Nightmare Magazine, Issue 102 (March 2021)

TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 102, March 2021

FROM THE EDITOR Editorial: March 2021

FICTION A Cast of Liches Woody Dismukes That Which Crawls from Dark Soil Michael Kelly It Accumulates Joanna Parypinski Modern Promethea Meg Elison

NONFICTION The H Word: Better Living Through Horror Donald McCarthy Media Review: March 2021 Ed Grabianowski

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Woody Dismukes Joanna Parypinski

MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Stay Connected Subscriptions and Ebooks Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard About the Nightmare Team

Editorial: March 2021 Wendy N. Wagner | 1115 words

Welcome to issue 102 of Nightmare! In the Northern hemisphere, March is the first month of spring. Where I live, it’s the month when the dead gray sticks surrounding the house suddenly transform into living trees, all green leaves and pink flowers. Perennials spring up from the dull muddy earth, turning brown to viridian. It is a season of transformation, when magic feels possible, and anything might happen. The work in this month’s issue all touches on transformation and change. Our first short story is Woody Dismukes’ “A Cast of Liches,” a story of racial injustice and revenge. And, of course, liches. We don’t talk about liches nearly enough—their cousin the zombie gets far more attention. But the lich is a much more interesting creature, a human willfully transformed into something undead and powerful. I think Dismukes’ liches are particularly motivated and interesting, and I look forward to sharing them with you all. Joanna Parypinski has her fourth Nightmare appearance with her story “It Accumulates.” If you’ve ever opened a closet door and wondered how you crammed so much junk into such a small space, then this story will really speak to you. As for the transformative element? I certainly won’t spoil it, but I will understand if after you’ve read this one, you can’t sleep with the closet door open. Our flash story this month, the very unsettling “That Which Crawls from Dark Soil” is from Michael Kelly. And Meg Elison returns to Nightmare with the beautiful and touching poem “Modern Promethea.” In the latest installment of “The H Word,” Donald McCarthy talks about the ways horror has helped him cope with mental illness. We also have a special review of the movie Hunter Hunter, and of course we have author spotlight interviews with our short fiction writers. We’re continuing our staff interviews with a discussion with our delightful proofreader, Devin Marcus. Devin has recently stepped up to join our author spotlighting team (you can enjoy his work this issue, where he interviews Woody Dismukes). I asked Devin a few questions about working here.

How did you get started working with Nightmare?

Honestly, I kind of came up to John out of nowhere back in college and sent a random email asking if he’d be willing to take me on in whatever position he needed. I was pretty darn amazed when he actually responded! He gave me a quick proofreading test and set me to work manning the slush pile, which I did for about a year, maybe a bit more. After a while, I wanted to get more hands-on, so I asked if I could start proofreading both Lightspeed and Nightmare. I love proofreading; it probably says something about me that I could pore through text looking for tiny minutiae all day and enjoy every second of it! John said yes, of course, and here we are just about five years later! I’ve even recently taken up conducting interviews with some of our featured authors, which I’m very excited about!

What’s your favorite part of your work here?

I mean, there’s a lot to enjoy, honestly. Getting to read all of these amazing stories monthly is a reward in and of itself, not to mention that these stories often inspire me in my own writing. Everybody on the staff is so dedicated to featuring, exploring, and advancing the horror genre in exciting new ways, and you can see the work that’s been put in every issue, from cover to cover. I even pick up tips from our review section from time to time; as an example, I grabbed Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark over the holidays on the recommendation of one of our reviewers, and it’s one of the most entertaining books I’ve read in the last year! It doesn’t hurt that I get to feel like I’m helping to give these authors the platform they so deeply deserve, in whatever way I can.

Would you call yourself a horror fan? If so, what brings you to the genre?

Absolutely I am! I have been ever since the dual-pronged attack of Stephen Gammell’s amazing illustrations in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and a beat-up VHS copy of Scooby Doo on Zombie Island, both of which I was introduced to when I was around five or six. Not so long after, my Aunt gave me my first Stephen King book (The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, for anyone wondering) when I was deemed old enough, and things progressed from there. I love feeling scared, and the good news is that I’m a huge baby, so that happens very easily. Nowadays, historical horror fiction like Laird Barron’s “Hand of Glory” and The Witch is what really gets me going. Any recommendations for this kind of stuff are very welcome, and can find a home at Twitter @DubbleOhDevin!

What’s your favorite horror villain or monster?

Sophie’s choice, man. Why you gotta do me like that? Back against the wall, I’d have to go with the Wendigo. There are so many interesting aspects at play within the concept of a Wendigo. For one, it causes cannibalism, which is super cool and terrifying in and of itself. But the method by which it causes this can vary; by some accounts, you have to eat human flesh to become one, but by others, it can be the result of excess greed, and in one very interesting short story I read it causes you to cannibalize yourself as a result of vanity! Not only that, it can look like a skinny zombie-type, it can look like a cool deer-headed giant humanoid (which is my favorite interpretation), and it can even just be incorporeal. Plus, I’m pretty sure it’s the only monster that has a real-world psychosis named after it. There is so much you can do with it, so many ideas you can play around with using a Wendigo, so it’s got to be my favorite. • • • •

Thanks so much for all your hard work, Devin! Nightmare is all the creepier and cooler for having you be a part of it. Now it’s time to dive into the actual issue. I hope you enjoy it . . . with your closet door firmly closed.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Wendy N. Wagner is the author of the forthcoming horror novel The Deer Kings (due out summer 2021) and the forthcoming gothic novella The Secret Skin (fall 2021). Previous work includes the SF thriller An Oath of Dogs and two novels for the Pathfinder Tales series. Her short stories, poetry, and essays have appeared in more than fifty venues. She also serves as the managing/senior editor of Lightspeed magazine, and previously served as the guest editor of Nightmare‘s Queers Destroy Horror! She lives in Oregon with her very understanding family, two large cats, and a Muppet disguised as a dog.

A Cast of Liches Woody Dismukes | 4968 words

“For how long must we keep doing this?” the first lich asked the second. His dreadlocks were dry and had faded near to white, a smell not of fragrant oils, but of something long past due permeating the air around him. His eyes were tired and sucked back into his skull. “As long as it takes,” the second answered. Bent forth on his crooked staff, he observed the cauldron’s brew. “Keep churning.” A third lich stood by silently, as if deep in meditation. After a time, he too leaned his wicked bones over the pot and spit. “That should do,” he said. The first lich quit his churning, and, with the others, he waited. As he stepped back from the cauldron, a pale, ethereal mist rose into the air and formed an amorphous mass above the three liches. The third lich watched the mist expectantly. “Go,” he told it. “Find the boy.” The mist obeyed and shot toward the sky, disappearing into the dark that swallowed the stars. “What do we do now?” the first lich asked once the mist had disappeared. “Come,” the second replied. “Let’s join the others.”

• • • •

When his fury roused him from the grave, the boy went first to see his mother. Their two- bedroom apartment that once had felt so cramped suddenly seemed completely bare. Nothing had changed, really. His father had stayed gone—not even the boy’s funeral could summon him back to his mother. His room was exactly how he left it. His vintage Ken Griffey Jr. poster was still taped crudely above his bed and his baseball bat still rested in the corner by his desk. His collection of Orioles hats remained next to his books on the shelf. All that was missing was his mitt stuffed with a muddy ball. That had been taken for evidence too, along with his body. His mother hadn’t left the couch since she had come home from the funeral, and this is where he found her, curled up with her knees at her chin and his framed school picture in her hand. Relatives had come and gone—seeing as the boy had no siblings to speak of—though as time went on, they too came less and less. Now she was utterly alone. The boy tried to wake her. “I’m here, Momma,” he said. “I’m here.” But his mother didn’t stir. She was still, save for the rise and fall of her chest, which even in sleep seemed like an unnatural heaving. Her cheeks were damp from tears, her nose red and raw. She was a distortion of how he remembered her, as if the past months had been years. “Momma?” he tried once more, but she could not hear him. His voice could not bridge the gap between them. He wondered if he left her if he would really be leaving. After all, he was not really there. Not to his mother. Not to the ones who needed him most. He did not wait for an answer to come to him; he left her regardless. • • • •

“Where will he go now?” the first lich asked, as he crowded around the cauldron with the others. The three liches pondered the images refracted in the brew. “He will go wherever his phylactery leads him,” replied the third. “Just as we followed ours.” The second lich ran his hand over his nearly skinless skull. “I wish I could look away.” “As do I,” the third lich said, turning to the second. “But even then, would you be able to forget?” “No . . . I suppose not,” said the second lich. “That is our curse, isn’t it?” “Burden. Curse. It makes no difference. It’s what makes us what we are.” The third lich lowered his head back toward the cauldron. “Now, watch.” Together they did as the third lich commanded, but the first lich could not hold his tongue. “When is it we intervene?” “Only when necessary,” said the third. “You’ll know. The boy will show us in his own way. He is our guide as much as we are his. It is his story, we are merely the scriveners.” The first lich steadied his gaze in the images, afraid to ask much more.

