial geometries overhanging the boardwalk of Broad Canal. It had been a wet, dispiriting winter full of gusts and mists, but with January the water had finally hardened into a thick pane of cormorant-black ice.

In Sept. 2020 (Issue 96)

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