TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 39, December 2015 FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, December 2015 FICTION The Judas Child Damien Angelica Walters Reconstructing Amy Tim Lebbon The King of Ashland County Caspian Gray Honey in the Wound Nancy Etchemendy NONFICTION The H Word: A Horde of Holiday Horror Dr. Arnold T. Blumberg Artist Showcase: Kerem Beyit Marina J. Lostetter Interview: Kim Liggett Lisa Morton AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Damien Angelica Walters Tim Lebbon Caspian Gray Nancy Etchemendy MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Stay Connected Subscriptions and Ebooks About the Nightmare Team Also Edited by John Joseph Adams © 2015 Nightmare Magazine Cover by Kerem Beyit www.nightmare-magazine.com FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, December 2015 John Joseph Adams | 932 words Welcome to issue thirty-nine of Nightmare! Big news this month, friends: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, publishers of my Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy (and the rest of the Best American series), have offered me the opportunity to edit a science fiction/fantasy (and horror) novel line for them—and naturally I agreed! The line will be called John Joseph Adams Books (their idea, not mine!), and will be a tightly-curated list of 7-10 titles per year. We’ll be pre- launching the line in early 2016 with new editions of three Hugh Howey novels: Beacon 23, Shift, and Dust—making them available via traditional publishing for the first time, and then the line will kick things off in earnest in early 2017 with our first batch of never-before-published works. If you’re a regular reader of my magazines and/or anthologies, then you should already have a good idea what to expect—and if you like my work as a short fiction editor, then I suspect you’ll like the novels I publish as well. The John Joseph Adams Books website is still under development, but if you bookmark johnjosephadamsbooks.com, that’ll take you to it when it’s ready. And never fear, dear readers—I’ll still be here, working to bring you your monthly dose of nightmares, and I’ll still be editing Lightspeed and anthologies as well. How (?!), you may ask. Good question—I’m not entirely sure! I will probably have to get much better at delegating! But the good news is, I had to consider about three hundred novels this year as a judge for the National Book Award (Young People’s Literature category), so if I was able to do that without all of the wheels coming off the bus, then I’m confident I’ll also be able to figuring out a way to fit acquiring and editing 7-10 novels into my schedule. That, or I’ll just give up optional extracurricular activities, like sleep. • • • • In awards news: The World Fantasy Awards were presented at the World Fantasy Convention, held this year in Saratoga Springs, NY, in early November. Your humble editor was nominated once again in the “Special Award: Professional” category, and, alas, I lost once again—this time to the folks who run the wonderful press ChiZine Publications. Congratulations to them, and to all of the other winners and nominees. You can see a full list of the nominees and winners at worldfantasy.org/awards. • • • • ICYMI, October saw the debut of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. In it, guest editor Joe Hill and I present the top twenty stories of 2014 (ten science fiction, ten fantasy), by the following: Nathan Ballingrud, T.C. Boyle, Adam-Troy Castro, Neil Gaiman, Theodora Goss, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, Seanan McGuire, Sam J. Miller, Susan Palwick, Cat Rambo, Jess Row, Karen Russell, A. Merc Rustad, Sofia Samatar (two stories!), Kelly Sandoval, Jo Walton, and Daniel H. Wilson. Learn more at johnjosephadams.com/best-american. Also recently released was Loosed Upon the World (Saga Press, Sep. 2015), the definitive collection of climate fiction. These provocative stories explore our present and speculate about all of our tomorrows through terrifying struggle and hope. Join bestselling authors Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, Nancy Kress, Kim Stanley Robinson, Jim Shepard, and over twenty others as they presciently explore the greatest threat to our future. To learn more, visit johnjosephadams.com/loosed. And back in August, I published a new anthology co-edited with Daniel H. Wilson called Press Start to Play. It includes twenty-six works of fiction that put video games—and the people who play them—in the spotlight. Whether these authors are tackling the humble pixelated coin-op arcade games of the ’70s and ’80s, or the vivid, immersive form of entertainment that abounds today, you’ll never look at phrases like “save point,” “first- person shooter,” “dungeon crawl,” “pwned,” or “kill screen” in quite the same way again. With a foreword from Ernest Cline, bestselling author of Ready Player One, Press Start to Play includes work from: Daniel H. Wilson, Charles Yu, Hiroshi Sakurazaka, S.R. Mastrantone, Charlie Jane Anders, Holly Black, Seanan McGuire, Django Wexler, Nicole Feldringer, Chris Avellone, David Barr Kirtley, T.C. Boyle, Marc Laidlaw, Robin Wasserman, Micky Neilson, Cory Doctorow, Jessica Barber, Chris Kluwe, Marguerite K. Bennett, Rhianna Pratchett, Austin Grossman, Yoon Ha Lee, Ken Liu, Catherynne M. Valente, Andy Weir, and Hugh Howey. Visit johnjosephadams.com/press-start to learn more. • • • • With the announcements out of the way, here’s what we have on tap this month: We have original fiction from Damien Angelica Walters (“The Judas Child”) and Caspian Gray (“The King of Ashland County”), along with reprints by Tim Lebbon (“Reconstructing Amy”) and Nancy Etchemendy (“Honey in the Wound”). Over on our column on horror, “The H Word,” we’re exploring holiday horror, and of course we’ll have author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview with author Kim Liggett. It’s another great month for nightmares, so thanks for reading! ABOUT THE AUTHOR John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Nightmare, is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent and forthcoming projects include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Operation Arcana, Loosed Upon the World, Wastelands 2, Press Start to Play, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated nine times) and is a seven-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams. FICTION The Judas Child Damien Angelica Walters | 2781 words A kid in a baseball cap and a Ninja Turtles t-shirt is sitting on the park bench, swinging his legs. The boy stands off to the side until he’s sure there are no grown-ups nearby, and then he flops down on the bench, hiding his misshapen left hand while pretending to pick a scab from his knee with the other. Turtle leans forward, the hat’s brim turning his eyes to shadow. The boy guesses he’s eight, maybe, or close enough. Not too skinny either. The monster doesn’t like it when they’re skinny. “Did you get hurt?” Turtle asks, his gaze skimming the scars on the boy’s arms and legs. Even faded with the passage of time, the scars are ugly and pitted, as though his flesh was repeatedly gouged with a small ice-cream scoop. “I was in a car accident,” the boy says. “Did it hurt?” “A lot.” The boy peers over both shoulders. The park is still empty save for the two of them, and best of all, it’s surrounded by bushes and trees. The branches sway in the breeze, rattling like a knocked-over pile of bones. In between flashes of green and brown, he catches glimpses of small brick houses with wrought iron-railed concrete porches. It’s probably a nice neighborhood, a place where people have parties in back yards and walk their dogs on the sidewalks. Once he took a dog, a skinny thing he found eating out of a trash can, to the monster, but it ripped the trembling animal into pieces, roared in the boy’s face, and squeezed his hand until it crackled and popped like cereal in milk. Then it made him clean up the mess. (It’s hard to dig a hole with one hand; not much easier to fill it in.) It’s spring, which means Turtle should be in school. He doesn’t look sick, and if it were a holiday the park would be crowded. Questions linger on the boy’s tongue, but he swallows them down. Best not to know. The answers wouldn’t matter anyway. “Want to see something neat?” he says. Turtle scrunches his face. “What is it?” “A monster.” Turtle grins, revealing front teeth his mouth hasn’t grown into yet. “There’s no such thing as monsters. Really, what is it?” “What I said, a monster.” The boy shrugs. “You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to.” The boy stands, tucking his left hand in his pocket, like a secret you don’t want to share.