• • • •

The boy found it strange how easy direction came to him. What a fallacy, to say that the dead became wanderers. From his mother’s apartment, he went to visit Officer Sanchez. He followed her to the precinct and he followed her home at night. He sat beside her all day in her patrol vehicle and watched over her as she slept. Though his mother was now alone, he would ensure that Officer Sanchez never would be again. It wasn’t long before she could sense him. At first, it was just little things. A breeze only she could feel. A whisper her colleagues could not hear. But quickly it escalated into more troubling phenomena. Soon, the boy began to appear in her every dream. She dreaded each time she laid her head against her pillow, for she knew he would be waiting there for her. Then the dreams drifted into daylight. She could feel him watching over her shoulder. She could see the silhouette of his form lurking in the distance. She could not escape him. Wherever she was, the boy was there too. Officer Sanchez tried to speak to the police psychiatrist. He told her that it was not uncommon for an officer to experience these symptoms after such a traumatic event. “You have nothing to worry about,” the doctor said. “In time, these things will pass.” He gave her medicine and began to see her weekly. Still, it did not matter how many pills she took or how strictly she clung to the doctor’s advice; the boy would not leave her alone. He was everywhere she looked. In the hallways. On the streets. In the faces of each suspect she forced into the back of her patrol car with hands chained behind them. “Where is he now?” the doctor asked one day during a particularly enlightening session. “Is the boy here? Is he in this room?” The boy leaned in over the doctor’s shoulder and glared at Officer Sanchez sternly. With his left hand he gripped the doctor’s shoulder tightly, but the doctor did not seem to feel a thing. With his right hand he raised a finger to his lips. “Shhhhh,” he whispered. Officer Sanchez broke down in tears, covering her bloodshot eyes with shame. Still, she said nothing. After this, the doctor put Officer Sanchez on leave. If she were to be honest, she was glad for it. Her colleagues throughout the precinct no longer trusted her. She no longer trusted herself. Each time she would place a hand to her service weapon she could feel the tenseness in her muscles. She could feel how tightly her finger gripped the steel; it was only a matter of time before it reached the trigger. Standard procedure required she hand in her badge and her gun. She mostly stayed indoors. She became as afraid of the light as she was of the dark. The boy’s presence paralyzed her. Even when she could not see him she knew he was there, waiting to reveal himself once more. Finally, she shouted into the shadow, “What do you want from me?” The boy stepped toward her with footsteps echoing thinly. Officer Sanchez was crouched in the corner of her kitchen, her back against the cabinet beneath the sink. “You know what you have done, and you know what I want for it,” the boy said. Officer Sanchez could say nothing. Sobbing, snot leaked into the corners of her mouth. “You may not have pulled the trigger, but it was you who dropped the gun beside me as I bled out in the dirt. It was you who stuffed the drugs into my pocket.” Her hands shook, as did her feet. Her teeth were chattering incessantly. “I was scared . . .” The boy remained still. Patiently, he waited for her to ask him again. He knew she would. He had all the time he needed. “Please . . .” she pleaded with him once more. “What do you want?” Slowly, the boy let his hands drop to the side. As he knelt down to meet her eyes, he revealed Officer Sanchez’s service weapon and presented it toward her. She had surrendered her weapon, she knew she had. Yet, here the gun was, as real as anything around her. Officer Sanchez reached out and took the gun. It felt heavier now than it ever had before, colder too. She did not have to check the chamber to know that it was loaded. Her eyes shifted from the gun to the boy and back again. The boy lifted a finger beneath her chin and forced her to look at him. Her eyes forced him to remember. Within them he was transported back to his final moments as he gazed up into the ever-darkening blue. He looked into her eyes then too and saw something that felt familiar. “You’re scared now . . .” he said, almost as if her reaction was unexpected, as if it wasn’t precisely what he’d intended. She nodded, then Officer Sanchez put the gun in her mouth and blew a hole in the back of her head.

• • • • The second lich picked up his head and shifted his eyes between the other two. “The others will be proud of the work we have done.” “Yes, they will be,” agreed the third lich. “But our task is far from done. The boy grows stronger, though he has much to learn still, before he will be fit to join our Order.” “And if he decides not to?” asked the first lich. “Many have before him,” answered the second. The third lich took the staff from the second and began to churn the brew once more. The images before them flickered, as if they were gazing into a zoetrope of time. The deaths of so many passed before their eyes. “Not all of us are meant to ease the tides on which we flow,” the third lich explained. “This ocean is vast and it is far easier to simply disappear.” “Then we will have failed?” asked the first lich. The third lich pulled the staff from the cauldron and handed it back to the second. The image settled back into that of the boy. “We will only know in time.”

• • • •

After the funeral of Officer Sanchez, the boy followed her partner to his home. Unlike Officer Sanchez, Officer McGregor did not live alone. He lived with his wife and two teenage daughters on the outskirts of the city, just as the century-old brownstones began to give way to the suburbs. It was a picturesque home. One that had dinner on the table each night just before the streetlights came on. One where each parent could be counted on. Two cars in the garage. Paint never chipping. A wood picket fence that quit at the waist, not high enough to keep anything out. Mrs. McGregor would drive the girls to school each morning. Officer McGregor would pick them up from basketball practice, always sure to catch the last hour or so. He was proud of his girls and what he was sure they would accomplish. He supported them in every way he knew how, in every way they could ever need. The boy studied their lives even more intensely than he had Officer Sanchez’s. He learned that the girls adored literature class and struggled in the sciences. The boy watched the wife too, though there wasn’t much to see. Each of her days proved as routine as the next. She woke up, made breakfast for herself and her daughters—usually by that point her husband had left for work. After taking the kids to school she would go to the store or, if she already had everything the household would need, perhaps manage a Pilates class for herself or take the dog for a walk in the park. But the boy knew the image of their perfect lives was all a façade. He saw the way Officer McGregor volunteered at the local church. He saw how he was friendly with his neighbors and respected by all. He watched as the officer emptied the change from his pockets to help a beggar in need. None of that mattered. The boy could see a space deep within the man that Officer McGregor kept hidden from everyone else, a part that he would never let anyone live to see. The boy swore he would reveal it, even if it was only unto Officer McGregor’s own eyes.

• • • •

He began with the wife, on one of the days she had decided to spend at the mall. The boy never understood the appeal of the mall, the way its patrons would idle their day away gleaming at things they couldn’t buy. They strutted their lifeless bodies around each other, never offering a word to anyone else, while their brains rotted from the acid pointlessness of their lethargy. The boy weaved closely behind Officer McGregor’s wife as she walked past the shoe stores and pretzel stands. Every so often she would pause before a window when she saw something she thought her husband or maybe the girls would like, but then would mutter something to herself and continue toward the department store. He was almost awed by the way she carried on with her routine. It was effortless, how she managed to ignore what her husband had done. The boy wondered what her husband had told her about the incident. Maybe he told her nothing at all. McGregor’s wife tried the lipstick and the perfume. She went from station to station at the department store trying new looks, seeing what felt good and what felt different. She tried on wool coats and patterned hats, even though she would never really wear either. She did not consider herself a frivolous woman. It was a busy day, with many shoppers asking for this and that. The boy watched as Mrs. McGregor stalked the salespeople with her eyes, growing more and more impatient with each passing minute. She was of course not the only one, several other customers stood with their arms crossed and eyes narrowed. Yet, only Mrs. McGregor gathered herself to say something. “Excuse me,” she growled angrily at a young, dark skinned girl who couldn’t have been much older than Mrs. McGregor’s own daughters. The salesgirl’s hands trembled around the shoebox she was holding as she glanced up at Mrs. McGregor’s pursed lips. “I’m sorry, Miss. Give me a moment to put this box back and I’ll be right with you.” The girl made to leave quickly, but Officer McGregor’s wife stepped in her way. “Why can’t you just get what I need now? You’ve got two hands, don’t you?” “I just need to get a couple things for another customer, ma’am,” the girl stuttered with her head turned to the floor. “Then I’ll be right back to get what you need, I promise.” The girl looked around at the other customers shamefully and nodded as she hurried off toward the supply room. Though before the girl could return, Officer McGregor’s wife waved another salesperson making his rounds about the floor. He was young, barely old enough to work. A boy. “Thank God,” Mrs. McGregor said once he had arrived. But before she could say anything further the boy interrupted her. “You should be ashamed,” he said. “Excuse me?” The boy stepped closer. He did not blink. The lights of the store seemed to dim. “You should be ashamed for your entire family after what you’ve done. After what you’ve let happen.” “What are you talking about? I haven’t done anything.” “Exactly,” the boy agreed. He wore no expression. His eyes were glassy. As he took another step closer Mrs. McGregor realized he had no smell. His skin was dry and hard. An inescapable emptiness took hold of her when she looked at him and saw the bullet holes that riddled his torso. The boy took hold of her hand and clenched it tightly. As he did, she saw—truly saw—for the first time, what her husband had done. She watched from the boy’s eyes as her husband pulled the trigger. She felt the baseball mitt slip from the boy’s hand. She felt the blood as it pooled around him. And then, as quickly as it had come, the vision was gone, and so was the boy before her. Not knowing what else to do, she turned and ran. Her head swiveled desperately as she watched the other patrons now looking at her in abject horror. She bolted out of the store and into the parking lot toward her car. Her keys were in her hand before she even got outside. Though she felt like someone was following her, when she looked behind no one was there. Ripping open the door, she jammed the key into the ignition. Without looking behind her, she floored the car in reverse and wheeled out of the parking space before speeding out of the lot. Her breath was heavy and her pulse quickened. She realized now that she was crying. As she took a hard right and sped out onto the main road, she never saw the large Ford pick-up truck coming around the corner to the left. The truck slammed into the driver-side door and rolled her car onto its roof. From the entryway to the mall, the boy watched as a tall skeletal figure with long white dreadlocks stepped out of the burning truck and looked into the wreckage that contained Officer McGregor’s wife. After a few moment’s glance, the figure stood up and nodded toward the boy. It was then he realized he was now flanked by the two other liches. “She’s dead,” said the second lich. The boy considered the figures of the two liches beside him silently. “That is what you wanted, is it not?” “I . . .” the boy began, but found his response lodged in his throat. “It is always the ones who have done nothing that are the hardest,” the third lich said with his gaze still focused on the wreckage. “Is this what she deserved then?” the boy asked to the breeze in front of him, not entirely expecting a response. The third lich turned to regard the boy. “What do you believe?”

