Nightmare Magazine, Issue 51 (December 2016)
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TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 51, December 2016 FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, December 2016 FICTION I Was a Teenage Werewolf Dale Bailey The Blood Drip Brian Evenson The Low, Dark Edge of Life Livia Llewellyn The Opera Singer Priya Sridhar NONFICTION The H Word: Audio Horror, the Menacing Stroll Alex Hofelich Artist Showcase: James T. Robb Marina J. Lostetter Panel Discussion: Penny Dreadful The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Dale Bailey Brian Evenson Livia Llewellyn Priya Sridhar MISCELLANY Coming Attractions, January 2017 Stay Connected Subscriptions and Ebooks About the Nightmare Team Also Edited by John Joseph Adams © 2016 Nightmare Magazine Cover by James T. Robb www.nightmare-magazine.com FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, December 2016 John Joseph Adams | 867 words Welcome to issue fifty-one of Nightmare! We have original fiction from Dale Bailey (“I Was a Teenage Werewolf”) and Livia Llewellyn (“The Low, Dark Edge of Life”), along with reprints by Brian Evenson (“The Blood Drip”) and Priya Sridhar (“The Opera Singer”). In our “The H Word” column, Alex Hofelich of Pseudopod talks about what makes the audio experience of horror so great. We’ve also got author spotlight mini-interviews with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a panel discussion of the show Penny Dreadful. Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 As you may recall, in addition to editing Lightspeed and Nightmare, I am also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, which launched last year. The first volume was guest edited by Joe Hill, and the 2016 volume (which came out October 4) is guest edited by Karen Joy Fowler. The table of contents for the 2016 volume includes two stories from Lightspeed (“Things You Can Buy for a Penny” by Will Kaufman and “Tea Time” by Rachel Swirsky), as well as Salman Rushdie, Adam Johnson, Kelly Link, Ted Chiang, Kij Johnson, Maria Dahvana Headley, Sofia Samatar, Sam J. Miller, Charlie Jane Anders, Catherynne M. Valente, Liz Ziemska, S.L. Huang, Vandana Singh, Dale Bailey, Dexter Palmer, Julian Mortimer Smith, Nick Wolven, and Seth Dickinson. Visit johnjosephadams.com/basff to learn more and/or to order! New Anthology Release: What the #@&% is That? (Saga Press, Nov. 1, 2016) My latest anthology—co-edited with Douglas Cohen—published last month. Here’s the cover copy: Fear of the unknown—it is the essence of the best horror stories, the need to know what monstrous vision you’re beholding and the underlying terror that you just might find out. In this anthology, twenty authors have gathered to ask—and maybe answer—a question worthy of almost any horror tale: “What the #@&% is that?” Join these masters of suspense as they take you to where the shadows grow long, and that which lurks at the corner of your vision is all too real, with stories by Jonathan Maberry, Seanan McGuire, Scott Sigler, Maria Dahvana Headley, Christopher Golden, Alan Dean Foster, Rachel Swirsky & An Owomoyela, and others. Visit johnjosephadams.com/wtf to learn more or buy the book. New Editions of Old Favorites Lightspeed readers are probably already familiar with most of my anthologies, but in case you missed one here or there, I thought it was worth pointing out that I recently released new editions of my anthologies Federations and The Way of the Wizard. The new covers are both by the wonderful and talented Matt Bright at Inkspiral Design. Visit johnjosephadams.com/federations and johnjosephadams.com/way-of-the-wizard to check out the new covers or buy the books. People of Colo(u)r Destroy Horror and Fantasy! In October, our “Destroy” series continued here in Nightmare, with Silvia Moreno- Garcia serving as the guest editor of the People of Colo(u)r Destroy Horror! special issue. She collected original fiction from Nadia Bulkin, Gabriela Santiago, Valerie Valdes, and Russell Nichols to help celebrate the work of creators of color in the horror field. Reprint editor Tananarive Due brought us four horror classics, including one from Pulitzer Prize winning author Junot Díaz, and nonfiction editor Maurice Broaddus presented a stellar line-up of essays and interviews. This month, the final volume in the POC Destroy series publishes as a special issue of Fantasy Magazine (which was merged into Lightspeed back in 2012). Guest editor Daniel José Older presents original fiction from N.K. Jemisin, Thoraiya Dyer, P. Djeli Clark, and Darcie Little Badger. Reprint