• • • •

Officer McGregor refused the chief’s offer of extended bereavement leave. Unlike Officer Sanchez, Officer McGregor was too proud to speak with a psychiatrist. He hid his anxieties well and rarely spoke to anyone about what was going on. Even if he did, it would be expected of a man who had just lost his wife. His years of conditioning turned to self- sabotage as he isolated himself from all those who could have helped him. Officer McGregor’s daughters noticed his increased coldness, his unusual irritability, but when they tried to reach out to him, he told them everything was fine and that they need not worry. In his mind, he was protecting them. They had to know that their father was not weak. They had to know he would always be there for them. His girls were everything to him now, he cared about nothing else.

• • • •

When Officer McGregor arrived at home, his house was completely dark. Had the girls been at basketball practice or out with some of their friends, this occurrence wouldn’t have been the least bit alarming. But Officer McGregor knew this was not the case. He had spoken to his oldest not even an hour before when he had stopped by the grocery store on the way home from work. He had planned on making pizza for the three of them and wanted to ensure they would be home. His daughter confirmed that she and her sister would be. Instead of removing the groceries from the trunk of his car when he parked inside the garage, his hand immediately went to his service weapon. Deliberately, he opened the driver’s side door and scanned his surroundings as he stepped out. He could hear nothing but his own breath. No TV blaring in the living room. No microwave heating popcorn in the kitchen. No friendly chattering before computer screens or iPhones. And yet, the door leading into the house was wide open. Seeing this, Officer McGregor unholstered his gun and paced toward the door. Sweat dripped down his forehead and his hands began to feel clammy. He wanted to call out for his daughters but knew better than to give away his position. He entered the house and made sure the kitchen was clear. Atop the granite counter, his youngest’s computer gave off a dim glow from the spot where she always did her homework, though the seat sat empty. Officer McGregor moved through the dining room into the living room, with a tactical precision in his movements. Still, both rooms were empty. Yet as he moved to the stairwell leading to the second floor, he saw something flicker in the darkness out of the corner of his eye. Raising the pistol in front of him he slowly traced his steps back into the living room. There the boy sat on the couch, staring into the static of the now lit TV screen. “Don’t move!” Officer McGregor shouted, aiming the gun at the boy. The boy cocked his head toward the officer, his eyes dark and blood from his wounds seeping into the cushion fabric. Officer McGregor gaped at the stark image in front of him, too mesmerized by the boy’s presence not to believe his eyes. “Why are you here?” The boy stood up and faced him. “I’m here to give you a choice.” Officer McGregor took an aggressive step toward the boy. “Where are my daughters?” he demanded. The boy looked around the room, his expression one of confusion. “What do you mean? They’re here. With us. Don’t you see them?” From the darkness behind him, the first two liches appeared on either side of the boy, though now they were no longer liches. They were youthful and lively. The first lich’s dreads were full and dark, his skin taught and glowing. The second lich’s head was no longer bald and skin-bare. His neck no longer scarred by the burn of the noose that killed him. Their figures no longer skeletal. They were children once more. “I said don’t move!” Officer McGregor shouted as they all took another step toward him. The boy laughed. “It’s funny. That’s more than you said to me the first time.” “Where are my daughters?” he demanded once more, but none of the children would be deterred. “Don’t shoot,” the children said in unison. “Please, don’t shoot,” they pleaded, though they continued to step forth. The officer did not ask again. As they took one final step toward him, Officer McGregor fired and emptied his clip at the figures in front of him. Yet when the children beside the boy hit the floor, Officer McGregor saw that they were not the boys he had seen them as, but his two daughters, bleeding out on the floor. Officer McGregor dropped his service weapon to the floor, leaping first to his youngest and kneeling by her side. One bullet had gone through her cheek and another through her left eye. She was dead as soon as the bullets entered her body. “Daddy . . .” he heard his eldest whisper, her hand clasped to a bullet wound in her neck. Officer McGregor spun toward her and placed a hand over hers, trying futilely to stop the bleeding. Her words were garbled by the blood in her throat, now leaking from the corners of her mouth. It stained the carpet beneath her. Her body was a slab of bullet holes, a desecrated vision of what the officer held in his mind. And she too was fading quickly. “Daddy, why did you do this?” They stared into each other’s eyes, her lids losing strength the longer she gaped at her father. “It’s not—” Officer McGregor began, but he realized she too was dead, the same as her mother, the same as her sister. Only he was left now, a puddle of blood and tears pooling upon the floor of an empty house. For some time, he held his daughter’s lifeless body, motionless. He could feel the boy’s presence but dared not look up. He could not bear the sight of whatever it was he would see. “It was nearly my birthday, you know?” the boy said. He needed the officer to see him. Lifting a ghostly finger beneath the officer’s chin, the boy forced him to look at his face. Officer McGregor stared at the boy for a long time expectantly. “No,” the officer said. “I didn’t know.” The boy and the officer stared together at the bodies of the lifeless girls on the ground. It was a brief moment, but for a few fleeting seconds the boy and the officer knelt as one, sharing their frustration and their pain. Their feelings were not the same feeling, their experiences too distant to truly understand how the other felt, but for the first time they each acknowledged that the pain was there, that it existed. From behind them, the three liches approached, now returned to their permanent spectral form. “Aren’t you going to finish it?” the second lich asked the boy. “Finish what?” the boy replied. “What’s done is done.” Officer McGregor’s face turned to the boy in puzzlement. “Isn’t that what you wanted? To kill me?” The liches appealed to the boy. He seemed to consider the question for a moment, but it was clear he had long before come to his conclusion. “No, I have what I came for.” The liches nodded in satisfaction with the boy’s answer. “Come with us,” said the first lich, placing his bony fingers across the boy’s shoulder to guide him away from the scene. But the boy paused. “Wait,” he said. “Must I go with you right now?” The first two liches looked questioningly at the third. When it was their time, they had followed the others unthinkingly. “There is something you must do?” The boy looked at his feet, almost ashamed. “Yes, there is.” The third lich approached, something close to a smile at his response. “To join our order is no easy decision. Go, do what you must. When you are ready, we will find you.” With that, the three liches disappeared into a mist, and the boy was sent on his way.

• • • •

When the boy returned to his mother’s apartment, he found that she no longer laid on the couch. The apartment was clean and well tidied. Her clothes were freshly washed. In the kitchen, the boy could hear something stewing. He wished he could remember the smell. He wished he could remember a good many things. His mother sat in the chair where she would always be sitting when he came home from school, but it no longer looked like she was waiting for him. She was looking forward, toward the TV. The headline to the side of the news anchor read: OFFICER MCGREGOR ARRESTED FOR MURDER OF OWN DAUGHTERS. She had not forgotten about her son. Pictures were still framed all around the house, displaying his life. She had not brought herself to clean out his room yet, and maybe she never would. Even so, there was a sense that she had managed to regain some sense of herself without him once more. The boy stood next to her and whispered, “Momma?” Still, she could not hear him. He tried once more, a little louder, and again after that. “Momma, can you hear me?” She could not. And the boy knew it. But even so, he went on. “Momma, I’m here,” he said. “I’m here, Momma.”

• • • •

Over their cauldron, the three liches consulted. “What happens now?” the first lich asked. “That is up to the boy,” said the third. “Either he will come to join our Order in their fight, or his phylactery will fade and he will become no more.” “The others will not be happy if he fades,” the second lich said. The third lich sighed. “The others will understand that not all fires will burn until the sunrise.” The other two liches considered these words. The first lich opened his mouth but realized he had nothing to say. None of them did. Realizing this, the second lich walked over to a pile of wood behind him. He picked up a couple of small pieces and arranged them carefully within the fire beneath the cauldron. “We should return to the others,” he said. The first lich nodded and hurried over to the second’s side, but the third lich remained rigid, staring into the brew. “Aren’t you coming?” asked the first lich. The third lich did not so much as flinch. “You two go ahead,” he said. “I think I’ll stay and watch a little while longer.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Woody Dismukes is a Brazilian-American poet, author, and social advocate living in Jackson Heights, Queens. He is a 2018 Clarion West graduate and has taught at University Settlement’s Creative Center. He is the author of The Way the Cowries Fall, a poetry chapbook from the American Poetry Journal, and has had work featured in Lightspeed, FIYAH, Strange Horizons and elsewhere. You can find him on Twitter @WoodyDismukes or on his website woodydismukes.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight That Which Crawls from Dark Soil Michael Kelly | 1108 words

On a barren hiking trail this past summer, I caught a glimpse of what I thought was a young person just off the path, half-hiding, peering quizzically at me. The sun was blinding. I blinked and the person was no longer there. I followed the trail, and circling back to the same spot I saw, or imagined I saw, a blur of a face peeking from behind a tree. There, then gone. Did I see someone? Who? What were they doing? And why? I chalked it up to the heat. But the questions remained. —MK

You’re alone, then? Somewhere in a forgotten forest, after thirteen years below ground, a cicada crawls stubbornly from the dark soil to sing, and its cry wakes you from a lonesome early summer torpor. You are alone, yes, but not unhappy. Though not quite happy, either. It is that age, that transitional time between junior school and high school, when acquaintances move to other schools, other districts, other lives; when you find yourself abandoned and think, not unwelcomingly, I will always be alone. And you feel nothing: not sadness, not pity, not happiness; not anger, not regret. Not anything. As if you don’t exist. And so it is that one summer afternoon, mere days after graduating junior school, and weeks before you are to start high school, you discover yourself walking along a path in the sun-strewn woods, looking up, up, squinting, hand shielding your eyes from the light dazzling through the leaves like a kaleidoscope, when from the corner of your eye you sense movement, and you look ahead to see a figure, a boy, emerge from behind a silver birch and step onto the path. “Hide and seek,” the boy calls out, and he is but a pale blur as he dashes into the woods, into the shadows. You are too old for such games, you tell yourself. As must be this boy. Soon, though, there will be high school, and college, and a job, and the general death of childhood, the slow erosion of a world that once held wonder. And as you perch on the precipice of adulthood, it is a pleasant early summer day; the scent of sharp pine and dead leaves and old earth drifts on the still summer air. The cicadas trill their songs and shafts of golden sun poke through the canopy in a hazy corona to bathe the green forest in enchantment. And the boy . . . he expects a game, doesn’t he? Hide and seek, he’d said, his delighted voice ringing in your ears. So, you run. You race off the path and charge into the darker forest, a grin plastered to your face. And in the running you feel energised and alive, your legs and arms working rhythmically, pinwheeling, pushing you pell-mell through the trees. And you remember what it was like to be younger, to be carefree, to be wind-kissed and rain-soaked. To splash merrily through worm-laden puddles as soft, warm rains fell; to toboggan steep hills as icy shards of snow flew up and stung your face raw; to ride your bicycle through a green, green wood, pretending to be a knight atop a mighty steed on a dangerous quest. You remember what it was like to be unencumbered by worry, before the world got all serious and dark. A world where games are frowned upon. Mostly, you remember what it was like to not be alone. You run until breathless, resting atop a rotted tree stump. You hear movement—something lumbering through the forest. You sprint in that direction, heart-racing. Where could he have gone? you think. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” And a voice, like an echo . . . Come out . . . A crunch, crunch, and a snap, like bones breaking. And you turn and head in that direction, deeper into the windless woods. The light is a fading thing behind you, as if all the colour were draining from the world. The trees are briefly limned in the dying silver light. A chill sweeps through you and you shiver. You jog aimlessly, searching and searching, calling out “Come out, come out,” and you realise you’ve lost your enthusiasm for the game, for childhood, for so many things, that life has defeated you yet again, and you stop dead, breath heaving and clouding in the sudden cold. In the dark, you are cold and alone. Then another soft crunch, and a darker shape appears between the trees. The black form moves towards you. You’re alone, then? A voice like razored-dusk; quiet and disquieting. And a grin in the asking. You shiver. Your world is a darkening void; empty and starless. You grow numb, your mind spinning, trying to latch onto something but coming away empty, like a rudderless ship bobbing on waves as distant shores dim. An untethering. Silence, except for the slow crunch of booted feet. Then, a lunge as the dim figure reaches for you ...... and you turn and run. And run. Mindless. Heedless of the reaching branches that claw and scratch. And in the running you feel sluggish and dead, plodding through the trees. Then you remember. Remember what it was like to be scared, heart-pounding as you stumbled through the dark of the world, past an old and broken bicycle, past the bones of dead things as a dark laughter rang out behind you, your mind a dark and spinning vortex of dread, a curtain of blood, then darkness. You remember the dark. You remember being alone. You remember feeling nothing. As if you didn’t exist. And thinking, if only I could crawl out of here. Then, a sound reaches you. A shrilling, buzzing noise. The cicadas are screaming. Thirteen, you recall. Thirteen years . . . Presently, you open your eyes to sunlight stippling through a green forest canopy. Your mouth tastes of dirt and worms, and something else, something worse. There is a birch tree, proud and silver, and beyond that a path. And on the path is a figure, looking up, a hand shielding its face from the light. You move to the tree, and your heart starts up, and for the first time in a long while, the beginning of a smile creases your face. And, briefly, you remember. So you step out from the shadows. “Hide and seek,” you trill out, and run back into the shadows, into the forest-dark, until the cicadas scream again.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Michael Kelly is the former Series Editor for the Year’s Best Weird Fiction. He’s a Shirley Jackson Award and British Fantasy Award-winning editor, and a two-time World Fantasy Award nominee. His fiction has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Black Static, Nightscript, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 21 & 24, Postscripts, Weird Fiction Review, and has been previously collected in Scratching the Surface, Undertow & Other Laments, and All the Things We Never See. He is the owner and Editor-in-Chief of Undertow Publications. It Accumulates Joanna Parypinski | 2892 words

It is a frequent yet mild aggravation to return to one’s car in a public parking structure and find stuck beneath the windshield wiper or in the door handle a postcard peddling Chinese delivery or Jesus, which is then folded angrily and left in the pocket of the driver’s side door until you remember to clean it out—but it is a sight more unsettling to find, instead, a black postcard advertising in bold red letters: “Exorcisms.” In the greenish fluorescent light of the cement structure, surrounded by empty spots, you might pause over the ad, might even chuckle as you turn it over to find the phone number on the back, but something stops you from flicking it away with your fingers—not the guilt of littering, though that is what usually stops you from tossing these ads when you find them— but something else, which tickles your spine. Instead, you put it in your purse with the grocery receipt from Sunday and a checked-off to-do list, intending to throw it away with the other spare bits of useless paper. But you don’t.

• • • •

And then, weeks later, you find it again in your purse. A faint memory of when it appeared on your car makes you huff something that is almost like a laugh as you turn it over, wondering who would be on the other line if you were to call the phone number. Hello, I would like one exorcism, please. “Look what someone left on my car,” you tell your husband, flashing the postcard, but he will barely look up from his phone long enough to say, “Huh” before he is back to scrolling through an email. “Well, I thought it was funny.” The postcard finds a home on your kitchen counter among a pile of unopened bills that are too tiresome to keep up with, stark black against the white envelopes. A few other postcards sit in the pile of mail—one telling you there’s an urgent recall on the airbags in your Nissan, another from a realtor boasting about inflated home prices. So many papers calling for your attention, but all you want to do is sit down on the couch and close your eyes. “What’s for dinner?” asks your husband. “I just got home from work.” “Well, so did I.” You sigh and stick your head in the fridge. You forget about exorcisms. For a time, you use the postcard as a coaster for your wine, letting it catch red rings even though you have enough coasters to last the apocalypse (though why you should need coasters during an apocalypse is beyond you, surely stains won’t matter at the end of the world). Then it gets buried under some papers, and it’s gone for a while longer. It’ll turn up again. Eventually. • • • •

These days, everything clamors for your attention: billboards about hair loss, the top ten most amusing tweets of the last week according to some listicle site that keeps popping up on your newsfeed, the hundred or so emails waiting for deletion but which you can’t delete because they might have important information, the latest list of books you have to read, the latest prestige television you have to watch. The world begs for your attention, and when you find yourself sitting at the dining room table staring into thoughtless space, just existing, you realize you could go on like this. You could sit here and do nothing at all and turn into a ghost and you wouldn’t mind. But then your husband gets home and walks into a stack of books and kicks them aside angrily so they sprawl across the carpet, and asks when you’re going to clean up all this shit. You didn’t intend to let it get this bad. It started with receipts and junk mail, which began to pile up on the dining room table until it became unusable, leading to the necessity of eating dinner at the coffee table in front of the television. Then shoeboxes that might be reused (but never were), glass jars of pennies and beads, burnt candles that still had a bit of wax in them, coasters (so many coasters—why so many coasters? There aren’t enough glasses in the world for all these coasters), cords to who knows what, keys to who knows where, USB drives that kept getting lost and found again, empty pill bottles that you’re not sure what to do with (is there a special way to dispose of them?), batteries (see previous comment), and—well, it accumulates. So much of it has accumulated, by now, in the closet of the spare bedroom that you haven’t even opened the door in months, simply because you don’t want to look at the mass of junk festering inside. The spare bedroom isn’t really a bedroom after all, since the bed is covered with extra clothes that wouldn’t fit in the master closet. They lie flat with hangers poking out the necks, as if hoping someday they will be hung again, these empty headless garments. “This does not bring me joy,” you think as you look over the pile of clothes, but then neither does the idea of hauling it all out to the dump. Who was that upbeat pixie woman on Netflix who went around telling other people how to clean up their homes? You look at your face in the bathroom mirror. “This does not bring me joy.”

• • • •

The sex with your husband is unsatisfying. Isn’t that a shame? Now that you’re married you have a constant built-in sexual partner who sleeps right next to you every night, who you can always go to if you’re feeling horny, but you never feel horny anymore. You feel dusty and stale. You wonder what it would be like to shove something else up there, to feel something different. A hairbrush, maybe, or your grandmother’s old crucifix that you hadn’t the heart to throw away, or a coat hanger. The last one sends a revolted shiver up your spine. Sick, you think, but then again, you’re the one who thought it. After sex you can’t sleep. Your husband snoozes contentedly beside you, and you wish for that blank oblivion. A sleeping pill might help, though it is already late and you have to be up early. On your way to the bathroom, you stop in the spare bedroom, though you do not know why. You turn on the light, though you do not know why. You go to the closet door, though you do not know why. Sometimes we do things we do not understand. When you finally open the closet, you find a teeming mass of junk built up into an unholy reeking mound—but chief among this mélange of rejected ephemera is one singular shape that startles you so badly your heart freezes for half a beat, since it looks so very much like a person, at first, that you believed there was a human being sitting here in the closet all this time, or more likely a corpse. But it is not a person, and it looks less like a person the more you look. After all, it doesn’t have a face. Its head is the hook of a wire hanger, wearing one of your husband’s old suits stuffed with moldering newspaper. Its feet are dusty spools of yarn. At the end of its sleeves, which sit in its flattened lap, is a rubber-banded bundle of pens and pencils, like long thin fingers, too many fingers. The abomination is wedged into the pile of trash so that it almost looks as if it is sitting, and the pile is its throne. “This does not bring me joy,” you say, and close the door.