editor Amal El-Mohtar selected four fantasy classics, from Sofia Samatar, Celeste Rita Baker, Shweta Narayan, and Leanne Simpson. And last, but not least, nonfiction editor Tobias S. Buckell will be bringing us an assortment of insightful essays and interviews. Learn more about both of these special issues—and the rest of the Destroy projects— at DestroySF.com. John Joseph Adams Books News In my role as editor of John Joseph Adams Books for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, I recently acquired a novel by debut author Bryan Camp: The City of Lost Fortunes, a novel about a magician with a talent for finding lost things who is forced into playing a high stakes game with the gods of New Orleans for the heart and soul of the city. Publication date is tentatively scheduled for Spring 2018. Meanwhile, I also bought a story by Bryan for Lightspeed, so you’ll be seeing his short story debut sometime in the near future as well! • • • • That’s all we have to report this month. I hope you enjoy the issue, and thanks for reading! ABOUT THE AUTHOR John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Nightmare, is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, a new SF/Fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, as well as the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, including The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent and forthcoming projects include: Cosmic Powers, What the #@&% Is That?, Operation Arcana, Loosed Upon the World, Wastelands 2, Press Start to Play, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated ten times) and is a seven-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams. FICTION I Was a Teenage Werewolf Dale Bailey | 6612 words Principal Ferguson’s Testimony Before Miss Ferguson found Maude Lewis’ body in the school gym, none of us believed in the teenage werewolf. There had been rumors, of course. There always are. But many of us viewed Miss Ferguson’s discovery as confirmation of our worst fears. Not everyone shared our certainty. There had been only a fingernail paring of moon that late February night, and a small but vocal minority of us argued that this precluded the possibility that Maude’s killer had been a lycanthrope. It was common knowledge, they contended, that werewolves only struck during full moons, often adding that one only became a werewolf by surviving the bite of another werewolf. No such attack had been reported. The rest of us refrained from pointing out the errors in this fount of superstition. Instead, we asked the skeptics to consider the facts of the case as Principal Ferguson reported them to the Rockdale Gazette. She had been working late as she did most nights, partly, we believed, because she was lonely, having no family to go home to, and partly to accommodate Maude’s practice schedule. Maude was a talented gymnast who harbored hopes of a college scholarship and often stayed well into the evening to practice her tumbling runs and stunts. Around eight o’clock on the night in question, Principal Ferguson had heard a brief shriek of terror. What she found when she investigated sent her flying back to her office in a seizure of panic and horror. She would not soon forget what she’d discovered in the gym. Some creature with superhuman strength—surely, it could not have been a man—had snapped Maude’s back like a twig and draped her supine body over the balance beam. It dangled there like it had no bones at all. Her abdomen had been torn open, spilling out glistening loops of yellow entrails. The stench was terrible. You wouldn’t think a pretty girl like Maude would have had such smells within her, Miss Ferguson said. The Arrest of Tony Rivers In a press conference the following afternoon, Police Chief Baker dismissed the rumors of a teenage werewolf, and announced that Detective “Don” Donovan, the lead investigator on the case, had already made an arrest. Tony Rivers, a junior, had also been in the school that night. Tony had been working after hours as the custodian for almost a year by then, ever since his father had succumbed to brain cancer, leaving Tony and his mother to make their way as best they could. Tony had told some of us about his father’s transformation as the tumor ate into his brain. A gentle man, Ted Rivers had, by the end, become foul mouthed, and prone to fits of rage. To those closest to him, Tony had confided that though he tried not to think about his father’s death, it weighed constantly upon him: when he was doing his homework or watching TV, when he was pushing a broom down the halls of Rockdale High.