• • • •

When you do finally manage to fall asleep, you dream of the mutation in the closet. You dream it is scratching against the inside of the door with the hooks of wire hangers—though why it should be doing that does not make any sense to you, since you thought the hanger was its head, and what sort of creature scratches its head against the door?

• • • •

There’s a new show everyone at work is buzzing about. Something about a bubbly petite woman who doesn’t just come tell you how to fix your broken life, but who actually takes it over for you. She goes to your house, greets your husband as if she is his wife, sleeps in your bed, goes to your job, makes dinner, and you just get to sit and sigh and watch and not have to do anything at all. And she takes your face and puts it on, and you are so relieved because you don’t have to be you anymore, you don’t have to wear that pretend smile every day. Everyone at work says it’s the next revolution in better living. Supposedly, everyone who’s done it is much happier. You smile at them, wondering if you should add the show to your queue. It doesn’t sound like something your husband would watch, but then again, he’s not expected to be the one to fix up your lives, is he? Maybe you will start with the tidying method, first. You decide to tackle the spare bedroom when you get home. It is without question that the first thing to go is the pile of clothes on the bed, a stew of yours and his tangled together. When you finally toss the crumpled clothes into a trash bag and pull out their hangers, you find on the bedsheets a spread of mold or rot—the bottom layer of the clothing must have gotten damp somehow—and the rot is almost in the shape of a face with a very wide grinning mouth, a mouth that stretches from one end of the bed to the other, and its eyes are very round, as if they have no lids and cannot close. You tear off the bedsheets and stuff them into the bag with the clothes. There is other stuff in the room that must be dealt with, but next you decide to make another assessment of the closet. When you open the door and peer in at the figure with the dangerous curve for a head, it looks as if it is grinning, only that cannot be so, because how can a hanger grin? Perhaps it is the way the room’s dull light glances off the steel. One of its arms—no, not an arm, just an empty sleeve—slides down from its lap with a whispery sound like paper, like the turning of a page, like an airy, voiceless snicker. The suit slides from its throne, and you lean instinctively forward to catch it. The motheaten cloth of the suit smells horrible, like the basement of an abandoned sanitarium, or like rotten eggs, and you push it back onto the pile. It slides toward the far wall of the closet, as if it is leaning back in repose, and its head—no, not a head, just the curve of a hanger—disappears into the shadows at the back of the closet. You turn from the figure with a shudder, only to find yourself looking at the back of the closet door, at the scratch marks on the wood.

• • • •

“Where’s my blue collared shirt? The one with the green stripes?” “How should I know?” Your husband tears his way through the spare bedroom. “It was in here!” Of course it was. It was in the pile on the bed. The pile he hadn’t touched in months. Of course, he wouldn’t want the shirt until it had been thrown away. If you hadn’t touched the clothes, he would have continued to ignore it, he would never have worn that shirt again. But now that it is gone, he needs it. “I cleaned that room,” you tell him. “Goddamnit, what is wrong with you?” He says it as if he hasn’t been telling you to clean up all this shit for weeks. He says it as if cleaning up the room is a heinous crime. His careless anger tugs at all that is clawing inside of you, all the little scraps of paper that make up your soul eating at you. When you try to walk away from him, the floor seems to swallow your feet. They wade through the mire of junk, slowing you, pulling you down into an ocean of oddities. It isn’t the floor anymore; now it is a jungle where strange creatures nip at your ankles. This is how it is, you think. Things attract. They get stuck. They clump together, form new things out of old things, things that might have faces, things that might laugh with the sound of tearing paper. At last, you make it down the hallway where you can close the bathroom door on his ranting. The face in the mirror does not bring you joy, so you twist it, contort it, pull strange expressions to try to get your face to be something else. Perhaps someone else would like to have it. You stretch your mouth into a grin, a wide grin, wider, wider—too wide. But now you cannot stop, it is frozen in a terrible rictus so wide that your lips crack and your eyes bulge, but then your eyes are no longer eyes. Now they are two shiny copper pennies, round and lidless. Your stomach rolls with nausea. Your too-wide mouth cannot hold everything in. A surge of batteries and beads comes spilling out. You choke and cough until you burp out the last of them, and they clatter into the sink. Strangely, you feel better now, good enough to step out of the bathroom. Your husband has stopped ranting and stomping, though the quiet means you cannot tell where he is in the house. He will be wanting dinner. You head for the kitchen, but instead of reaching for a box of dry pasta, you pick up a pile of papers from the counter and stuff them into your mouth, chewing them into a paste. It is then that you spot the black postcard advertising “Exorcisms.” You pick it up and slip it into your back pocket, next to your phone. The familiarity of this little thing pleases you, and it comes with the memory of laughter. Eventually you find your husband in the master bedroom, sitting on the bed, looking contrite. He starts as you step through the doorway. “Listen, babe, I’m sorry I snapped at you. I get it, you were doing what you thought was right. But maybe next time you could ask me first?” He manages to get all of this out before he really looks at you, at which point he goes silent as his mouth falls open in horror. Your hands have become wire hooks and your flesh peels away like sheaves of rotting newspaper. Though you cannot be sure what your face looks like, the overhead light sends two shiny circles onto the wall wherever you look, and you think it must be reflecting off your eyes. Somehow, you get your grinning mouth to sound out a few thin, papery words. “You do not bring me joy.” And before he has a chance to close his mouth—before, indeed, he has a chance to do much of anything except stare—you drive one of your hook-hands into his open mouth, into the back of his throat, higher, into his skull, into his brain. Your mind is on fire as you stumble out of the room and into the one next door. The closet is already standing open. When you look inside, the figure is not there. A presence behind you tickles the hairs on the back of your neck, and you turn to find the figure standing beside the bed, and now its head is no longer just the top of the wire hanger, now the hanger is draped with the thin empty flesh of your face and it is grinning at you and its teeth are AAA batteries and its eyes are two pennies and it is laughing that papery laugh— Though it has made no movement at all toward you, still you reel backward into the closet and shut yourself in with the pile of junk and the darkness, which you decide to light up with the pale blue glow of your phone. When you pull it from your pocket, the black postcard comes fluttering out. You turn it over. Typing in the phone number is nearly impossible with wire hooks for hands, but at last it starts to ring. As it rings, you hear footsteps slowly creaking over the floor toward the closet door, and finally there is a click as the line connects, and you try to blurt out, “Hello, I would like an exorcism,” but it is almost impossible to speak without a face.

©2021 by Joanna Parypinski. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Joanna Parypinski is a writer of dark speculative fiction by night and a college English instructor by day. Her work has appeared in The Burning Maiden Vol. 2, Dark Moon Digest, NewMyths.com, and Haunted Nights, an anthology edited by Ellen Datlow and Lisa Morton. When she isn’t writing or lecturing on the virtues of good grammar, she plays cello in a community orchestra and finds her muse in the foothill cemeteries north of Los Angeles. She has an MFA from Chapman University and is a member of the Horror Writers Association. Find more at joannaparypinski.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight Modern Promethea Meg Elison | 514 words

I was thinking about the power of Frankenstein not to raise the dead and become like god, but to redress the unjust nature of death (femicide in particular) to make god irrelevant. I was thinking about how not all women bear children, and some of us make people in other ways. How we all make each other. How we’re all riding the lightning, just staying alive. And then there was a poem. —ME

It strikes first with a grand old woman twining through her coronet of silver at the grocery store her careful hands on an avocado kind as she is in everything a young girl wants to tell her something intimate something respectful of her years and all she knows but the girl opens her mouth and words hit like the lightning

Silver lady carries it in her closed mouth nothing wasted until she finds the right moment a woman on the train with three small children one every year and another coming as worn out as the breaching crotch of her jeans silver smiles and offers to hold the sleepy one tells the mother she is beautiful that it won’t always be this way that she is enough and the world will wait because an old woman can, with authority, say these things

a mother of such an army speaks to few people she didn’t make and so holds the lightning for a few days using it to stiffen her spine to stir sugar into her tea and it is enough so that the next woman she sees who needs it spills it out of her like milk on the worried woman in the drugstore hands reaching out to cram alcohol into her basket and gauze and gauze and gauze someone somewhere is bleeding (aren’t they always?) and the mother tells the mother it will be ok they’re never as hurt as you think blink and blink and blink and maybe, the tired mother thinks, maybe that one didn’t take but truth lands and turns to something just as bright something kin to the lightning and it’s alive other mother takes it home accustomed only to speaking to people whom she has made finds the body from the girls’ dorm in the basement chooses youth chooses smallness the one with the milk-carton face and the Dateline hair finds the pulse in the cold arm finds the flutter in the blue-white chest anxiously looks her creation in the eyes tells her it is enough, monster, it is enough that your heart is beating again life isn’t over because someone said so holding you down in a bathtub you were not used up you have purpose still and the monster’s eyes bolt open not from the sky down but from the ground up like the lightning

©2021 by Meg Elison. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Meg Elison is a science fiction author and feminist essayist. Her series, The Road to Nowhere, won the 2014 Philip K. Dick award. She was a James A. Tiptree Award Honoree in 2018. She has been published in McSweeney’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Fangoria, and many other places. Elison is a high school dropout and a graduate of UC Berkeley. Find her online, where she writes like she’s running out of time, at megelison.com or at @megelison

The H Word: Better Living Through Horror Donald McCarthy | 1555 words

Almost every semester, I teach a Horror Literature course for undergrad students. We read some classic horror by Shelley, Poe, and Hawthorne, but we also read some more current literature: Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, Victor LaValle. It’s by far the class I most enjoy teaching. And, if my students are to be believed, it’s one of their favorite classes, too (getting the chance to read horror leads to these positive reviews as much as anything I do in class). I’ve long found it amusing how students end up loving a class with the word “horror” in the title. About a year ago, I started bringing this into the course itself. During our first class of the semester, I bring up this very topic: why would you sign up for a class with the word horror in its title? The question often elicits laughs, the students assuming I’m just making a crack, but I push past the laughs, reiterating my inquiry. Why would you sign up for a class where we only read works designed to instill scares? They start to think, realizing how it does sound odd to be attracted to the horror genre.

• • • •

About a decade ago, my friend drove me through what remains of Pilgrim State Hospital, an area filled with derelict structures that look as inviting as prisons. One structure, a cylindrical brick building, stands in an otherwise empty field, like a watchful creature waiting to pounce. The structures fascinated me as much as they intimidated me. As someone with mental illness, my relationship with the landscape was an odd one. It is not inconceivable that in a time before antidepressants I could have ended up in those buildings back when they operated. Yet, something about the place spoke to me, like there were voices here I could relate to. There was an eeriness to the location, but a comfort, too, a reminder that those of us whose minds operate differently are not alone. I have long found comfort in horror and the surreal, especially when my mental health takes a turn for the worse. On my thirtieth birthday last year, I watched Mulholland Drive, a film about a woman’s sense of reality breaking. I cannot imagine a better way to celebrate the start of my third decade. I don’t need drinks or fancy meals; existential horror serves me more than enough. This fascination with horror is ironic. Certainly, no one would have guessed it if they knew me as a small child, since I suffered from near crippling anxiety. I screamed in terror when I was marched off to preschool, begging my mother not to make me go to this strange place. In grade school, I despised the idea of having to socialize with my fellow students and worry how to interact instead of being allowed to play on my own. As I entered middle school, the chemistry in my brain continued to act up, leading my mind to come up with an anxious thought that would then lodge inside of me, reminding me of it whenever events quieted. Here’s a gross image you won’t forget. Here’s a way you might die. Here’s why your life might fall apart. Imagine if this happens, imagine if that happens. Be afraid. Be always afraid. Eventually, a whole bunch of diagnoses landed in my lap: social anxiety, OCD, dysthymic depression, high-functioning autism. Through them all, though, my love for the weird, for the surreal, and especially for the horror grew and grew. Baffling, surely. Why, if I already suffered from mental health issues that caused anxiety and depression, would I want to consume media designed to scare and terrorize me in my spare time? Why don’t I just binge watch Friends? Why don’t I crack open the latest YA fantasy series and disappear into a fun world? Why don’t I just listen to The Beatles all day? No doubt there are some that feel soothed by doing just that. I’m not one of them. Horror touches me, because it acknowledges my existence, my sense of how the world works, certainly in my darker moments. Perhaps nothing better captures this than the circumstances when I first watched The Shining. Toward the end of my very unpleasant time in high school, when I struggled the most with mental illness, I stayed home from school “sick” for two days in March. March, as any student can tell you, is the worst month of school. February’s break is a fading dream, and April’s spring break seems eons away. During those two days, I read Stephen King’s The Shining and then watched Kubrick’s adaptation. I enjoyed both, but the Kubrick film made an impact on me that left a deep, possibly life-changing, impression. Prior to watching that film, I don’t think I’d ever been so scared while viewing a movie before. It was glorious. It also made me understand why horror was my genre. As someone who felt trapped in a place that he despised, I responded to Jack and Wendy Torrance’s time in the Overlook, feeling like the emotions I saw on screen were outsized versions of my own. Instead of being repulsed by this and dashing for the remote, I felt acknowledged. The makers of the film had an insight into psychological issues that made me feel less alone. In those years, I knew of no one going through what I felt, but at least this piece of art let me know someone else in the world understands how my brain works. Years have passed since then, but it is in horror that I still feel most welcome, and it is horror that I turn to when I’m feeling ill. My bookshelves are filled with strange and terrifying stories, I write horror myself, and I’ve devoted more hours to watching scary movies than any other genre. Even the bleakest of times do not cause me to turn from my beloved genre. In fact, such times make me embrace it more. A year ago, while going through a very difficult medication change, I watched my old standby, The Shining, for the sixth time. It provided a comfort that I found hard to come by during that difficult stretch. Recent events have only reaffirmed how medicinal the genre can be for me. While I write this, the world, and especially my country, suffers through the coronavirus pandemic. Here in New York, I spent the spring locked inside, hearing about a rising death toll on the news. Now, as I write this first draft, it’s early autumn. The coronavirus has quieted in New York, but the rest of the country is reeling as it cuts a line straight through. Now, more than ever, I am told, is the time for escapism. Still, I’m drawn to the darkness. In the spring, I set up a marathon of the scariest episodes of The X-Files. I watched Carnival of Souls, a horror classic I’d been meaning to see. I caught up on the comic book series Something is Killing the Children. I read one of the only Shirley Jackson novels I hadn’t gotten to yet, We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Like so many others, my mental health has swung wildly during the pandemic. As in the past, I look to horror to find validity and companionship for my feelings. The works of David Lynch, the words of Shirley Jackson, and the art of H.R. Giger remind me that the horrors my mind sometimes inflicts on me are shared by others, too, and, through art, we can explore them instead of pushing them aside.

• • • •

My Horror Literature students have many answers to my first class question. It always leads to a lively discussion, a great way to break the ice and form a sense of camaraderie. The most common answer I hear from students is that horror allows them to have adrenaline rushes in a way that’s safe, like a roller coaster. This, I surmise, must be why jump scares have become an integral part of horror filmmaking. It’s telling, then, that I’ve always disliked jump scares, that I prefer the scares to come from the atmosphere, from the world a piece of horror places me in, be it the derelict spacecraft in Alien or the vampire-filled steamboats of Fevre Dream or my old friend the Overlook. Inevitably, a student will ask me why I like horror. Students love to throw my questions back at me, maybe picking up that I am at my best when there is a class discussion. Or they just want me to talk for longer so I assign less work. Either way, I always answer the same way. I don’t give them a long backstory, I don’t even give them an anecdote. I just tell them that of all the types of storytelling, it’s horror that seems most interesting in telling me the truth, and in that truth, I find comfort.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Donald McCarthy is a writer and teacher from New York. He’s had essays appear with Salon, The Huffington Post, Paste Magazine, and more. His fiction has appeared in The Grey Rooms Podcast, Raconteur Literary Magazine, The Manhattanville Review, New Myths Magazine, and a host of other places. His website is donaldmccarthy.com. Media Review: March 2021 Ed Grabianowski | 1782 words

Hunter Hunter Written and directed by Shawn Linden Produced by Julijette, Inc., MarVista Entertainment, Particular Crowd December 18th, 2020

In Hunter Hunter (2020), a grim-faced survivalist living off the land in Manitoba tries to protect his wife and daughter from a wolf, only to find out there are worse things in the woods. To get to the film’s gory, vengeful finale, every living thing on the screen must be tormented and brutalized, and every character undermined and negated. In the end, this pulp fiction pastoral elegy, with all its survival horror, serial killer, and revenge thriller tropes, feels like one long set-up for the big “punch line” at the end. Be aware that this movie contains numerous depictions of violence against animals and sexual violence against women (and that this review contains spoilers aplenty). Hunter Hunter positions nature and culture (a word we’ll use to represent the somewhat slippery philosophical concept of “human society and technology”) as auto-annihilating forces that can never coexist without exploding into violence and death. At the juncture of these two forces is the Mersault family: taciturn and uncompromising Joe (Devon Sawa), at- the-end-of-her-rope wilderness wife Anne (Camille Sullivan), and their thirteen year-old daughter Renee (Summer Howell), who’s learned tracking, trapping, and skinning skills from her dad. When their trap line and personal safety is threatened by a rogue wolf, it pushes the family to a crisis point. With the wolf stealing meat and pelts from their traps, the family will soon run out of food. The thing is, they’ve never been entirely successful at living off the land. Anne makes regular trips to town to sell beaver pelts and pick up supplies, but times are changing, prices are down, and there isn’t enough to get by. She wants to shift to a more normal lifestyle, but Joe refuses. The rogue wolf is a bit of a red herring. For a moment, you almost suspect some supernatural thrills await you when the wolf surprises Anne and Renee and apparently kills the family dog. Later, Anne struggles to explain to the local sheriff why she found the wolf so threatening, eventually settling on the wolf just being especially “mean.” But the wolf never appears again, having served its role as a plot device to lure Joe away from his family. While Joe is tracking the wolf, he finds it has been chewing on a human arm. Tracing the blood trail, he finds a grisly scene out in the woods—several young women, partly or entirely naked, have been tied or chained to trees and murdered (what else may have been done to them we can only infer from the killer’s later actions). Joe returns home for his big claw traps, tells his family he’s going out of walkie-talkie range for a few days until he gets the wolf, and lays the traps at the killer’s camp. It’s especially frustrating when a movie has all the ingredients for something compelling, and simply fails to use them effectively. We have a killer on the loose in a desolate wilderness, a gruff survivalist hunting him, a family in peril, and the sheriff (Gabriel Daniels) gradually piecing together that something is amiss out in the woods. Will everyone crash together in a tense and thrilling climax? Sadly, no. The first problem is that once he lays his traps, we never see Joe alive again. He’s murdered off-camera by the killer. But the biggest problem is how this movie treats Anne and Renee. We know that Renee is thirteen. We know Anne has lived out in the woods with Joe for at least that long. At one point, Renee comes across a walkman and is utterly mystified by it and the sound of the music it plays, suggesting she’s had zero contact with civilization for her entire life. This is ludicrous—clearly Anne goes into town for supplies, and there are manufactured goods in their cabin, plus they have a truck with a radio, so Renee is not a feral child raised in a cave. But this is the reality the movie presents us with, that these two women are all about the hardcore wilderness life, that it’s all they’ve ever known, so we can take it at face value. Until the movie ignores it entirely. As soon as Joe leaves, Anne and Renee struggle to function. They freak out when confronted by the wolf. Admittedly, they’re worried about their dog, and certainly a wolf is a threatening and potentially dangerous animal, but their full-blown panic seems odd for people who have surely encountered wild animals a few times before. They also can’t find food and are literally starving. Anne shoots a baby deer and then needs Renee to show her how to skin and clean the carcass, because Renee has been learning from her father while Anne apparently has been hiding under the bed for thirteen years. I’m sorry, their entire livelihood is trapping animals, skinning them, and selling their pelts, but Anne is clueless as to how to do any of this stuff? Anne eventually has an emotional breakdown when she’s forced to kill a rabbit she’s trapped—I’ve lived in a city or a suburb my entire life, and I’m less squeamish than Manitoba Wilderness Anne. The way Hunter Hunter undermines its female characters becomes especially evident as it moves into the third act. Anne stumbles across a wounded man in the woods. Actor Nick Stahl exudes such a sense of oily menace, even when he’s unconscious, that it’s obvious immediately that he’s the killer—the killer Anne doesn’t know about, because Joe didn’t bother to tell her. She drags him home to help him, but when she later tries to get him to the truck so he can get to a hospital, he balks and insists on staying in the cabin with them. His ploy is transparently creepy, yet Anne later goes looking for food and leaves Renee alone in the cabin with him! One of the best chills this movie provides happens when Anne, in desperation, radios Joe, hoping he’s in range. When she does, she hears his walkie squawk nearby. That’s when she finds his corpse, realizes the man in her cabin is probably not a good person, and we’re propelled to the film’s bloody conclusion. This conclusion is ugly in a variety of ways. When she returns to the cabin, Anne finds that Renee has already been killed off-camera. The killer then drugs and attempts to rape Anne (which lets us infer a whole lot of horrible things about what probably happened to the girls at his camp and to Renee). Anne manages to fight him off, however, and ends up skinning him alive in Joe’s work shed just as the police finally reach them. I have to give credit where it’s due to writer/director Shawn Linden. He helms this film confidently, with solid, albeit unspectacular cinematography by Greg Nicod (this is Nicod’s first feature, and Linden’s third as director). The film’s late 80s/early 90s setting is shown off subtly with the cars everyone drives and the technology available to them. It’s telling that this movie felt worth putting a fair bit of thought and analysis into, to see what went wrong, even though I ultimately disliked it. I think Linden has a flair for noir, but he may need to work with a different writer to really find his strength. What about all that nature versus culture stuff? I usually don’t like to look for allegory in movies—you end up making a bunch of post hoc arguments or oversimplifying the story. But in this case, I suspect Linden had a specific theme in mind and wrote around it, which helps explain some of the inconsistent logic. The killer represents the modern world. When he encounters Joe, he kills him, because Joe, as the survivalist who refuses to join society, represents a purer form of nature. Renee also gets destroyed by the modern killer (whose Walkman so mystifies her) because she is nature, unsullied by modernity. Anne, who we know has rejected nature in her desire to join the modern world, is the only one who can defeat the killer. Indeed, she wears his headphones and listens to his music while she flays him. The conflict between nature and culture is not equal. While nature is brutal and unforgiving, human culture eventually destroys nature. If the main plot doesn’t drive this point hard enough, it’s reinforced by the sheriff’s side plot, in which he continually has to deal with “yuppies” who have recently moved into their rural community and are having problems with bears. The sheriff has to kill the bears because they’ve come into contact with humans and become used to eating from their garbage cans. There’s one other way to explain Hunter Hunter, and it doesn’t preclude the allegorical interpretation. Linden may have started with the carnage of the final scene and worked backward to set it up. Anne learning to skin the baby deer from Renee foreshadows what she does to the killer. Anne also uses an injection of a powerful anesthetic when she stitches up the killer’s wound. This same drug later ensures that the killer remains conscious and aware while she removes his skin, tearing his face away as his bulging eyes look on in horror (the film’s biggest gore effect, which is disgustingly effective). And Renee ends up being used simply as fodder to fuel Anne’s final transformation into the vengeful mother who is no longer meek or too squeamish to kill. Linden is playing with the trope of the Final Girl Who Has Seen Some Shit, survived the horrors, and finds a moment of quiet at the end, spattered in blood and powerfully changed. But to get there, he has to make us believe she’s an incompetent idiot. The movie’s own lack of internally consistent logic makes any feeling of empowerment or righteous vengeance feel cheap and hollow. If you’re looking for more horror with a wilderness vibe, you might try Panos Cosmatos’ psychedelic death metal vengeance trip Mandy (2018), the cosmic horror-inflected The Ritual (2017), or The Furies (2019), an interesting take on the Final Girl slasher trope that pits women against a variety of masked killers in a wilderness reality show setting. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ed Grabianowski is a writer of fantasy and horror from Buffalo, NY. His fiction has appeared in Black Static, as well as the anthologies Chilling Horror Short Stories, Geek Love, and Scourge of the Seas of Time (and Space), and he’s written non-fiction for Apex, Clarkesworld, and io9. He’s also the singer in a band called Spacelord.

Author Spotlight: Woody Dismukes Devin Marcus | 890 words

First off, I wanted to say that I enjoyed how this story felt like a dialogue, in that both the boy and the liches function as each other’s guides. What do you feel that switching between both framing devices of the boy and the liches add to the story?

Thanks Devin, for your extremely thoughtful questions and thorough read of my story. For this one, I have to give credit to John, who actually rejected this story just before Wendy took over as EIC. Initially, the story didn’t have the liches at all, and John rightfully felt the story needed more nuance. Adding the liches allowed for more uncertainty to resonate within the boy and consequently the reader as well. Though the story was very cathartic for me to write, I don’t want the piece to function as a “statement,” per se. Rather, I want this piece to act as a point of entry into a conversation on how we, as a nation, can collectively process the current state of police brutality as a continuing historical moment.

I noticed that while the boy and the liches are not named, the officers that caused and covered up the boy’s murder are. Why is this?

This was a really hard decision for me, who to name and why. From a historical standpoint, we want to remember the names of the victims who gave their lives to highlight the vast injustices that this country has levied upon them. George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. Michael Brown. Rodney King. But from a narrative standpoint, I wanted the boy to act as a monolith, as a figurative stand-in for those murdered at the hands of the police. At the same time, I wanted to draw the reader—especially readers who may not be fully aware of their privilege—into a false sense of security that they know who the heroes are because they are named. In a way, I hoped to turn the reader’s own prejudices against them.

I’ll admit that most of my exposure to liches comes from either Dungeons and Dragons or Adventure Time, where they are typically evil without exception. What made you choose liches for this story, and why did you buck that trend?

I think this question also ties into your previous one. I probably don’t need to summarize here how black and brown bodies have been portrayed historically in the media. We’re criminals, vagrants, drug dealers, and whores. So, I really wanted to play with the idea of villainy in this story by choosing an archetype for the protagonist that was unequivocally represented as evil in other media. This was yet another opportunity to force the reader to confront their own prejudice. Congratulations on winning the inaugural Ignyte Award for your poem “A Conversation Between the Embalmed Heads of Lampião and Maria Bonita on Public Display at the Baiano State Forensic Institute, Circa Mid-20th Century”! Between that poem and this story, you engage with concepts of death, permanence, and purpose. What draws you to these topics?

Thank you! It was an incredible honor to win this award. I hate to draw everything back to me being adopted, but I think it really explains a lot of things in my life. I was born during one of the worst droughts in Brazilian history in the middle of one of the most widely affected areas. My birth mother had the courage to put me up for adoption, and I was lucky enough to be adopted by a loving and supportive family in the US, but had that courage failed her, I very easily could have died with so many other Brazilians at the time. Because of this, I have always had this nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I shouldn’t be here, that maybe I should have died with all the others back in the early nineties. It’s survivor’s guilt, for sure, but it also motivates me. I feel that if I have been lucky enough not only to survive such a deadly situation, but to also have to an opportunity to build a budding early career as a writer, then it is my duty to write something meaningful, to write something that in some small way, gives back to the world. I guess it’s only natural that those themes manifest in my writing as well.

What can we expect to see from you next?

There are a few things in the pipeline, but first is another story that will be coming out in PodCastle sometime soon called, “Solace of the Keeper.” It’s got ghosts and sorcery and all that fun stuff too, though I think it’ll be a bit lighter and more fun. You need those kinds of stories as well. But further down the road, I just finished up a semi-autobiographical novel about two Brazilian twins separated at birth that may or may not be gods. The publisher hasn’t announced on that one yet, so that’s all I’ll say for now, but I’ll be sharing more details on social media when they’re available.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Devin Marcus is a freelance proofreader and editor living in Portland, Oregon. Outside of his day job proofreading and printing at a golf scorecard company, you can find him at Aphelion Webzine, where he’s the resident Short Story Editor. Additionally, you can send him cool horror-related stuff on Twitter @DubbleOhDevin. Author Spotlight: Joanna Parypinski Ellie Murray | 1027 words

I really enjoyed your play on Marie Kondo and the sometimes predatory, sometimes powerful nature of “self-help” material. What drew you to the subject?

Thank you! Even as someone who doesn’t follow the self-help world, I was aware of that question to ask about your possessions: “Does it bring you joy?” It’s a pithy question that became so popular. At the time, some readers and writers also pushed back against Marie Kondo’s suggestion about purging books, since obviously most of us have large book collections that we’re unwilling to part with. Sure, working on decluttering your home sounds like a great idea, but at some point, you have to wonder . . . how far is too far? And I think that was the “too far” moment for a lot of bookish people. With all of that in mind, for a story about a house that has become so cluttered it’s literally taken on a life of its own, it just made sense that some bastardization of the KonMari method might arise. Of course, just like with the way the clutter takes itself to an extreme in the house, I also wanted to take that kind of self-help to the extreme—to the horrifying idea of truly giving over all autonomy to your self-help guru, as an alternative to giving yourself over to the clutter. Both options result in a loss of identity to the significance of “stuff” or lack thereof; both end up seeming equally horrifying, to me.

Your novels Dark Carnival and It Will Just Be Us also focus on somewhat domestic, personal spaces being twisted against us. What do you feel, if anything, is gained when the protagonist has a deep, intimate connection to the horror itself?

Strange and otherworldly horrors are a lot of fun to play around with, but for me, the truly terrifying comes from something that is supposed to bring us comfort. I think that deep connection does make it all the more frightening. Your house ought to be the most comfortable, safe place in the world—so when it’s not, there’s this implication that nowhere is safe. Dark Carnival centers around the hometown itself and the idea of “home” as a kind of awful magnet pulling you back, no matter how hard you try to get away; and in the book, there is something terrible lurking under the surface of the town that is inescapable. Small- town horror is so fun to play around with because of the expectations of how quaint and safe the small town should be (though decades of small-town horror have proven otherwise by now!). It Will Just Be Us brings it more intimately into the home itself, where I really explored the idea of the uncanny in a domestic setting: a house haunted by itself, by everything that has ever happened in it, and perhaps everything that ever will happen. And then you get into other similar territory of uncanny, intimate terror, like demonic children, other versions of your loved ones, and the house itself becoming unfamiliar. I think there’s such a deep well to draw from here, and the more intimate, the more impact—on an emotional and psychological level.

Let’s turn this back on the writer. Many things in the story compete for the protagonist’s attention—the bills; the cleaning; the husband—that the protagonist threatens to be consumed/replaced entirely. What do you do in your personal life to stay true to yourself when there’s so much competing for our attention now?

Hah! That’s a tough one. Perhaps some of the horror in the story is my own fear of being consumed by all the different things vying for my attention. Imagine if the protagonist had kids on top of it? (I can’t, which is why she doesn’t). I definitely have those days where I tell myself, “I’m going to clean the kitchen.” And then it becomes, “I’m going to clean the kitchen . . . tomorrow.” And tomorrow . . . and tomorrow . . . and tomorrow . . . and after a while, creeping in this petty pace, it just sort of . . . accumulates. I end up having to prioritize what is most important to me (what brings you joy?). You know what, I can let the kitchen get dirty, and I can postpone checking my email for a few hours. What makes me feel like . . . me? Writing, of course. Reading (even though you paradoxically lose yourself in characters, but maybe that’s when we come to understand ourselves). Playing my cello. Petting my cats. We all need that balance, which is what I think it comes down to in the story, too. Fall into either extreme, and you’re lost; balance the annoying minutiae of living with the joys of life, and perhaps you’ve figured out what it really means to be alive. But what do I know; I’m a total homebody.

Your novel It Will Just Be Us came out just a few months ago. What’s next for you?

I finished a new novel right around the time It Will Just Be Us came out, so that was great timing! I guess I would categorize it as sort of a western Gothic, with elements of postapocalyptic horror. It takes place largely in an old mining town in Nevada haunted by . . . something mysterious, of course. My agent has it now, and I’m hoping we’ll soon sell it to a publisher. It Will Just Be Us was also optioned for film/TV by Ill Kippers, a production company owned by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister from Game of Thrones), so that’s really exciting. Nothing much has happened with that yet, but I’m keeping my newsletter subscribers in the loop as soon as any developments arise. Other than that, I’m getting started on a new novel about a haunted apartment building, and excited to see where this one takes me.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Ellie Murray lives in New York, furiously filling notebook after notebook. She is a student at Purchase College SUNY and is President of their Literature Society. She loves Dungeons & Dragons, building stories with her friends, and spreadsheets. She is perpetually editing two novels and striving to move through the world with honor and grace. You can follow her on twitter @ee_murray_, or shout her name into the wind and she will appear.

Coming Attractions The Editors | 140 words

Coming up in April, in Nightmare . . . We have original short fiction from A.T. Greenblatt (“Family in the Adit”) and Marc Laidlaw (“Paradise Retouched”). Our Horror Lab originals include a flash story (“When the Snowshoe Hare Turns White”) from Eileen Gunnell Lee and a creative nonfiction piece from Paul Crenshaw. We also have Nightmare alum Stephanie Malia Morris writing about her family’s supernatural stories in “The H Word.” Plus we have author spotlights with our authors, and a book review from Terence Taylor. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Nightmare. Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got new fiction on the way from Tim Waggoner, Caspian Gray, Gillian Daniels, and Gordon B. White. Thanks for reading! Stay Connected The Editors

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Nightmare:

Magazine Website www.nightmare-magazine.com

Destroy Projects Website www.destroysf.com

Newsletter www.nightmare-magazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed www.nightmare-magazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed www.nightmare-magazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter www.twitter.com/nightmaremag

Facebook www.facebook.com/NightmareMagazine

Subscribe www.nightmare-magazine.com/subscribe Subscriptions and Ebooks The Editors

If you enjoy reading Nightmare, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Nightmare store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Nightmare more than 45 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain! Visit nightmare-magazine.com/subscribe to learn more, including about third-party subscription options. We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors, and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Nightmare ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! Buying a Bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. Buying either of the half-year Bundles saves you $3 (so you’re basically getting one issue for free), or if you spring for the Year One Bundle, you’ll save $11 off the cover price. So if you need to catch up on Nightmare, that’s a great way to do so. Visit nightmare-magazine.com/store for more information. Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard The Editors

We already offer ebook subscriptions as a way of supporting the magazines, but we wanted to add an additional option to allow folks to support us, thus we’ve launched a Patreon (patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams).

TL;DR Version If you enjoy Fantasy, Nightmare, and/or Lightspeed, our Patreon page is a way for you to help support those endeavors by chipping in a buck or more on a recurring basis. Your support will help us bring bigger and better (and more) projects into the world.

Why Patreon? There are no big companies supporting or funding our magazines, so they really rely on reader support. Though we offer the magazines online for free, we’re able to fund them by selling ebook subscriptions or website advertising. While we have a dedicated ebook subscriber base, the vast majority of our readers consume the magazine online for free. If just 10% of our website readers pledged just $1 a month, the magazines would be doing fantastically well. So we thought it might be useful to have an option like Patreon for readers who maybe haven’t considered supporting the magazine, or who maybe haven’t because they don’t have any desire to receive the ebook editions—or who would be glad to pay $1 a month, but not $3 (the cost of a monthly subscriber issue of Lightspeed). Though Fantasy, Nightmare, and Lightspeed are separate entities, we decided to create a single “publisher” Patreon account because it seemed like it would be more efficient to manage just one account. Basically, we wanted to create a crowdfunding page where, if you enjoy the work Adamant Press puts out, and you want to contribute a little something to help make it easier for us to produce more cool projects, then our Patreon is the place to do that.

What Do I Get Out of Being a Patron? Well, you get the satisfaction of helping to usher the creation of cool new short fiction projects into the world! Plus, the more support we get, the better we can make the magazines and compensate our authors and staff. By becoming a supporter via Patreon, you help fund our growth and continued publication of two award-winning magazines. Of course, if you’re already one of our ebook subscribers (thank you!), you are already supporting us. This is for those who prefer to read the issues each month on our free websites, or wish to support our efforts more generally. By becoming a supporter, you are also bestowed a title, such as Dragonrider, or Space Wizard, or Savior of the World and/or Universe, thus making you instantly the envy of all your friends.

Thank You! If you’ve read this far, thanks so much. We hope you’ll consider becoming a backer on Patreon. That URL again is patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams. Thanks in advance for your time. We look forward to hopefully being able to make the magazines—and our other publishing endeavors—even better with the support of people like you. About the Nightmare Team The Editors

Editor-in-Chief Wendy N. Wagner

Publishing Company Adamant Press

Publisher John Joseph Adams

Associate Editor Arley Sorg

Podcast Producer Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor Jim Freund

Podcast Host Jack Kincaid

Art Director Christie Yant

Assistant Editors Lisa Nohealani Morton Xander Odell

Editorial Assistant Alex Puncekar

Reviewers Adam-Troy Castro Terence Taylor

Copy Editor Melissa V. Hofelich

Proofreader Devin Marcus

Webmaster Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios