Nightmare Magazine Issue 28

TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 28, January 2015

FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, January 2015

FICTION Returned Kat Howard The Hollow Man Norman Partridge The Trampling Christopher Barzak Blessed Be the Bound Lucy Taylor

NONFICTION The H Word: You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby Lisa Morton Artist Gallery Tran Nguyen Artist Spotlight: Tran Nguyen Marina J. Lostetter Interview: David Cronenberg The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Kat Howard Norman Partridge Christopher Barzak Lucy Taylor

MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Stay Connected Subscriptions & Ebooks About the Editors

John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue twenty-eight of Nightmare! This month marks the start of our next big project. Last year, we asked women to destroy science fiction, and they did — spectacularly — in Lightspeed’s crowdfunded, all- women special issue, Women Destroy Science Fiction!. Never ones to rest on our laurels, we thought it best to continue with that fine tradition and engage in a little more destructive behavior. Thus, this year’s anniversary issue will be Queers Destroy Science Fiction!, guest edited by Seanan McGuire. As with Women Destroy Science Fiction!, we’ll be launching a Kickstarter campaign in support of Queers Destroy Science Fiction!. We’ll publish the issue whether the campaign is successful or not, but the campaign will determine how big and awesome we make the issue. If we raise just $5000, we’ll be able to make the special issue a special double-sized issue, and if we raise even more than that, we have a couple of really excellent stretch goals lined up as well. Our two biggest stretch goals are the same as last year: If we receive enough pledges, we’ll not only publish Queers Destroy Science Fiction!, we’ll also publish Queers Destroy Fantasy! and Queers Destroy Horror! special issues as well. The Queers Destroy Science Fiction! Kickstarter campaign will run from January 15 – February 15. To learn more, visit destroysf.com/queers.

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In other news, Nightmare is now available as a subscription via Amazon.com! The Kindle Periodicals division has been closed to new magazines for quite a while now (and has been since before Nightmare launched), but by employing some witchcraft, we were able to get the doors unlocked just long enough for us to slip into the castle. Amazon subscriptions are billed monthly, at $1.99 per issue, and are available now. To learn more, please visit nightmare- magazine.com/subscribe. Also: If you love Nightmare and have a subscription — whether or not it’s via Amazon — if you wouldn’t mind leaving a review over on Amazon, that would be really great. Positive reviews on the subscription page will go a long way toward encouraging people to try out the magazine. It doesn’t have to be much of a review, just a few words and a rating is totally fine — and much appreciated!

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With our announcements out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month: We have original fiction from Kat Howard (“Returned”) and Christopher Barzak (“The Trampling”), along with reprints by Norman Partridge (“The Hollow Man”) and Lucy Taylor (“Blessed Be the Bound”). Over at “The H Word,” the Stoker award-winning writer Lisa Morton explores the state of female protagonists in horror. We also have an interview with legendary filmmaker (and now novelist) David Cronenberg. Plus, of course, we have author spotlights with our authors and a showcase on our cover artist. That’s about all I have for you this month. 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, 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 winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated eight times) and is a six-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 Returned

Kat Howard

The shadows press on your skin, prickled velvet that shouldn’t have weight, shouldn’t have texture, shouldn’t feel like you are wearing sandpaper and poison, but they do. You are almost used to it, this new way that things that shouldn’t happen do, but you do not like it. Here is one of the things that shouldn’t have happened: You are awake, and you do not want to be. No. No, that’s not quite it, and you are going to be honest. You are going to put aside the polite fucking fictions that are in place to make everyone else feel better around you because you are done, done, done caring what they feel. Since you have returned, no one has given any indication that they care about what you feel. So. To say the thing true: You are alive, and you do not want to be. Well, you are not exactly sure about that one word. Alive. You died. Not the sort of dead on the operating table, light at the end of the tunnel, go back to those who love you, near- death kinds of dead. But dead dead. All the way gone. A death certificate was signed. Your body was cremated. You were made into a thing of ash and air and some fragments of bone. All that was left to go wherever you were was a soul, and that had gone on long before the burning of your body. Not that it had been your idea to die. You weren’t a suicide. It had been (a snake bite) (a poisoned apple) (a hand around your throat) Anyway, you don’t exactly remember, or rather you do. The problem is you exactly remember all of those things, all of those possible deaths, and you cannot say which one was yours. Maybe that is why everyone looks at you, well, like that. Maybe not. You’ve heard them talk. You remember being dead. You remember passing over the white bone of the corpse road, feeling vertebrae, ribs, phalanges crunch beneath your feet. You remember the air shivering as you passed beneath the lych gate. The scale that weighed your heart. You didn’t need coins to pay your passage, because. No. That part you don’t remember. (maybe) (no) The queen whose eyes were as cold as marble who welcomed you with frostbite’s kiss. You remember her very well. She smelled of winter and tasted like pomegranates. You were neither particularly happy nor particularly sad about being dead. There were things you hadn’t done — you had never learned French, or how to make a soufflé. You never started the novel you had always meant to write, and you still couldn’t run for more than a mile without stopping. You regretted not doing those things, but in a dull, quiet sort of way. It seemed to you just as likely you would never have done them, only kept them on a list for someday, even if you hadn’t been (stung by a bee) (hit by a car) (drowned in your bath) You got used to being dead. The way the sky was shades of red, purple, gray — always striated with black, and never any stars. The way voices carried in the land of the dead, sounding more hollow, less real than other sounds, as if they were coming from farther away than the mouths that spoke. The way drinking from the wrong river could make you forget what it had been like to be alive. (You knew that, about the river, before you arrived on its shore. But it was only a little that you drank, and you had been thirsty, or at least you thought you should have been after your travel there, and besides, you didn’t want to remember how you died.) (You wish there was a river like that here.) Then he showed up. The hollow voices of the dead sounded almost solid in their excitement over his presence, as they told you he was here, he was speaking. If he spoke well, he would take you back. Back to life. Excitement was not what you felt about him being there. You didn’t listen to him speak. You stayed away, until you couldn’t. He was, you guessed, the person you would call your boyfriend. Or lover. Which you mostly thought was a stupid word, but what else do you call the guy who walks into the afterlife and drags you back into your beforelife with him? Bringing you back was, all things considered, easy for him. He had rules and he had tasks and he had warnings, and if he did all of the things exactly as he was supposed to, you would have to go with him. He did, and you did. No one ever asked you what you wanted. The cold-eyed queen’s goodbye kiss burned like ice on your lips from the moment they touched hers until the moment you stepped again into the sun. You think you remember seeing a tear on her cheek as she embraced you and bid you safe journey, but perhaps you only want to remember that. Now that he has brought you back, he is bright-eyed and golden and so very pleased with his success, so very proud of himself. He is handsome on television, and in the photographs for websites and weekly magazines that write stories about what he’s done, stories that say bringing you back was a miracle of love. He writes “Top Ten Lists of Romantic Gestures Sure to Win Her Heart,” and no one comments on the fact that, for number one to work, she has to be dead first. No one says that things are more romantic when the girl is alive. You are a shadow in photographs, cold-eyed and frostbitten, and everyone says they cannot tell what he sees in you. This makes them like him all the more. He must be a really great guy, to love someone like you. To stay by your side, even now, now that you are like this. You cringe from the sun, too bright in a sky that is shades of blue, day and night, and full of the stark white light of stars. You step back when he tries to touch you. He had sex with you, once. The first night you were back. He had brought you back because he loved you and now he was going to show you how much. He pushed himself inside you, and withered almost immediately. You were too cold, he said. Like a dead thing. He hasn’t tried again. Small mercies. You’d walk away, leave, if you could, but whatever tether pulled you with him out of death, whatever magic reconstituted the pieces of your immolated body around your peregrine soul, still hasn’t snapped. If you get too far away from him, well, you can’t. You are dissolved, reconstituted, turned inside-out. Returned to him, to his side, to this curse he has brought you to. You wish he had looked back. But he didn’t, and you are here. Returned. And at the center of an attention that is just one more thing that you don’t want. You hate how they look at you, with pity and puzzlement. You hate how they look at him, lust and belief. No one cares about the truth of you. At first, they expected you to be happy. Not being dead was clearly superior to being dead. And how romantic, what he had done. He must love you very much. No one asked you the opposite question — whether you loved him, whether you wanted to return with him. The old magics are not without their flaws. The people around him watch you as you turn from him, as you flinch from his hand, as you stay behind him, as far as you can without being snapped back to his side, as if you are ungrateful, as if you are some half-wild, feral thing, and you suppose you are. The reason why is another thing they do not know, that you would tell them, if they asked. Your body was not the only thing that came back, when you were yanked between death and life. Your memories did, too, the ones you drank away with the river. Bits and pieces, here and there, more like a dream than like events you lived through (died in), but maybe that’s how things are, now. Even your dreams feel more real than this thing that happens when you’re awake, this thing you used to call life. But you are awake, and you do remember. You remember that you weren’t in love with him, not anymore. You were going to leave, you had told him. You remember he reached past you, and closed the door, and said No. You remember the look in his eyes as he told you he would never let you leave his side. You remember the weight of his hand as it crushed your throat. You remember that, even though you were dead, you ran from him, under the red-black sky of the land of the dead, on the white white bones of the corpse road. Ran much farther than a mile without stopping. Ran into eternity, fleeing into death, away from the pursuing voice that called out how much he had loved you, loved you so much, why couldn’t you see it, he would make you see. You crossed the river’s shore and you washed your hands in it, washed your hands of him, and drank its waters to forget. But now you remember. And the shadows fall painful on your skin, and the sky is too bright, and you cannot turn your back and walk away from him. So you try to die. It’s the only way you can think of to get away from him, and it wasn’t bad, being dead. (The cold kiss of the colder queen.) You were just starting to get used to it. You miss the soothing darkness of the starless sky. You open your wrists because the knife is close and you have never been afraid of blood, but the liquid that runs in the wake of the blade is darker than blood and your skin heals almost before the cut is finished. You take pills, so many pills, and you do not even fall asleep. You sink yourself beneath the waves and discover that you can breathe underwater. He cries when you come back, dripping salt water behind you, and asks why you want to leave him again, when he loves you so much. He says that it is the power of his love that keeps you here. You should be grateful that he rescued you, that he has made it so you can always be together. You think about that word: always. It is stuffed to the letter with time; it is an alternate shape for an infinity symbol. It is unbearable. I’ll tell them, you say. I’ll tell them that you killed me. He doesn’t even bother to laugh. It’s too ridiculous. You’re clearly not dead. He has fixed things, taken it back. Fixed. Things. Rage is acid in your veins. Even the air on your skin is needles. Your lips peel back from your teeth and you hiss like a snake, like a Medusa, like a basilisk. And perhaps your gaze is poison, because it fixes him like a stone. You don’t think of what happens next as murder. His death is only a side effect. But if you are going to be tethered to him for always, for that infinity-shaped word, you are going to choose where. Your fingers are claws and you tear his fragile heart from behind the opened cage of his ribs, and when it ceases to beat in your hand, you feel the rubber band snap of a loosed tether. This is not what you expected. This is better. Free. You are free. You drop the ruined thing from your stained hand. It is full of blood, and not love, after all, no matter what he said. You begin to walk away. You can feel the bones of the corpse road again, and you know that if you just keep walking, you will find it under your feet, that it will return you to where you belong. Then you turn. You look back. There is one thing you need to bring with you. A talisman against future events. This time when you leave, you don’t look back. You carry his head by the hair, and when the white bone of his spine, unstrung like a broken lyre, clatters against the white bone of the road, you stop and you fix it there. You place it very carefully. You make sure that his sightless eyes are always looking into the land of the dead, always looking in the wrong direction to walk out himself, or to drag you back with him. This time, you do not drink from the river of forgetfulness. You do not even wash your hands in it. You return, covered in the price of your passage, to the cold queen on her colder throne, and she presses her cold lips to yours. Your hands smear her red, like the crushed seeds of a pomegranate, and she tells you how glad she is that you have returned.

© 2015 by Kat Howard. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kat Howard’s short fiction has been performed on NPR as part of Selected Shorts, and was nominated for the 2013 World Fantasy Award. It has previously appeared in Lightspeed, Apex, and Subterranean, as well as other places. She currently lives and writes in the Twin Cities.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight. The Hollow Man

Norman Partridge

Four. Yes, that’s how many there were. Come to my home. Come to my home in the hills. Come in the middle of feast, when the skin had been peeled back and I was ready to sup. Interrupting, disrupting. Stealing the comfortable bloat of a full belly, the black scent of clean bones burning dry on glowing embers. Four. Yes. That’s how many there were. I watched them through the stretched-skin window, saw them standing cold in the snow with their guns at their sides. The hollow man saw them too. He heard the ice dogs bark and raised his sunken face, peering at the men through the blue-veined window. He gasped, expectant, and I had to draw my claws from their fleshy sheaths and jab deep into his blackened muscles to keep him from saying words that weren’t mine. Outside, they shouted, Hullo! Hullo in the cabin! and the hollow man sprang for the door. I jumped on his back and tugged the metal rings pinned into his neck. He jerked and whirled away from the latch, but I was left with the sickening sound of his hopeful moans. Once again, control was mine, but not like before. The hollow man was full of strength that he hadn’t possessed in weeks, and the feast was ruined. They had ruined it. “Hullo! We’re tired and need food!” The hollow man strained forward, his fingers groping for the door latch. My scaled legs flexed hard around his middle. His sweaty stomach sizzled and he cried at the heat of me. A rib snapped. Another. He sank backward and, with a dry flutter of wings, I pulled him away from the window, back into the dark. “Could we share your fire? It’s so damn cold!” “We’d give you money, but we ain’t got any. There ain’t a nickel in a thousand miles of here . . .” Small screams tore the hollow man’s beaten lips. There was blood. I cursed the waste and twisted a handful of metal rings. He sank to his knees and quieted. “We’ll leave our guns. We don’t mean no harm!” I jerked one ring, then another. I cooed against the hollow man’s skinless shoulder and made him pick up his rifle. When he had it loaded, cocked, and aimed through a slot in the door, I whispered in his ear and made him laugh. And then I screamed out at them, “You dirty bastards! You stay away! You ain’t comin’ in here!” Gunshots exploded. We only got one of them, not clean but bad enough. The others pulled him into the forest, where the dense trees muffled his screams and kept us from getting another clear shot. The rifle clattered to the floor, smoking faintly, smelling good. We walked to the window. I jingled his neck rings and the hollow man squinted through the tangle of veins, to the spot where a red streak was freezing in the snow. I made the hollow man smile.

• • • •

So four. Still four, when night came and moonlight dripped like melting wax over the snow-capped ridges to the west. Four to make me forget the one nearly drained. Four to make me impatient while soft time crept toward the leaden hour, grain by grain, breath by breath . . . The hour descended. I twisted rings and plucked black muscles, and the hollow man fed the fire and barred the door. I released him and he huddled in a corner, exhausted. I rose through the chimney and thrust myself away from the cabin. My wings fought the biting wind as I climbed high, searching the black forest below. I soared the length of a high mountain glacier and dove away, banking back toward the heart of the valley. Shadows that stretched forever, and then, deep in a jagged ravine that stabbed at a river, a sputtering glimmer of orange. A campfire. So bold. So typical of their kind. I extended my wings and drifted down like a bat, coming to rest in the branches of a giant redwood. Its live green stench nearly made me retch. Huddling in my wings for warmth, I clawed through the bark with a wish to make the ancient monster scream. The tree quivered against the icy wind. Grinning, satisfied, I looked down. Two strong, but different. One weak. One as good as dead. Three. Grizzly sat in silence, his black face as motionless as a tombstone. Instantly, I liked him best. Mammoth, wrapped in a bristling grizzly coat he looked even bigger, almost as big as a grizzly. He sat by the fire, staring at his reflection in a gleaming ax blade. He made me anxious. He could last for months. Across from Grizzly, Redbeard turned a pot and boiled coffee. He straightened his fox-head cap and stroked his beard, clearing it of ice. I didn’t like him. His milky squint was too much like my own. But any fool could see that he hated Grizzly, and that made me smile. Away from them both, crouching under a tree with the whimpering ice dogs, Rabbit wept through swollen eyes. He dug deep in his plastic coat and produced a crucifix. I almost laughed out loud. And in a tent, wrapped in sweat-damp wool and expensive eiderdown that couldn’t keep him warm anymore, still clinging to life, was the dead man, who didn’t matter. But maybe I could make him matter. And then there would only be two.

• • • •

When the clouds came, when they suffocated the unblinking moon and brought sleep to the camp, I swept down to the dying fire and rolled comfortably in the crab- colored coals. The hush of the river crept over me as I decided what to do. To make three into two. Three men, and the dead man. Two tents: Grizzly and Redbeard in one, Rabbit and the dead man in the other. Easy. No worries, except for the dogs. (For ice dogs are wise. Their beast hearts hide simple secrets . . .) The packed snow sizzled beneath my feet as I crept toward Rabbit’s tent. The dead man’s face pressed against one corner of the tent, molding his swollen features in yellow plastic. Each rattling breath gently puffed the thin material away from his face, and each weak gasp slowly drew it back. It was a steady, pleasant sound. I concentrated on it until it was mine. No time for metal rings. No time for naked muscle and feast. Slowly, I reached out and took hold of Rabbit’s mind, digging deep until I found his darkest nightmare. I pulled it loose and let it breathe. At first it frightened him, but I tugged its midnight corners straight and banished its monsters, and soon Rabbit was full of bliss, awake without even knowing it. I circled the tent and pushed against the other side. The dead man rolled across, cold against the warmth of Rabbit’s unbridled nightmare. “Jesus, you’re freezin’, Charlie,” whispered Rabbit as he moved closer. “But don’t worry. I’ll keep you warm, buddy. I’ve gotta keep you warm.” But in the safety of his nightmare, that wasn’t what Rabbit wanted at all. I waited in the tree until Grizzly found them the next morning, wrapped together in the dead man’s bag. He shot Rabbit in the head and left him for the ice dogs. Redbeard buried the dead man in a silky snowdrift.

• • • •

That day was nothing. Grizzly and Redbeard sat at the edge of the clearing and wasted their only chance. Grizzly stared hungrily at the cabin, seeing only what I wanted him to see. Thick, safe walls. A puffing chimney. A home. But Redbeard, damned Redbeard, wise with fear and full of caution, sensed other things. The dead man’s fevered rattle whispering through the trees. An ice dog gnawing a fresh, gristly bone. And bear traps, rusty with blood. Redbeard rose and walked away. Soon Grizzly followed. And then there was only the hollow man, rocking gently in his chair. The soles of his boots buffed the splintery floor and his legs swung back and forth, back and forth.

• • • •

Two. Now two, as the second night was born, a silent twin to the first. Only two, as again I twisted rings and plucked muscles and put the hollow man to sleep. Just two, as my wings beat the night and I flew once more from the sooty chimney to the ravine that stabbed a river. There they sat, as before, grizzly and fox. And there I watched, waiting, with nothing left to do but listen for the sweet arrival of the leaden hour. Grizzly chopped wood and fed the fire. Redbeard positioned blackened pots and watched them boil. Both planned silently while they ate, and afterwards their mute desperation grew, knotting their minds into coils of anger. Grizzly charged the dying embers with whole branches and did not smile until the flames leaped wildly. The heat slapped at Redbeard in waves, harsh against the pleasant brandy- warmth that swam in his gut and slowed his racing thoughts. “Tomorrow mornin’,” blurted Redbeard, “we’re gettin’ away from here. I’m not dealin’ with no crazy hermit.” Grizzly stared at his ax-blade reflection and smiled. “We’re gonna kill us a crazy hermit,” he said. “Tomorrow mornin’.” Soon the old words came, taut and cold, and then Grizzly sprang through the leaping flames, his black coat billowing, and Redbeard’s fox-head cap flew from his head as he whirled around. Ax rang against knife. A white fist tore open a black lip, and the teeth below ripped into a pale knuckle. Knife split ebony cheek. Blood hissed through the flames and sizzled against burning embers. A sharp crack as the ax sank home in a tangle of ribs. Redbeard coughed a misty breath past Grizzly’s ear, and the bigger man spun the smaller around, freed his ax, and watched his opponent stumble into the fire. I laughed above the crackling roar. The ice dogs scattered into the forest, barking, wild with fear and the sour smell of death.

• • • •

So Grizzly had survived. He stood still, his singed coat smoking, his cut cheek oozing blood. His mind was empty — there was no remorse, only a feeling that he was the strongest, he was the best. Knowing that, I flew home happy. There was not much in the cabin that I could use. I found only a single whalebone needle, yellow with age, and no thread at all. I watched the veined window as I searched impatiently for a substitute, and at last I discovered a spool of fishing line in a rusty metal box. Humming, I went about my work. First I drew strips of the hollow man’s pallid skin over his shrunken shoulder muscles, fastening them along his backbone with a cross stitch. Then I bunched the flabby tissue at the base of his skull and made the final secret passes with my needle. Now he was nothing. I tore the metal rings out of his neck and the hollow man twitched as if shocked. A bullet ripped through the cabin door. “I’m gonna get you, you bastard,” cried Grizzly, his voice loud but worn. “You hear me? I’m gonna get you!” The hollow man sprang from the rocker; his withered legs betrayed him and he fell to the floor. I balanced on the back of the chair and hissed at him, spreading my wings in mock menace. With a laughable scream, he flung himself at the door. Grizzly must have been confused by the hollow man’s ravings, for he didn’t fire again until the fool was nearly upon him. An instant of pain, another of relief, and the hollow man crumpled, finished. And then Grizzly just sat in the snow, his eyes fixed on the open cabin door. I watched him from a corner of the veined window, afraid to move. He took out his ax and stared at his reflection in the glistening blade. After a time Grizzly pocketed the ax, and then he pulled his great coat around him, disappearing into its bristling black folds. In the afternoon I grew fearful. While the redwoods stretched their heavy shadows over the cabin, Grizzly rose and followed the waning sun up a slight ridge. He cleaned his gun. He even slept for a few moments. Then he slapped his numb face awake and rubbed snow over his sliced cheek. Grizzly came home. I hid above the doorway. Grizzly sighed as he crossed the threshold, and I bit back my laughter. The door swung shut. Grizzly stooped and tossed a thick log onto the dying embers. He grinned as it crackled aflame. I pushed off hard and dove from the ceiling. My claws ripped through grizzly hide and then into human hide. Grizzly bucked awfully, even tried to smash me against the hearth, but the heat only gave me power and as my legs burned into his stomach Grizzly screamed. I drove my claws into a shivering bulge of muscle and brought him to his knees. The metal rings came next. I pinned them into his neck: one, two, three, four.

• • • •

After I had supped, I sat the hollow man in the rocker and whispered to him as we looked through the veined window. A storm was rising in the west. We watched it come for a long time. Soon, a fresh dusting of snow covered the husk of man lying out on the ridge. I told Grizzly that he had been my favorite. I told him that he would last a long time.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Publishers Weekly called Norman Partridge’s Dark Harvest “contemporary American writing at its finest” and chose the novel as one of the 100 Best Books of 2006. His fiction includes horror, suspense, crime, and the fantastic — “sometimes all in one story,” says his friend writer Joe R. Lansdale. Author of five short story collections, Partridge’s novels include the Jack Baddalach mysteries Saguaro Riptide and The Ten-Ounce Siesta, plus The Crow: Wicked Prayer, which was adapted for film. Partridge’s compact, thrill- a-minute style has been praised by Stephen King and Peter Straub, and his work has received multiple Bram Stoker awards.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight. The Trampling

Christopher Barzak

It starts with a small child — a girl of no more than eight or nine, with stringy blond hair and grease caked under her ragged fingernails — trotting down a street in a not so fashionable district of London. It’s 1886. It’s nearly three in the morning, the night shrouded in fog. She’s barefoot and hungry, and back in the rooms she left just ten minutes ago, her parents have begun making up from the row they’ve just ended, a row that included a vast amount of cursing, thrown cutlery, and fisticuffs, leaving the girl’s mother with a great weal across her cheek and another across her forehead. The girl’s been sent for a doctor, who might stitch up the cuts. Her parents’ making-up will consist mainly of the girl’s father forcing himself into her mother, disregarding the tears in her eyes and the whimpering he mistakes for her pleasure, and in this way he will allow himself to believe that everything that came before that moment has been forgiven. The girl, as mentioned, is hungry. And also somewhat frightened by the goings-on back home, though over the years her fear of her father’s temper and her mother’s sharp tongue has waned. Little by little, the girl has come to see that, though one might easily and consistently be hurt in mind or body by living in the circumstances she’s been born to, one can survive if one keeps her wits about her. So when a fight breaks out, she knows to slip out the door and wait beneath the window ledge with the flowerless flower box sitting upon it, until the shouting and the tussling is finally over. Which is what she’s done. Then her father called her in and said, “Run and get the doctor.” Which is what she’s doing. Even this late at night, there are doctors of a certain type — apothecaries more than anything — that will waken and go to someone’s aid, even though the streets have almost emptied. Even this late at night, too, you can sometimes find a gentleman who may stop to give a barefoot urchin a coin, enough to buy a sweet from the shops in the morning if she can hide it long enough from her parents. And many gentlemen won’t even require her to sing a song or to perform a dance or to allow his hand to caress her for several moments. No, the ideal gentleman will simply press a coin into her hand and will then move along, shaking his head, disturbed by the overwhelming force of pity she’s stirred in him. If she can find an ideal gentleman while running for the doctor, she thinks it could at least mitigate some of the disaster she’s just lived through. To find a doctor, she’s had to go down a street that she’d probably recognize more easily during the day, when people are actually walking about and the shops are open. She’s unsure of whether or not she’s taken a wrong turn, because it feels like it’s taking longer than usual to find the building where the old sawbones who usually sees to her mother’s ailments lives. And despite her belief that there are always kind gentlemen available at any hour, none seem to be appearing now to help her. The moon is high. The gaslights flicker in the white fog like faraway lighthouse beacons. Though the girl doesn’t see any gentlemen appearing in her path, someone is in fact coming toward her. Someone — or something — is approaching from nearly two blocks away, heading in her direction, his footfalls thudding against the cobblestones, his breathing fast and heavy. He is not a gentleman in the least, though. He is more like some kind of elemental force: a dark wind blowing down an alleyway, pushing over carts, spilling apples, shaking windows until they shatter in his wake. He is hurrying away from something at this moment, his arms pumping furiously, as though he’s being chased, and his bloodshot eyes are glistening. When he turns a corner, he sees the little girl just up ahead. She’s standing under the foggy glow of a street lantern, a sole actor illuminated by stage lights. He doesn’t slow down in the least. He goes forward, possibly even faster, as if she is just another obstacle placed in his way — an old barrel, or a bin full of rotting cabbages — that for obscure and paranoiac reasons he must now confront. The girl turns to see him barreling down on her, coming at her with the pace and intent of a juggernaut, and promptly she opens her mouth to scream. Before she can loose a cry, he is there, knocking her backward, her head hitting the stone upon which she’d been standing, and then he tramples over her, his boots thudding across her small body, snapping her left arm in two. After which the girl does manage to scream, loudly and over and over, unwittingly calling the attention of someone nearby. A gentleman, actually. An ideal gentleman by the name of Enfield who, on his way home from what he’ll later describe to a confidante as some place at the end of the world, has just witnessed what’s occurred from across the street, and who now shouts, “You there! You, sir! I say. Halt!” When the dark wind that blew the girl over does not heed his words, Enfield rushes across the street and begins to chase the monster. It is a long chase, though Enfield does not feel exactly how long it is as adrenaline pumps through his body. As the cries of the little girl rise like frightened night birds, he quickens his pace, faster and faster, going one block, two, three, then a fourth, until suddenly he is breathing down the neck of the man who assaulted her, grabbing the collar of his overcoat, and lifting him off the ground by an inch. “I said to stop!” Enfield shouts, and then places the offensive cur back on his feet, only for the man to turn around to reveal his face, shadowed beneath the brim of his hat. It is a normal enough face, but something in it strikes to the heart of Enfield, sending a shiver through his body, weakening his grip on the man’s collar. It is a normal enough face — two eyes, not set too far apart or too close, two ears in proper alignment, a nose without a break, a mouth full of all its teeth even — but something in how it is all put together signals pure evil. The evil man sneers, and Enfield says, “You, sir, have hurt a child. A child to whom we shall now give our help.” No argument ensues. The horrid little man — who is actually not little so much as stooped over as he walks — simply says, “Very well, then,” and walks alongside Enfield, who has still not released his grip on the man’s collar. It’s only after they walk the four blocks back to the street corner where the terrible incident occurred that Enfield realizes the length of the chase and begins to feel winded as he returns to normal. A small crowd has gathered around the girl at this point: her parents have come looking for her, along with the doctor she’d intended to find in the first place, and a few people from the neighborhood that were woken by her cries. Her mother’s face is shrouded with a shawl she’s pulled over her head, as though she means to keep out the winter chill instead of hiding the violence done to her earlier that evening. Her father still stinks of gin, but by now he’s at least able to stand without wobbling. The little girl looks up at them all as they converse above her. After examining her briefly, the old sawbones snaps his black bag closed and stands again, telling everyone, “Her arm is broken, I’m afraid,” which sends them all into a concerted argument with the man who ran her over. They have questions for him. What is his name? “Hyde,” he tells them. Her mother repeats that name like a curse, then spits at the man’s feet, mere inches from the girl’s body. They will bring that name to ruin, they tell him. They will make such a scandal of that name that it will stink from one end of London to the other. The man who trampled the girl cannot seem to make a face that exudes any hint of an apology, which angers the gathered crowd even more. He wears a continual sneer, as though all of humanity is beneath his contempt, as if all of humanity is his for the trampling. He adjusts the brim of his hat so that it shades his eyes into dark pools, and says, “If you choose to make capital out of this accident, I am naturally helpless. No gentleman but wishes to avoid a scene. Name your figure.” Numbers fly back and forth over the girl’s head. They seem to have forgotten her at this point. The man, Enfield, who brought her assailant back to face justice, says, “One hundred pounds!” and the girl’s father looks at him as though he’s demanded the moon itself. “A hundred pounds!” says Hyde. “Why, that is enough to purchase a house!” “Or to purchase our silence,” Enfield says, his voice low, almost growling like a dog giving warning. “Very well, then,” says Hyde. “A hundred pounds.” “And how will you produce a hundred pounds at this hour?” Enfield asks, seeming angry that Hyde has agreed to meet his figure, as if he were hoping the man would argue, so that he might instead have him thrown into prison. Hyde simply grins an evil grin and says, “Follow me.” Before they leave, the old sawbones sets the girl’s arm and arranges it in a sling, muttering, “It’s a simple break, but do not let her move it.” He also gives the girl’s mother a vial to help the girl sleep, if sleep will not come tonight. “Only a thimbleful, though,” he advises. “It is strong stuff.” Then the girl’s father lifts her up and places her into her mother’s arms. The mother takes the girl back to their dirty little rooms and puts her to bed, then sits beside the girl’s cot to sing her a lullaby. Her notes flicker like the flame in the bedside lantern as she sings an old song about a child who’s been ill and, after breathing her last breath, is released from her body to walk across a star-filled sky. Afterward, the girl pretends to fall asleep, and the mother folds her arms across her stomach as she rocks back and forth in her chair, over and over, stifling her sobbing. The girl lies in bed, eyes closed, pretending to sleep so that the mother will eventually stop crying and leave her altogether. It is only after the mother stands to go, closing the door behind her, that the girl’s eyes fly open again, and she stares up at the ceiling, where shadows are starting to gather. They move as if they have a life of their own, bending and winking. She watches them shift and transform in a hypnotic fashion, until suddenly she sees a figure forming above her, and she begins to scream. • • • •

We’ll leave the girl like that for a moment. We must now follow the men — her father, the old sawbones, and Mr. Enfield, her savior — on their journey to acquire Mr. Hyde’s hush money. Mr. Hyde leads them away from the scene of the crime, stamping his cane on the stones in front of him. They walk not a great distance, but in that short span the streets change into a somewhat dingy neighborhood. Dingy, but what one calls quiet. Dignified working class quarters, where the houses are bland but livable, and where the streets during the daytime take on a friendlier air as the shopkeepers push their grains and goods outside for passersby to consider. This neighborhood borders a much better one, so those who live on this particular street take pride in their nearness to polite society. They come to a stop at one particularly sinister-looking block of buildings — two stories high with not even one window, and a gable that thrusts itself out and over them like a gargoyle — and there Hyde opens a recessed door with a key and looks over his shoulder to say, “One moment, I will be right back,” before closing the door behind him. The door is a blistered and discolored affair, set back into a sliver of darkness. It’s the sort of place where tramps take cover, sleep, and strike matches against the panels. It’s the sort of place where children decide to keep shop, where schoolboys try their knives on the moldings. Enfield, the father, and the old sawbones look upon it and shiver. Hyde returns quickly, as promised, and hands the father coins and a check. “What’s all this?” the father asks, and Hyde explains that he only has ten pounds in his quarters, and the rest can be withdrawn from the banks in the morning. Before the father can say anything, Enfield takes the check from him and examines it for a long moment, after which he lowers it slowly, so that Hyde sees the man’s eyes revealed little by little, and then his entire face. And Enfield’s face betrays a shocking disbelief. “How did you come by this check, sir?” Enfield inquires calmly, though his voice is tinged with an even greater edge than before. And Hyde does not attempt to answer with any complex lie. He simply assures Enfield that the check, despite being signed by a Dr. Henry Jekyll, is quite good. “If it is good,” Enfield says, “then you wouldn’t mind waiting with the rest of us until morning, when we could all go to the bank together.” He looks at the father, who nods, and then at the old sawbones, who sighs but also nods, and then turns back to Hyde, who is grinning beneath the shadow of his hat’s brim. “But of course,” says Hyde. “Where, however, might we wait?” He looks back to the sinister building behind him, and the other men look with him. Hyde’s grin grows wider, though they can’t see it. And their own faces look grim as they consider what Hyde’s lair might contain. “My rooms are not far from here,” Enfield says, and they follow him several blocks into the bordering streets, where polite society still sleeps. They pass two hours in Enfield’s drawing room, which has a fire going for warmth, and he shares out a bit of brandy between the men, Hyde included. The father drinks his too quickly, rather than sipping. Enfield is perturbed by the man’s lack of manners, but rises to pour him another regardless. If he didn’t, he would not be a gentleman. The men do not speak much, and the father eventually falls asleep in a wingback leather chair, snoring a bit as he descends into unconsciousness. Hyde snorts at the irony of this development, and peers through the fire lit shadows to see if Enfield and the old sawbones, too, find it humorous that the father of the victim is the first to reconcile himself with their odd situation enough to sleep soundly in a strange room among strangers, one of whom has injured his daughter. Enfield rolls his eyes a little, then looks toward the window, where the sun has just begun to rise behind the silhouetted roofline across the street, turning the sky pink, then orange, and then finally a blue that glistens like ice. When the bank opens, the men are already outside, waiting to enter. Waiting to end their enforced company. So they slip through the pillars into the building, where Enfield instructs the father and the old sawbones to wait on a bench near the front, and then he and Hyde continue further, seeming to grow smaller as they approach the center of the high-vaulted room. A man comes out from behind a large desk to greet them, shakes their hands vigorously, takes the check from Enfield, asks for them to wait just a moment, ferries the check to an inner chamber, then returns minutes later with a billfold of bank notes, which he presents to Enfield, which Enfield carries back to the father waiting on the soft-leather bench, to place it in the father’s hands gently, soberly, with an air of nobility, as if he is knighting or anointing the father with this money that has purchased their silence. The check is good, as Hyde said it would be. The father now holds a hundred pounds on his person. More than he has ever seen in his life, even if he added up every shilling that had ever slipped through his grubby fingers. They stand in a circle staring down at the bank notes, except for Hyde, who is already moving toward the exit. “It has been an interesting evening, my friends,” he says, and then he laughs loudly — once, twice, a third time — as he pauses at the door to look over his shoulder briefly, to sneer at them once more. And then he is gone, sticking his cane out before his next step, strolling among the good people of London. The men dissolve their company and the father returns to his dirty rooms in his dirty district, where the mother has fallen asleep sitting at the kitchen table, her head rested on her folded arms. He wakes her up, laughing, and dances a jig as he shows her the money, which makes the mother laugh as well now, hysterically so, and then she has a kettle on and she’s still laughing and laughing — she cannot stop laughing — and they’re making plans, so many plans, more plans than the money can even make happen. A house. New wardrobes. Perhaps they will open a shop for the mother. She’s a good seamstress, after all. She could have her own place, if they’d purchase the equipment and all of the materials she’d need to make a go of it. Together they could make a go of it, they’re thinking, they could make a go of this life that they’d nearly given up on after years and years of backbreaking labor that never amounted to anything but squalor. The girl, who has not yet fallen asleep, hears them laughing and dancing. She stares up at the ceiling and shakes her head at each idea they produce in the midst of their hysteria. These dreams, she knows, none of them will come true. She knows this because she knows her father, knows his rarely kept promises, knows his seeming inability to flourish even when good fortune befalls him. Whatever he touches turns to dust and ruin, the opposite of Midas. And she is right. The father will not buy the house they’ve imagined that morning. He’ll rent one for them instead, in a better neighborhood, of course, and yes, he’ll buy them new clothes. But the dreamed-of shop for her mother will never come to fruition. He’ll have started drinking far too much gin again by then; and really, even now, as they’re making plans for what to do with the money, he is already thinking of his next glass. And as the money withers little by little, he will grow frightened and will begin to gamble, trying to regain his losses, but the money will only disappear faster and faster, as if it’s caught a wasting disease, and eventually he’ll be unable to pay the rent on the new house and will be evicted, only to return to the dirty rooms in which they are now, at this very moment, dancing and laughing and making plans for a better future. The girl shakes her head as she holds her broken arm and tries not to look up at the shadows crawling on her ceiling. They seem to be alive, to crawl like snakes.

• • • •

This is the last we’ll see of the girl in a somewhat hopeful situation. Her arm will heal, of course, but the old sawbones unfortunately did not set it properly, and because of this she will not be able to bring it behind her back or raise it entirely over her head for the rest of her life. It will be a limitation that excludes her from certain kinds of work. Like the work her mother had lined up for her prior to the trampling. Work as a servant in a decent house, where the girl might have taken coats from gentlemen as they entered to visit the girl’s hypothetical master, for whom she might have cleaned and blacked the stove and helped the cook with preparations in the kitchen. Instead, in the coming months, after the father has moved them to the new house, then moved them back to their old rooms after losing the money, the girl will be turned down for the position as it becomes clear she isn’t capable of doing certain kinds of labor. Instead, she’ll go to work in a match factory at the end of their grubby street, where she will work sixteen-hour shifts dipping matchsticks into vats of phosphorous, the fumes of which will eventually come to rot her teeth. She will continue to dip matchsticks from then on, from age ten until age sixteen, which is when she’ll begin to cough blood into her hands and onto her pillow — another effect of the fumes she’ll breathe for sixteen hours out of each day of her life, more chemicals than oxygen — and when that happens she will remain in bed for the rest of her remaining days and nights, which are unfortunately quite limited. Hers is not an unusual life, really, even now, where we stand over a century beyond the girl’s desperate circumstances. Cell phones manufactured by indentured factory workers, clothes made in places where sixteen-hour work shifts are still quite ordinary, where such a shift may produce only a dollar or two for those who work them, and where children scavenge among the material wreckage other nations have deposited in their homelands, looking for copper and other metal that might be salvaged. It is not unusual, even now, to hear of places where the powerful have arranged for the working populations to enter into a new kind of slavery, where a person can toil freely, without compulsion, for the profit of others yet still go hungry, still live in squalor despite their hard labor. It is not unusual, even now, to hear stories of the powerful attempting to eradicate laws that have been erected to protect people from allowing misery of this kind to dominate their lives. Laws that would protect people from them, really, the Hydes of the world, who appear before us as the highest members of society, seeming as good as Dr. Jekyll himself seemed, doing charity work and throwing galas for the underprivileged in an effort to obscure their all-consuming greed, to help obscure their inner desire to harm, to exploit, to trample. The girl lies in bed with her hands on her stomach. She hasn’t been to the matchstick factory for nearly a week. Her breathing is shallow; her chest stutters as it rises and falls. It is almost time for her to leave her body and walk across the night above the rooftops, to leave the pain this world has given her, as in her mother’s song. But for now she still breathes. She still lingers. She still stares up and into the vault of darkness gathering above and waits for the shadow that has haunted her since the night of her trampling. The shadow that had made her scream that night, right before we left her to follow the men to Enfield’s quarters. On that night, the night Hyde ran the girl over, she’d feigned sleep so her mother would leave her bedside. And afterward the girl had opened her eyes, only to see a cloud of black shadows swirling above her. At first the shadows moved like gentle winds, but the longer she watched, the faster they stirred, growing furious and more powerful, bending across her ceiling, until all at once they coalesced into the figure of a man, and in the next moment the man dove toward her. The mother, from the front room, had heard and came running, casting out the shadowy figure in the very instant she opened the door and filled the room with light from the kitchen. “What is it, love?” she asked the girl. “Is it your arm?” But the girl only shook her head and said, “It was him. It was him again. That man. He was coming to trample me.” “Oh love,” her mother said. “It’s all over now. It’s all over.” But it wasn’t over, not really. Not for the girl, who would continue to see his shadow appear above her every night for the rest of her brief life, even after other horrors she would eventually encounter at the factory might have replaced him as an alternative source of torment. He was still out there. It was not over. Not for anyone. The girl knew this on the night he trampled her, and she knows it still, now, in her final hour. Even as she waits for her last breath to leave her, she can hear the clomping of his heels on the cobblestones and his heavy breathing as he approaches. And then he is there in the room with her once more. She gasps, releasing a chilled plume of breath into the air above her, and then she is skipping across the night sky above a jagged line of London’s rooftops, free, as the lullaby her mother once sang her promised. He is out there, even now, still running with the pace and intent of a juggernaut down streets and alleyways, prepared to trample over anything and anyone, prepared to trample over the world if he has to, still sneering, as if all of humanity is beneath him.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Christopher Barzak is the author of the Crawford Fantasy Award winning novel, One for Sorrow, which has been made into the recently released Sundance feature film Jamie Marks is Dead. His second novel, The Love We Share Without Knowing, was a finalist for the Nebula and Tiptree Awards. He is also the author of two collections: Birds and Birthdays, a collection of surrealist fantasy stories, and Before and Afterlives, a collection of supernatural fantasies, which won the 2013 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Collection. He grew up in rural Ohio, has lived in a southern California beach town, the capital of Michigan, and has taught English outside of Tokyo, Japan, where he lived for two years. His next novel, Wonders of the Invisible World, will be published by Knopf in 2015. Currently he teaches fiction writing in the Northeast Ohio MFA program at Youngstown State University.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight. Blessed Be the Bound

Lucy Taylor

The Binding takes place tomorrow at the Sisters of Solace Hospital outside Charlottesville, Virginia. From my bed, I can just see the peaks of the October hills, dappled maroon and scarlet. If I could lift my head, I’d be able to glimpse the wing of what was once a dormitory at the University of Virginia and now serves as a Confinement Center for the most violent prisoners/inmates, but gel compression restraints, deemed more humane by hospital staff than electro-loops, ensnare my wrists and ankles. Even if I braved the pain and wriggled free, shimmering vertical bands across the windows expose the presence of high voltage grids. Today is Mother’s last chance to see me before I am Bound to my brother. My last hope for deliverance. Acid rises in my throat at the bitter irony of hoping for rescue from Mother, since O’Dell and I have long suspected it was she who, in a fit of pique or spite, reported us for what the law calls fourth degree sexual deviancy. Especially galling if we’re right, since we both shared unsanctioned intimacies with Mother for years before we explored activities, deviant or otherwise, with each other. At the hearing, a venerable psychiatrist argued I was addicted to my sibling as surely as the psychonauts and ket- freaks in the floating colonies off the coast are in thrall to the black gusts of brain-burn, that having been kept homebound by Mother, I was both naive and eminently corruptible, a victim of my wicked brother’s perverse desires. “Enticed into his depravity,” hissed the gerbil-faced little defense attorney while I sat meekly, head bowed, trying to convey with every breath my profound and scalding shame. The performance failed; my carefully pantomimed remorse was judged a poor facsimile of penitence. I was the cunning, lustful one, the judge declared. My pretty brother, though condemned to the same fate as I, was merely susceptible and stupid. Our sentence, to be Bound for life, is the penalty reserved for society’s worst: murderers, traitors to the State, and second through fourth degree sex criminals. Unlike O’Dell, who remains willfully ignorant of the details of Binding and still claims to fully expect a last minute reprieve, I’ve researched the procedure compulsively, read biographies and watched biopics of the Bound, conversed with holographic surgeons, and, prior to my conviction, toured the Museum of the Bound on the Plaza in Washington D.C., where visitors must sign a waver holding the Museum blameless if they pass out, throw up, or suffer permanent trauma from viewing the exhibits. The reality of it still stalls my mind: two bodies of the same or opposite sex, snipped and sliced and stitched together in a gruesome flesh-garment of jigsawed limbs, split bones, and sutured skin, afflicted with the vacant gaze and shuffling, stumbling gait peculiar to their maimed condition. Worst of all, the monstrous final hours of the partner who outlasts its mate, since Binding is forever, even when the so-called “living” one is fused to a decaying, putrid corpse. Although the physical abominations leave me reeling, still more soul-shattering is the utter forfeiture of privacy and solitude, an especially bitter hell for one whose preferred companionship has always been her own. I reflect that the one thing not forfeited is the very act that led to this catastrophe in the first place. A jocular therapist even winkingly assured me that, since I am limber and O’Dell well-made, we will eventually learn to mate, or may even — unimaginably — decide to procreate. Nothing, after all, is forbidden to the Bound. They have paid for their crimes and are at liberty to indulge whatever indecencies or degradations they’re disposed to. In more backward parts of the world, I’m told, people pay small fortunes to watch Bound couples making love. Or vaster sums to join them. I can’t imagine why anyone would wish either form of entertainment. I remember, as a child of ten, going up the steps to the Abbey of the Stoning with Mother and O’Dell, who was then nine. A Bound couple, one of the first to survive longer than a few weeks, was on display. Above the creature’s heads, a gold plaque provided details of their crime, but I was too stunned to read anything beyond their name, which I still recall was Marcus-Angelina. Incapable of standing, the poor off-kilter beast crouched on a specially constructed seat before the altar. From beneath its purple robes protruded two thick legs, hirsute and muscular, while the female’s one remaining leg, tube-thin and flaccid, dangled at the side, an abutment of lab-grown flesh conjoining her legless hip to the male’s intact one. Their three mismatched arms, two belonging to the female, one to the male, fidgeted and twitched in ceaseless, spastic agitation. Their cloudy and dilated eyes were white and empty as eggs. I know now that the ministers had drugged it, but at the time I thought the enraptured gaze was the result of its unholy union, a kind of ghastly erotic trance. I know better now. Poor maimed creature that it was, a waxy tear slid down the female’s bloodless cheek. “Touch it. Touch it for luck,” urged Mother. The thought of contact with that mutilated flesh revolted and appalled me, in part due to the fact that I knew those three legs extended upward to two groins, two sets of genitals, but unlike O’Dell, who looked like he might faint, I was also fascinated. I pressed a single finger to the female’s spongey thigh and watched, repulsed, as tremors rippled knee to ankle and a rash of gooseflesh spread across the skin like faded Braille upon an ashen parchment. “The Lord has purified them,” intoned Mother. She bowed, dragging O’Dell and me with her, and kissed the creature’s three bare feet as was the custom among the more ostentatiously devout.

• • • •

“Eugenia?” The door revolves and a fax-bot with a smile like a surgical scar coos in a ludicrously come-hither voice, “Mama is here, Eugenia.” She pronounces “Mama” with a British accent, a ridiculous affectation that can only mean she is an elder-bot, programmed in the U.K. prior to the Euro-Sino conflict. Swiveling toward the bed, she commands, “Deactivate restraints.” After a moment the gel clamps ungrip, allowing me to sit up and finally, unsteadily, to stand. The fax-bot, evidently programmed to feign consideration, diplomatically withdraws. Mother minces gingerly into the room, stiff-legged as a deflowered child. Except for plumped lips dyed permanently scarlet, her face is leached of color, her eyes kohl hollows scooped above the jutting cliffs of her implanted cheekbones. Around the ivory column of her neck gleams a sunstone cross that glimmers softly as though lit from within; from her ears dangle pendulous pearls. Her numerous tattoos are raised and garishly colored, according to the fashion. At the sight of her, adrenalin claws through my bloodstream and, astonishingly, tears of relief sprout copiously. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come.” The admission shocks me; I hadn’t understood the depth of my terror that, in my time of greatest need, I’d be abandoned by her. But then, before I can ask for what she’s brought me, she whispers gravely, “Terrible news. O’Dell bit his wrists open last night and almost bled to death. The sensors activated a warning just in time. When I saw him, he was hysterical, screaming that the Binding can’t really be happening, that he can’t go through with it.” “I’m glad he lived,” I say in my best hypocrite’s simper. “If O’Dell had died, I’d just be Bound to another criminal.” Of course, once I’m dead, that’s exactly what will happen to O’Dell, but I can’t worry about that. Was he thinking about me with his face pressed to his own gore? Did it bother him, knowing that I’d be Bound to a stranger? Mother’s gaze darts about the room like a bottled fly. Her talon-sharp nails clamp onto my arm. For the first time in years, I tolerate her touch without recoiling. “What we talked about, Eugenia . . . what you asked me to do . . .” “Yes, yes, I’m ready. It’s time.” She fingers the sunstone, which yields up rays of delicate, refracted light. “Sometimes people do terrible things, my darling. Sometimes love expresses itself in desperate ways.” Is this her way of saying O’Dell and I are forgiven? Or is she finally confessing that she betrayed us to the authorities? She starts to tremble uncontrollably, a tic plucking so violently at her mouth that it drags her face askew. I guess that even she, though a vocal supporter of the idea of Binding, quails before the truth of it. “I loved O’Dell,” she says defiantly, as though someone has suggested otherwise, “but a daughter is different. A son goes out into the world and takes a bridemother. A first-born daughter, if she’s virtuous, remains at home. A mother’s love for her daughter — that’s the unbreakable bond.” She slides her hand seductively along my forearm, gently and sensuously, as though her palm is a small boat gliding silently up a river of milky skin. “Your arms are so soft and shapely. I wonder which one they’ll remove.” That breaks the spell. I seize her wrist and twist it until she cringes and cries out. “Stop it! Give me what you brought!” Her fingers stroke the sunstone again and I think: There! It’s hidden there! until she says, “I’m sorry, I can’t do it. I can’t kill you. The toxin I smuggled in for you, I gave it to O’Dell.” Her voice soars recklessly and she directs her words toward the voice monitors disguised as air filter units in the wall. “He was so grateful when I put the poison on his tongue. His face was rapturous. He died thanking me.” The screams I’ve swallowed all my life tear past my teeth, an anguished howl that brings the fax-bot accelerating into the room so fast she bangs into the wall. A red oblivion-dot gleams wetly on her finger. “Too noisy you,” she chides, though not unkindly, and taps the dot with its cornucopia of hallucinogens directly in the center of my forehead. I have time only to gasp, “My brother — she murdered him”, before the world incinerates, the drugs blitzing through synapses, resurrecting extinct galaxies and annihilating new ones inside my neocortex. The fax-bot’s face looms wide and globulous, an enormous amoeboid blob undulating in and out of my telescoping vision. Moles as big as barnacles, conceived for verisimilitude by some bot-designer comic, festoon her ill- made chin. “We know she killed O’Dell,” she says. And that is all that matters.

• • • •

When I wake up, I am riddled with razors, my bones a bed of nails, my lungs full of mucus and mud. At my slightest movement, unseen incisions rip and leak. An avuncular and dour face hovers above me. I recognize the doctor, Montague Tritt, assigned to counsel O’Dell and me post-Binding. But O’Dell is dead. Tritt frowns and steeples his fingers, his whiskery mouth forming a mackerel-ish “o.” “Dear me,” he says. Beside me, something thrashes feebly. It whimpers tremulously as it forms words. I must say “it,” for I can’t attribute to it any sex, any individuality, any name, but I can tell the stump of its left leg is Bound to my right hip and the stump of my right arm is fused to its left shoulder, each wound affixed by a few centimeters of artfully applied prosthetic meat. “Eugenia,” exults the thing that speaks like Mother, “we’ve been forgiven for our crimes.” With my remaining arm, I tear at the graft on our mutual shoulder and hear my scream and hers scrape the upper ends of agony. Tritt thumbs an oblivion-dot against my temple. My skull brims with hissing lava that quickly cools to a gentle snowdrift of ash as I sink into the center of the dead volcano that is my core. I pray that I can hide in here forever. “Blessed,” someone murmurs, “be the Bound.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Lucy Taylor is the author of seven novels, including Nailed, Saving Souls, Eternal Hearts, Dancing with Demons, and the Stoker-winning The Safety of Unknown Cities. Her stories have appeared in over a hundred anthologies and magazines, including The Mammoth Book of Historical Erotica, The Best of Cemetery Dance, Twentieth Century Gothic, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and The Century’s Best Horror Fiction. Most recently her work has appeared in Danse Macabre, Exotic Gothic 5, and Best Horror of the Year 5. Her collection Fatal Journeys is due out in early 2014, as are stories in Axes of Evil, Miseria’s Chorale, and Of Devils and Deviants. Her story, “In the Cave of the Delicate Singers,” was recently acquired for the June/July 2015 issue of Tor.com. After seven years in Pismo Beach, CA, she recently relocated to Santa Fe, NM.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight. NONFICTION The H Word: You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby — The Female Protagonist in Horror

Lisa Morton

“Hippolita, his wife, an amiable lady, did sometimes venture to represent the danger of marrying their only son so early, considering his great youth, and greater infirmities; but she never received any other answer than reflections on her own sterility, who had given him but one heir.” — The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole

That description comes on the first page of The Castle of Otranto, the seminal work by Horace Walpole that not only announced the arrival of the Gothic novel, but could conceivably be thought of as also the first major contemporary horror novel. In some respects, the novel is surprising — near that same beginning, a gigantic helmet falls surreally out of the sky — but its attitude toward its female characters is familiar: They serve as mothers (who are defined by their failure to conceive), wives, daughters, and victims. Fortunately, horror fiction in the twenty-first century has expanded past those traditional roles (remember when the catch-phrase “You’ve come a long way, baby” referred to a cigarette targeted at women?). Along the way, the most interesting horror fiction has reflected society’s changing views . . . and in a few cases (see below), may even have helped push those changes. The greatest of the Gothic writers, Ann Radcliffe, redefined the genre forever by centering her stories around young, smart heroines who typically find themselves placed under the thrall of tyrannical aristocrats until they escape with the help of a beloved suitor whom they finally wed. In her masterpiece The Mysteries of Udolpho, Radcliffe describes her protagonist Emily as a young woman of learning, who was educated by her father: “He gave her a general view of the sciences, and an exact acquaintance with every part of elegant literature. He taught her Latin and English, chiefly that she might understand the sublimity of their best poets. She discovered in her early years a taste for works of genius; and it was St. Aubert’s principle, as well as his inclination, to promote every innocent means of happiness. ‘A well- informed mind,’ he would say, ‘is the best security against the contagion of folly and of vice . . .’” Critics have suggested that Radcliffe’s fiction actually reinforced social mores at a time when much European society was in upheaval; in essence, her endings — when the heroines settled down to serene domesticity — salved anxieties raised throughout the stories. Mary Shelley may have been a radical feminist in her real life, but feminist themes are, at best, veiled in her 1818 classic Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus. Contemporary critics have suggested that the tale of a scientist who creates a monster-man from dead parts may have been Mary’s response to the death of her own baby. Scholar Mary Poovey has also read Frankenstein as being partly about Shelley’s own fear of self-assertion. Shelley had, after all, first published the novel anonymously, which caused later critics to suggest that some of it may have been written by her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley (in response to that suggestion, Mary responded, “I certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling, to my husband, and yet but for his incitement, it would never have taken the form in which it was presented to the world”). It would take 1935’s movie classic The Bride of Frankenstein to add a feminist switch to the monster’s story — in the end, the Bride rejects (in no uncertain terms) her role as the monster’s mate. The two greatest American dark fantasists, Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, take almost opposite views on women as characters (and probably in their real lives as well). Poe’s romantic obsessions are well-known; nearly half of his poems center on women, and his fiction tends to idolize them . . . almost literally, as in “Ligeia” (1838), for example, where he describes the eponymous heroine in a paragraph that also references “the misty-winged Ashtophet of idolatrous Egypt.” Lovecraft, on the other hand, is often cited as having written only one piece that featured a prominent female character — “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1937) — and in that story, Asenath Waite seems to embody the author’s own fears about the fairer sex, as when he notes that “. . . she would frighten her schoolmates with leers and winks of an inexplicable kind . . .” If Lovecraft and Poe seem to describe women more through their own personal relationships than through society’s, most of the famous works from the late-nineteenth century seem to veer more toward the latter. Take, for example, Professor Van Helsing’s admiration for Mina in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897): “Ah, that wonderful Madam Mina! She has man’s brain — a brain that a man should have were he much gifted — and a woman’s heart.” Stoker tells us that Mina is extraordinary in Victorian society by possessing masculine intelligence, which she indeed demonstrates throughout the novel (much of which is drawn from her journals). Henry James, in 1898’s The Turn of the Screw, offers up a heroine who chafes against her societal constraints: Not long after she arrives at the estate where she begins looking after two children, the governess notes, “I learned something — at first, certainly — that had not been one of the teachings of my small, smothered life; learned to be amused, and even amusing, and not to think for the morrow. It was the first time, in a manner, that I had known space and air and freedom . . .” Consider that in 1897, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies was formed in Great Britain, indicating a society where women’s roles were in flux. It’s probably no exaggeration to say that no author so profoundly influenced the roles of women in horror literature in the twentieth century as Shirley Jackson. Women are at the heart of much of her fiction, and are described as fully- rounded, very human characters. Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House features, near the novel’s beginning, this description of its female lead: “Eleanor Vance was thirty- two years old when she came to Hill House. The only person in the world she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister. She disliked her brother-in-law and her five-year-old niece, and she had no friends. This was owing largely to the eleven years she had spent caring for her invalid mother, which had left her with some proficiency as a nurse and an inability to face strong sunlight without blinking. She could not remember ever being truly happy in her adult life; her years with her mother had been built up devotedly around small guilts and small reproaches, constant weariness, and unending despair.” Note that, with the sole exception of a brief mention of her brother-in-law, Eleanor is defined by her relationships to other women and by her hatred . . . a far cry, in other words, from Ann Radcliffe’s Emily, a daughter who possessed “a captivating grace.” The 1970s saw an America caught in the throes of various civil rights movements, and a Hollywood breathing new, socially-aware life into genre films. Suddenly, the women in horror films were no longer helpless victims who fled in terror until stumbling over those ubiquitous tree roots. In 1978’s Halloween, director John Carpenter instead endowed his plucky “final girl” with determination and the ability to fight back with minimal male assistance (she is finally aided by an armed psychiatrist, always a dangerous figure). But even more important was the character of Ellen Ripley in 1979’s Alien; never before had a heroine in a horror film been so focused, so strong, and so resolute (to say nothing of protecting a cat). Sigourney Weaver’s portrayal of the character made her seem both Amazonian and believable, and forever recreated the role of women in horror/science fiction. Did the Ripley effect spread beyond genre cinema as well? Critics like Jordan Poast (in Cultural Transmogrifier Magazine) have called Alien “one of the most politically progressive films ever made,” and noted that “the film blazed trails for female protagonists to lay claim to the male-centered cinema that had reigned since the inception of motion pictures, including the most entrenched forms, the action genres.” By the mid-’80s, it was acceptable for female protagonists in horror to be thought of primarily as working professionals. Consider Clarice Starling from Thomas Harris’s 1988 bestseller The Silence of the Lambs. On the first page, Starling is described this way: “She had grass in her hair and grass stains on her FBI Academy windbreaker from diving to the ground under fire in an arrest problem on the range.” Jodie Foster’s Oscar-winning performance in the 1991 film further reinforced the image of female lead as a no-nonsense woman of action. If there was a trilogy of horror action heroines beginning with Ripley and segueing through Starling, surely the triumvirate would be topped off by Buffy Summers, a bubbly, blonde California girl who is actually a supernaturally- empowered vampire slayer. Beginning in 1997, Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer offered a weekly dose of female empowerment to both younger women and a legion of older fans. The cultural bombshell of Buffy probably led to the rise of the paranormal romance and urban fantasy genres, which typically feature strong young women surrounded by monsters (and romantically entangled with at least one of them). As much as Buffy boosted the image of women in the horror genre, another phenomenon was about to attempt to supplant some of that newly-gained power: “Torture porn” cinema (and its literary equivalent, “extreme fiction”). Movies like Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005) gained a reputation for brutal depictions of rape, mutilation, and murder, and although victims were members of both genders, as critic Kira Cochrane noted in The Guardian, “The publicity campaigns for many of these films flag up the prospect of watching a nubile young woman being tortured as a genuinely pleasurable experience.” Since the rise of torture porn, horror has had a tough time shaking off its image as misogynistic. By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, horror fiction began to increasingly explore how women were more subtly victimized and subjected to culturally-approved sexism. These novels and stories are almost entirely by female authors and feature carefully-drawn and anxious heroines. Take this scene, for example, that comes near the beginning of Sarah Langan’s 2009 novel Audrey’s Door, as Audrey gets into an elevator with a middle-aged apartment super: “Edgardo’s entire neck craned as his eyes grazed the v-neck of Audrey’s loose blouse, her small breasts, hunched shoulders, and at last, her stark, green eyes. When he was done, his gaze settled on her bare, scarred-up fingers. Then he winked, to let her know he liked what he saw . . . She frowned. She was thirty-five years old, with a good job and a decent head on her shoulders. Still, when she spotted strangers looking for that ring, she felt . . . exposed.” Perhaps no one has explored the dread women can experience in seemingly the most innocuous of circumstances than Joyce Carol Oates. Her 2011 short story “The Good Samaritan” centers on a college student who tries to return a lost wallet discovered on a train. What she finds instead of a grateful wallet owner is the owner’s handsome husband, who is frantic about the disappearance of his wife. On the second floor of the couple’s home, the young woman becomes all too aware of the husband’s size: “I saw the doorway; the stairs was just beyond. If necessary, I could run — I could run to the stairs . . . The man would outrun me, I knew.” As more women authors enter the horror genre (and evidence in everything from self-published bestseller lists to awards rosters to anthology table of contents suggests this is indeed happening), and as male authors continue to explore the changing roles of women, we can only hope that female protagonists will become so common and varied that it will be virtually impossible to survey them in even the lengthiest of academic tomes. At least heroines really have come a long way, baby, from being defined by their failure to bear children.

• • • •

As a sidebar to this article, I asked horror authors of both genders to tell me about their favorite female protagonist in a book or movie. Do the comments reveal a difference between the way men and women perceive female protagonists? I think what we can answer without hesitation is that Ellen Ripley was the hands-down winner with both sexes.

“I think my personal choice would be Ellen Ripley from Alien. I choose her as she was certainly femme, but was always in control of her game, her job, her person. Unlike Laurie Strode from Halloween, a character I felt grew into her role as a take-charge individual, I got the feeling that Ripley was always ready to deal with whatever was coming her way, no matter how tough it might be. She was canny, brave, and quite smart. She wanted to follow the proper protocols in the first place, and if they had, the entire crew (practically) wouldn’t have perished. A very good character, and a great role model not only for film characters, but young women in real life.” — Jason V. Brock, filmmaker and author of Disorders of Magnitude

“Some people say that Alien is a science fiction movie, but horror fans know better. And Ripley is the ultimate badass heroine. She kills monsters and rescues kitties! What’s not to love?” — Nancy Holder, co-author of the Wolf Springs Chronicles and Wicked series

“Imp from The Drowning Girl by Caitlin Kiernan is one of my favorite protagonists of all time. Her voice is so vivid and individual that it is truly horrible and horrifying to descend with her into the disturbing places the story goes. Unlike many female protagonists that are written as stock male characters with breasts, Imp navigates her world on her own terms.” — Kate Jones, author of Candy House and Ceremony of Flies

“Ripley, of course, in Aliens. The best ‘protective mommy’ line in the movies: ‘Get away from her, you bitch.’” — Stephen King, author of Doctor Sleep and Mr. Mercedes

“I have kind of a personal stake in seeing — and writing — strong female characters in fiction. Before becoming a full-time author I taught women’s self-defense for a lot of years, including fourteen years at Temple University. I’ve seen, and felt, firsthand how tough women can be. And how smart they have to be while being tough. We never taught women how to fight like men; we taught them how to fight like women. Different physiology, different set of disadvantages and advantages. Different psychological and sociological approach. And, let’s face it, the stakes are different. So, when I see a woman being tough the way a woman realistically would be, I’m all in. Ripley, in the Aliens movies, is a personal favorite. She balances her fear with a developing personal courage that comes from need and a strong survival instinct. She’s also smart in the way she confronts threats. No he- man wise-cracking super-heroics. She thinks and acts with practicality, clarity of vision, and intelligence. She’s the patron saint of nearly all modern thinking-woman’s action heroes.” — Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of Dead of Night and Rot & Ruin

“My mom has always been the most influential woman in my life. She raised three daughters on her own while dealing with a lack of knowledge in regards to American culture and the English language. During the roughest of times, my oldest sister dated and befriended the rabble of our neighborhood against my mother’s wishes. These losers often terrorized my mom on the streets while she drove to and from our house. Instead of living in fear, she took them on and beat them at their own games. I knew then I wanted to be a strong woman like her. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson was a book I bought around the same time, because the cover art reminded me of myself — a girl with long, dark hair looking through a fence at a hostile, outside world. Little did I know how much that girl would influence my life, and become a part of who I am today. Merricat Blackwood was a badass. Like me, she lived in isolation away from others because she and what remained of her family didn’t quite fit in. She trusted in her magic to keep her and her sister safe. I pretended I did the same, and it gave me a sense of strength to get through some trying times. Like my mom, I couldn’t hide my dislike for the neighborhood bullies so they often picked on me. Even my own sister would join them sometimes. I could very much relate to Merricat’s situation. Charles trying to make the moves on Constance was like the thugs preying on my naïve older sister, and she not seeing them for their true intentions. It wasn’t until after I’d read the book that I realized my true strength came from knowledge. I was smarter than most of the people on the other side of the fence I looked out at and feared. The realization that I would grow up and surpass them made me even stronger. This newfound wisdom made the remainder of my days there tolerable. Eventually, my family moved on and left all that behind, but I knew no matter where we went we’d always have each other like Merricat and Constance. In the end life improved, and people started coming around.” — Rena Mason, author of The Evolutionist and East End Girls

“I so wanted to answer Buffy. Absolutely love her. She’s tough, fearless, and imminently capable, yet wounded and scared and hopelessly at odds with herself and her station in life. But every time I tried to make myself believe she was my answer, I kept coming back to Eleanor Vance, from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. At first blush Eleanor seems to be such a wallflower, and hardly the kind of heroine that attracts a great deal of interest, but I’ve read Hill House perhaps ten times over the years, and listened to it on audio three times, and each time I walk away with a completely different take on who she is. Eleanor is a cipher, for me at least. I think I know her, I think I get her, and then the next time I read her, I realize I was all wrong. I guess that’s what I love about her, that she isn’t easy.” — Joe McKinney, author of Dog Days and Plague of the Dead

“I’m gonna have to go with Stretch (Caroline Williams) in Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. As scripted by Hooper and L.M. ‘Kit’ Carson (the man who wrote us Paris, Texas), she’s sharp, funny, no-nonsense, and full of life. But when the chainsaw hits the fan, midway through, her talking-down of the smitten Leatherface is Rape Deflection 101; and when she winds up doing the screaming chainsaw dance at the end, covered in blood, it’s not the first film’s escape into madness. It’s a motherfucking triumph.” — John Skipp, author/editor/filmmaker

“Dolores Claiborne is probably the most real of all horror’s female characters. Want proof? ‘Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto.’” — Rocky Wood, author of Stephen King: A Literary Companion And as for myself . . . I have an odd fondness for Sarah from George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead. In the face of apocalypse, the ultimate dilemma is thrust upon her: as possibly the last human woman alive, does she fly off to a paradise and “make some babies” with the empathetic helicopter pilot, or does she continue to function as maybe the last scientist smart enough to solve the zombie crisis? Women have had to choose between biological imperative/intellectual yearning throughout history, but I don’t think that’s been articulated so well anywhere else in the horror genre. The fact that Sarah can also tell off dimwits with catty scientific- sounding insults didn’t hurt, either.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of nonfiction books, award-winning prose writer, and Halloween expert whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” Her short fiction has appeared in dozens of anthologies and magazines, including The Mammoth Book of Dracula, Dark Delicacies, The Museum of Horrors, and Cemetery Dance, and in 2010 her first novel, The Castle of Los Angeles, received the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel. Recent books include the graphic novel Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Times (co-written with Rocky Wood, illustrated by Greg Chapman), and Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween. Also recent are the novellas Summer’s End and Smog, and the novel Malediction. A lifelong Californian, she lives in North Hollywood and can be found online at lisamorton.com. Artist Gallery

Tran Nguyen

Tran Nguyen is a Georgia-based gallery artist and freelance illustrator. Born in Vietnam and raised in the States, she is fascinated with creating visuals that can be used as a psycho- therapeutic support vehicle, exploring the mind's landscape. Her paintings are created with a soft, delicate quality using colored pencil and acrylic on paper. Nguyen has worked for clients such as Playboy, Tor, McDonald’s, Chateau St. Michelle Winery, and has showcased with galleries in California, New York, Spain, and Italy. She is currently represented by Richard Solomon and Thinkspace gallery.

[To view the gallery, turn the page.]

Artist Spotlight: Tran Nguyen

Marina J. Lostetter

A lot of the figures in your work are reclining or in a relaxed position, with necks bent and shoulders drooped. What is it about these postures that appeals to you?

I feel that the reclining position exudes a sense of elegance and whimsy. They help create a more dynamic composition that complements other assets in my painting such as the flat gold shapes and billowing fabric, which are often implemented in my work.

This month’s cover image, Nevermore, is one of the few pieces in your online portfolio that features an animal instead of a person. What drew you to illustrate Poe’s “The Raven”?

I’ve always been intrigued by Poe’s dark stories, particularly “The Raven.” His beautiful descriptions of ominous atmospheres and melancholic qualities perfectly represent imageries that I love to illustrate. Also, birds are reoccurring motifs in my work. I love to focus on their ethereal form, feathery texture, and the mystery behind their presence. Do you have other pieces inspired by poems or stories? What about these works moved you?

I don’t often create paintings from poetry. Most of my works are heavily based on universal emotions and stories shared by people that I come across. I deeply enjoy depicting the experiences of shared consciousness such as overcoming adversity and existential emptiness.

You commonly use a color palette that is very soft, but features a strong pop of color (such as the red string in Nevermore). What is it about these colors that speaks to you?

I find that subdued, limited color palettes help convey mystery with its subtleties. Not only that, but it beautifully contrasts vivid spot colors. I do the same with juxtaposing rendered figures with flat shapes — it’s something that personally intrigues me.

Your art has been featured in many publications, including Spectrum, and you’ve done work for high-profile businesses such as Tor, Hatchet, McDonald’s, and Playboy Magazine. You’ve also had many gallery exhibitions. To what do you attribute your success? It’s absolutely all because of my selfless family. I know it may sound Super Saiyan cheesy, but my parents brought my brothers and I to the States with absolutely nothing at hand. Since we’ve moved here from Vietnam in 1990, I’ve seen my dad work in harsh conditions for meager pay so that I could have a better lifestyle, attend a wonderful school, and pursue my artistic endeavors (which is uncommon in Vietnam). In witnessing their endless devotion and hard work, I can’t but be inspired to work just as hard and make them proud as well as myself.

When you illustrate, do you have any little rituals? For example, is there a certain kind of music you like to listen to, or certain type of beverage or food you like to have on hand?

Yes. Actually, it’s somewhat developed into a minor compulsive behavior. I can’t start painting unless I mentally prep myself by finishing two cups of hot green tea while contemplating all the goals I need to accomplish for the workday. Also, there needs to be some sort of background noise, whether in the form of music, TV show, or people talking. I think this helps distract my mind from wandering while I work.

Do you have any resolutions for the New Year you’d like to share with us?

For 2015, I’m continuing the conquest over my forever lingering shyness. People close to me know that I’ve struggled with timidness since childhood, so that’s been a life long struggle. I’ve been trying to be bolder, more spontaneous, and fearless these days — I recently worked as an extra for an upcoming Marvel movie. It’s an impeding trait of mine that I’m slowly conquering.

And finally, in the spirit of Nightmare, what scares you the most?

Scary visuals. Being a visual person, these images are forever imbedded in my memory so my mind tends to recall these images in the night and in dark corners. Particularly, the beginning scene in Resident Evil haunted many of my childhood years. It’s when the player walks into an empty room and witnesses a zombie feasting on a body. He then slowly turns around towards the player to show his grotesque, rotting, blood-stained face. Ugh.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Marina J. Lostetter’s short fiction has appeared in venues such as InterGalactic Medicine Show, Galaxy’s Edge, and Writers of the Future. Her most recent publications include a tie-in novelette for the Star Citizen game universe, which was serialized over the first four months of 2014. Originally from Oregon, Marina now lives in Arkansas with her husband, Alex. She tweets as @MarinaLostetter. Please visit her homepage at lostetter.net. Interview: David Cronenberg

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

David Cronenberg is a Canadian filmmaker whose career has spanned more than four decades. Cronenberg’s many films include Stereo, Crimes of the Future, Fast Company, The Brood, The Dead Zone, The Fly, Naked Lunch, M. Butterfly, Crash, A History of Violence, A Dangerous Method, and Cosmopolis. His most recent film is Maps to the Stars. In 2006 he was awarded the Cannes Film Festival’s lifetime achievement award, the Carrosse d’Or. His debut novel, Consumed, was published by Scribner in 2014. This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by David Barr Kirtley. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview.

You said that when you were a teenager, you were reading science fiction magazines and submitting stories to them. Which ones?

There were three primary ones: Fantasy & Science Fiction, Galaxy, and Astounding. Of the three, Fantasy & Science Fiction was my favorite because it was broad in terms of the kind of things that they published. Astounding was more hardcore science/tech SF, and Galaxy was somewhere in-between. It was Fantasy & Science Fiction that I submitted a story to when I was sixteen, and I got a really great rejection letter; it was one page with one side the printed cover of one of their recent issues, and on the other it said, “This came quite close; we would be glad to see more.” That was encouraging, although I never did submit another story.

Do you remember what that story was about?

It was about a dwarfish person who lived in a basement apartment, very reclusive, and had a picture on his wall of a street in Paris and had huge fantasies about the life of the person who painted that picture; he envied and identified with that person. Later, he discovered that person was like himself; a recluse, not very attractive, living in a basement.

It sounds like a lot of the themes that you’ve explored throughout your career go back to that story.

You could make that case. I had no insects or transformation, all of the themes that people seem to think that I must have. My nervous system is what it is, and there are things I keep returning to because they seem to have significance for me as touchstones, as metaphors. Would you say that you were influenced by the stories you were reading in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Galaxy, and Astounding?

They did delight me, and I remember some of them: one was called “Rat in the Skull.” I think I was influenced by everything, including the movies I was going to see, some of which were science fiction and fantasy, but a lot of them were cowboy movies. I can’t point to one specific thing.

What is it about the skull story that makes it stick out in your mind?

It was bizarre and yet very touching; you should read it. I won’t get into the details of it; I’ll probably get it wrong. I haven’t read it for sixty years. One of the writers who I came to much later was Philip Dick. I don’t recall reading any of his stories in those magazines.

He’s one of my favorite authors as well. How did you discover him? And what was it about his work that made a big impression on you?

I can’t remember exactly why; it’s conceivable that it was because people were proposing his work as possible movie projects. He was so much a part of his time, and a lot of his writing is not really good because, as we all know, he was taking speed and writing twenty-four hours at a time, or even forty-eight hours. He didn’t spend time rewriting, and it’s obvious. But there were moments where it was absolutely brilliant, everything came together, and you realized that if he had been a slightly different kind of writer, in a slightly different context, he could have written stuff that would have been recognized for its literary excellence.

I want to come back to Philip K. Dick, but before that, you said that in the 1950s, all the science fiction stories were about how dehumanizing and soul-destroying technology was?

No; not all of it. I just said that it was a tendency in the ’50s. Don’t forget it was the Soviet Union, nuclear weapons, bomb shelters; that represented the ultimate in technology. The tendency was to demonize it, because people were afraid of it, so every second story you read was about the world after nuclear holocaust. Philip Dick was interesting because that wasn’t the stance he took; he loved to create characters who were just guys working on technology and who would come and fix your talking robotic door that wouldn’t let you out of your apartment, even when you put in the ten cents you were supposed to, or ten credits; whatever it was. He got down to the nitty-gritty of small and local technology. As a teenager, did you have that kind of relationship with technology? Or did you have more of the 1950s mind frame?

No; I think I really belong on your blog. I don’t think I was a nerd, socially, but I was definitely a geek and loved technology. My father was my model; he got the first IBM Selectric in Canada, a typewriter that you could actually change the font on, which was unheard of. That it was also an electric typewriter just enhanced everything. I used to fall asleep to the sound of his Selectric hammering away, because he was a journalist. He would get the first calculator that was available through private hands, so I had a very cozy appreciation for technology and also saw it as enhancing creative power. And, to assert my geek cred, there was a program called Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, and I got that because I had never really learned to touch type properly, and typing was so much more attractive than it had been with a mechanical typewriter. In the booklet from this fictional typing teacher, there was an article on the QWERTY keyboard vs. the Dvorak, and how the QWERTY keyboard had been designed to slow you down; if you went too fast, you would jam the keys together. I was so outraged, I decided I would never type QWERTY again. In those days, Dvorak was kind of underground, so I actually sent away to certain strange addresses and I would receive a floppy disk that could convert your keyboard. I’m totally sold that you’ve established your geek cred.

Very good; thanks. When the specifications of the iPhone 6 came out, I cut a cardboard version of it out and carried it around to see if it would be too big. I didn’t end up getting an iPhone 6 Plus.

You were writing fiction as a teenager, and then took a multi-decade break from it to make films; what brought you back to writing prose fiction?

I’ve never lost the desire to be a novelist; I was derailed or kidnapped by cinema. The President and publisher of Penguin Canada, a woman named Nicole Winstanley, started sending me boxes of books they were publishing and saying that she had read my screenplays, seen my movies, and thought I had a novelist’s sensibilities. She asked if I had ever thought about writing a novel, and I said, “Only for about fifty years.” She said that she would love to publish me, and that really encouraged me. I sent her a proposal that had begun as a screenplay but had stalled; I romanticize it by thinking it knew it needed to be a novel and was waiting for me. That was eight years ago, but you can’t say that it took me eight years to write Consumed because I don’t know how much seat time in front of the computer was spent writing the novel; in- between, I made four movies. I would be away from my virtual typewriter for a year and a half, and then to come back and try to pick up the thread of the novel — very difficult to do. You suddenly think, “What if I go back to it and it’s no good?” or, “What if I go back to it and it is good, but I don’t think I can continue on that level?” So I’m interested in the idea that I write a novel and not do anything else, and see what that feels like and how long it takes me.

For a first novel, the prose style is incredibly well done. Had you written any sort of prose fiction in those years?

Not really. I think my last attempt to write a novel was when I was living in the south of France in 1971, and that was when I wasn’t sure if I was an underground filmmaker or if I was going to be a commercial filmmaker, in the sense that I would make a living as a filmmaker.

But you must read a lot of literature.

I’ve never stopped reading novels, and I read a lot of other things. But everybody who reads a novel is not a novelist. I was certain I had a voice as a filmmaker, but I wasn’t really sure if I had one as a novelist, so I was interested to see if I did, and what it was. I take it as a huge compliment, what you said about the prose. I was really impressed by it. Did you have to do a lot of rewriting and polishing, or is that pretty much your natural voice?

I didn’t do much restructuring; it just sort of flowed that way. I did do rewriting, but I’ve read about people who do ten drafts, twenty, and I didn’t do anything like that. They were small changes, which make a difference between an awkward sentence and a beautiful sentence.

The book concerns, prominently, a married couple: the Arosteguys. Why don’t you tell us about them?

They’re an interesting French phenomenon, the “hot philosophy couple” exemplified most by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, both philosophers; they would write political pamphlets and were also very public intellectuals, which is something you don’t see much in North America. They wrote difficult philosophical works, but at the same time were invited to, and did, comment on current affairs; they took extreme political stances and would talk about French culture and world culture in general. Bernard-Henri Lévy and his wife Arielle Dombasle are the current version of that cultural couple. I like the idea of that kind of person, and then counter-poised it with two relatively naïve young Americans, Naomi and Nathan, who are journalists who get involved in a scandal that involves this couple; the woman has apparently been murdered by her husband, and cannibalized, and he has now disappeared. There’s a Henry James thing there; the American novelist who liked to position Americans going abroad to Europe as relatively naïve, simple and sweet, and then counter-poise them with the decadent, sophisticated Europeans. Not that I think that anybody thinks of Americans in that way now, or Europeans either, but there’s a bit of that in Consumed.

I don’t know if you would call Nathan and Naomi sweet and innocent, exactly. There is a sort of innocence to them, but they are very worldly and cynical.

They’re very practiced in terms of their use of the internet for their profession, and there’s an affected cynicism that comes somewhat with youth when you think you’re tough, and then you meet people who are tough beyond your imagining, and more manipulative than you are aware. So it’s not exactly like Henry James.

The journalism they practice is interesting; it’s called para-journalism, and it’s freelance/tabloid style journalism. Can you talk about what inspired that?

I mention Tom Wolfe and his invention of what he called “New Journalism,” which was very ego-centric. It was, “I’m Tom Wolfe, I’m a journalist, I’m interviewing you, but I’m really the star, and what I think and my perceptions are as valid as yours no matter who you are or how accomplished you are. This article I’m going to write about you is also going to be about me.” It was quite shocking, because the standards of journalism used to be that you were invisible; you never used the first person. Hunter Thompson was a part of that, in his own extreme way. That has become absorbed into the idea of journalism; it’s not considered a complete atrocity to include yourself and your experiences in your investigations. We’ve now gone beyond that because of the internet; the idea now is, “What on the internet is legitimate? What is plagiarism, and what is general information that’s up for grabs?” Even in novel writing, there are instances where things are taken from Wikipedia in one chunk and put in a novel without attribution; you’re including your own experiences, but you’re also gleaning other peoples’ experience. I’ve seen that myself; if I’m considering casting an actor, I’ll go to YouTube and watch interviews with the actor, to get a feel for what they’re like as a person, as opposed to what they do as an actor. You can imagine that a journalist about to investigate a murder finding YouTube videos of the victim and alleged perpetrator will want to see those videos, and include what they see in their journalism. But those videos were done by somebody else for another purpose. I wouldn’t say that, in the novel, I’m criticizing anything. I’m taking what is a relatively neutral stance on the things I see happening. I’m presenting characters who are living these kinds of lives, using these kinds of tools, and the reader can react negatively or not. Although I think there’s a lot of humor in the novel, that also comes out of the characters themselves rather than me imposing any satire.

Do people interview you who are like that?

It’s wild, because — for example — I get journalists from the old school that I’ve known for thirty years interviewing me for a newspaper, but now they’re holding up their iPhones; they’re forced to become videographers, and they don’t know how to do it very well. Then you’ve got the younger journalists who are very adept because they’ve grown up with it. They know that you’re going to also do stills and video, maybe even edit it yourself, so you have to have a Final Cut on your laptop. And then, yes, I get people challenging me, saying, “In a video you did in 1962, you said ‘blank.’” It’s a whole new world, and it has thrown up all kinds of questions about boundaries and legalities.

You mentioned that there’s a lot of philosophy in this book, or discussion about philosophy, and you mention the titles of some of the Arosteguys’ books that include Science Fiction, Money, Apocalyptic Consumerism: A User’s Manual, and A Labor of Gore: Marx and Horror. Those all sound like fantastic books; I’d love to read them.

I could’ve written them, but it would’ve taken me another five years. I don’t think people would have wanted it in the middle of the novel, but maybe those are the books I should write next.

But you do have a fleshed-out idea of what these books would be about?

Definitely. It was interesting for me to decide how technical the philosophy could be from the Arosteguys, because highly technical philosophy is very difficult to read. Think of Sartre’s book Being and Nothingness, or Heidegger’s Being and Time; it takes years to read those books because you have to learn a whole new vocabulary. They’re discussing things that haven’t existed before in thought. In a novel, there’s momentum and flow, and you couldn’t really do that, so I had to simplify the way the Arosteguys were approached; you don’t see them teaching a class full techno, but you see them doing media events, where they deliberately simplify their speaking about technology. At one point, Célestine says, “The owner’s manual is the ultimate literature of our present time.” I can imagine a modern version of Sartre diluting his philosophy to the point that it could be accessible to more people.

Consumerism obviously plays a big role in this story; the title of the book is Consumed, as a play on that. If you were to write Apocalyptic Consumerism, the book, what would it be about?

It’s very easy to criticize consumerism — buying useless things, creating useless things, polluting the Earth — and the Arosteguys try to be the devil’s advocate, saying, “Consumerism is a beautiful, natural thing, and we are creating amazing things that are as beautiful as anything that the Earth has produced. It is an incredible expression of human creativity and emotion.” If we had ever had a chance to press Aristide Arosteguy, he would admit he was deliberately taking an extreme position in order to illuminate the debate between the anti-consumerists and the consumerists. It becomes a discussion of capitalism as well, because consumerism and capitalism go hand-in-hand, and it’s traditional for French philosophies to be Marxist, or at least very leftist, so Aristide is doing a twist on that as well, saying, “Marx was great at understanding capitalism.” Many capitalists read Marx because he understood capitalism a lot better than people who were in favor of it. But then they don’t accept Marx’s solution to that, which is to get rid of capitalism in favor of socialism or communism. How close would you say your personal philosophy is to the Arosteguys’? Many of the things that Aristide says in his novella section of the book sound similar to some of the things you’ve said.

Yes, although I sometimes put them in a context that negates them. As a tech geek, part of me loves the devices that consumerism produces, that extend our lives and compress time and space, like the internet and airplanes do. At the same time, I can be cold-blooded in saying that it’s quite possible that, with our technology, we are destroying the Earth. I don’t have a solution for it, but I can see it clearly, and I have an emotional divide. As a novelist and filmmaker, I don’t present myself as a prophet; I don’t have the answers, but I do have a lot of the questions, and observations. So I make those observations and leave it to my readers to draw conclusions themselves.

Right; for example, on that point, Aristide is reported in the book to say that an artist is not a manufacturer and that meaning is a consumer item.

Aristide is smarter than I am; he should be, being a world famous philosopher. If you’re an existentialist, there is no meaning in human life or the universe. And almost all religions are there to provide you with meaning, but for me, that’s a consumer item; a means of creating meaning. I think that all meaning is a human construct; there’s not an abstract question of meaning with a capital “M” that exists outside our lives. We have to create it for ourselves, and there are many ways of doing that: through art, religion, culture, family, and so on. That’s what he means.

I don’t know if you’ve ever read a book by Thorstein Veblen called The Theory of the Leisure Class. I studied political philosophy in college, and that’s a book I read, and one thing he says in there is that children are the ultimate luxury consumer item. That always stuck in my head. The same thing with “meaning;” these things that we think of as being most important or sacred, you just have to squint a little to see them as just things.

Yes. I think if you’re an artist, one of the things you have to offer is that clarity of vision, with no bullshit. Even if you can’t say to yourself what the “meaning” of what you’re observing is, your observation should be absolutely clear. And it’s not easy to do; human culture and society is incredibly complex, and with the internet now and the global reach that you can have just sitting in your office or bedroom, it’s become even more confusing and full of information. That clarity is in short supply.

Another thing that Aristide says that sounds like something you might say is, “Reality is neurology.”

I believe that myself. I like to use the simple dog analogy: You’re sitting in your chair and you have your dog at your feet, and you’re both sitting in the same space and time; what is the reality for your dog at that moment? The dog is a legitimate sentient being, as you are, and yet its experience of reality is completely different from yours. All the things we think are absolute, or at least communal — sense of space and time, language, color, smell, hearing — are completely different for your dog. There are two realities in that room, both equally valid, so the difference is two different neuro- systems. I can then say that something like the internet is changing our reality, not just in the way we perceive things, but we are neurologically different than the Greeks three thousand years ago. Our brains are not static things that mature at the age of eighteen and never change; it used to be thought that was the case. The Nobel prize-winning neurologist, Gerald Edelman, said that the brain is much more like a rainforest than it is a computer; there’s a constant struggle for dominance amongst the neurons, and they’re constantly changing. The ones that you use become stronger, and the ones that don’t wither away. If that’s true, and I think it demonstrably is, then your reality is changing.

That brings us back to Philip K. Dick, this idea of subjective reality, and in Consumed you do mention Philip K. Dick’s novel, The Divine Invasion. Is there a particular reason you mentioned that novel?

You have to not take it out of context; this was Aristide talking about a change in his wife, Célestine, in which she started to have what he thought were delusions about her body — an infestation, in particular, of insects into her left breast — and wondering if she perhaps had a stroke that altered her brain. And I was thinking about Dick’s Divine Invasions; his post-trip work became religious in an odd way, and hallucinatory in a way it hadn’t been; a strange version of Christianity. He died of multiple strokes, because he used amphetamines so consistently, and it has been suggested that the visions he were having were induced by his strokes rather than a religious conversion. And that’s why it was mentioned in the book.

You mention the insects there, and that reminds me of another quote that really struck me, especially as a science fiction fan, where Aristide says, “It always amused me to observe the pathetically desperate hunger expressed in popular culture for life forms on other planets, when underneath the very feet of these seekers of aliens, and roundly ignored by them, were the most exotic, grotesque, and fabulous life forms imaginable.”

Something I’ve said myself. I was a big entomologist as a kid, and right now I’m reading E.O. Wilson’s book on ants called The Super Organism, which is very technical and fantastic. I don’t think that anybody in science fiction has invented anything as phenomenal as the life of ants, and it is ironic that people have their heads looking up to the stars.

Can you think of anything specific that’s bizarre and alien about insects that most people don’t know?

Ants speak to each other and induce communal action by emitting chemicals, and will leave trails of chemical scents that will tell them to follow a trail because there’s food at the other end of it, or to be wary because there’s danger there. Whoever came up with that in science fiction?

This book has a blurb from Viggo Mortensen, and he says that you will probably be accused of every sin that can be invented to compensate for human fear of mind and body. Was he correct?

I haven’t been accused of every sin. Yet. He knows that in my career as a filmmaker — for example, when I made Crash — I was attacked for all kinds of things, like misogyny. I think the reading public is different than the movie world, so we’ll see. I have some listener questions: Ewan Road says, “Was the film Videodrome actually a prophetic film about social media? Death to Facebook, long live the new flesh.”

It’s easy to see, in retrospect, that it feels like that. In the film, I create the idea of interactive TV, where you’re almost physically entering the TV set, and that feels now very much like we do with the internet and touchscreens. I never thought of myself as a prophet; there was definitely a strain in science fiction that was designed to be prophetic. For example, the writer who predicted satellites: Arthur C. Clarke. He was very proud of that, because he was more of a techno science fiction writer than, say, a fantasy or imaginative science fiction writer. But for me, it was the imagery and the feel of it, rather than an attempt to assess all the developments that had come about so far and then to make a calculated prediction of what could happen from there. For example, the plug-in umbilical cords for gamesters in eXistenZ; I’m not really saying we’re going to be plugging directly into our spines. But, at the same time, why not? It’s certainly physiologically possible if the technology’s there. It’s not that I need it to come true, it’s just a playful invention, which is part of the delight of any narrative creation. When you create new creatures and physiologies, you feel like you contributed to nature even though you haven’t; it’s a lovely feeling. In Rabid, I came up with stem cells, basically, and that was from my reading in science; I have a device that takes a skin graft, neutralizes it, and wherever you put it in the body it will read its position and develop into whatever is required. I mentioned that in Shivers as well, but in that case I was talking about a parasite.

There are so many weird conditions in this book: Apotemnophilia, Capgras Syndrome, Peyronies Disease, Dupuytren’s Contracture. I just imagine you have this big shelf full of medical textbooks. Where do you come up with all these?

When I was doing Dead Ringers, I did get a couple of immense medical books. These days, you can find that stuff on the net. As you age, you and your friends talk more and more about medical stuff; it’s the subject of comedies. Even in the newspapers and websites, there’s almost a disease-of- the-week. Again, rather than being a prophet, you have these antennae, like an insect, that are very sensitive to what’s in the zeitgeist, and you are downloading and playing with that as an artist. Sometimes your antennae are more sensitive than other peoples’, so you pull things together in ways that other people might not.

What sort of upcoming projects do you have?

I have no film projects at the moment, and that pleases me because it’s taken me ten years to get Maps to the Stars made. It seems to take ten years to get every interesting movie made. I’ve run out of those projects, so I’m looking forward to writing another novel.

Thanks so much for joining us.

A pleasure; thank you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast airing on Wired.com. It is produced by Nightmare editor John Joseph Adams and hosted by David Barr Kirtley. Dave Kirtley is the author of thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Lightspeed, in books such as Armored, The Living Dead, Other Worlds Than These, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He lives in New York. AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Author Spotlight: Kat Howard

Kevin McNeil

Can you tell us a little about your writing process and what inspired “Returned”?

I honestly don’t remember the precise spark that inspired me to write “Returned.” But I’m generally fascinated with stories that involve a trip to the Underworld, and one of the things that happens fairly often in those stories is that someone goes to the Underworld to rescue someone else. And we all think, “Yes, great! A Get Out of Hell Free card!” And we don’t often think, “hmm, I wonder if the person in the Underworld maybe wanted to stay there.” So I wanted to write a story where that seemingly great rescue was twisted all the way around. I do remember the process for this story, because it was utterly unique in my history of writing. I had gone out to New Hampshire to house and pet sit for my parents, and have sort of a writing retreat. And I had gotten all set up at the table with my notebooks and my snacks and my coffee, when the tornado warning went off on my phone! And then the power went out. So I grabbed all the pets and evacuated them to the basement — cats, by the way, do not like being evacuated — and grabbed my notebook, and scribbled out most of the first draft by battery lantern in the basement, waiting for it to be safe to come back upstairs.

Why did you choose to tell this story in the second person? Do you feel that horror lends itself to the second person point of view? If so, why?

I chose the second person because I wanted to make the reader uncomfortable. I wanted them as close to the story as possible. (Plus, honestly, I wanted the challenge of seeing whether or not I could pull it off.) I’m not sure if I believe that horror lends itself to the second person any more or any less than any other genre. I think that — like many things — point of view is one of the tools that a writer can use to do things (to use the highly technical term) to the story, and so we ought to consider it when we write.

As I read this story I found myself thinking of the ugliness of abusive relationships. Why use the fantastic to tell this story? Did the writing of this story present you with any significant challenges?

I used the fantastic to tell the story because that’s where the idea came from — to the best of my knowledge, someone walking into the Underworld and bringing someone back out of death is not the sort of thing that generally occurs in the world as it is. And I prefer to work in the fantastic and the speculative because that gives me a freedom to really push on things, to take them beyond the extremes that I could if I were writing mimetically. But of course, even while working in the fantastic, I try to ground the story in the real. And in this case, the real emotion, the real underlying situation. So yes, it was a challenge to write, and it wasn’t a pleasant headspace to live in while I was writing it.

There are beautiful descriptions and imagery throughout this story. It’s obvious you care about the language. I’ve read that most writers fall into one of two categories: storytellers or wordsmiths. Do you agree with this idea? Would you put yourself in the wordsmith camp?

I’m going to dodge this question a bit, because I think it is always dangerous to ask a writer to categorize herself. And while I agree that I care about (love, am fascinated by) language, I am also fascinated by story. I could give you some of my favorite words — quintessence, tenebrous, rife, iamb, scintillate — but on their own, they aren’t anything except fun to say. And while there are times where lush, baroque prose might be the best way to tell a story (and the language I used in “Returned” was indeed a choice), there are also times where it serves a story better to be told in language that is stark, or is simple. Is there anything else you’d like to share about “Returned”? What’s next for you?

I am very excited to have my first novel, Roses and Rot, coming out from Saga Press in 2016. Beyond that, I’m working on a variety of things, both short fiction and long.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kevin McNeil is a physical therapist, sports fanatic, and volunteer coach for the Special Olympics. He is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and The Center for the Study of Science Fictions Intensive Novel Workshop, led by Kij Johnson. His fiction has appeared in Every Day Fiction and is forthcoming in Orson Scott Cards Intergalactic Medicine Show. Kevin is a New Englander currently living in California. Find him on Twitter @kevinmcneil. Author Spotlight: Norman Partridge

Britt Gettys

In “The Hollow Man,” you only mention the title entity in the very beginning, leaving him to act as a sort of metaphor for the dark desires of the characters. Do you view the Hollow Man as representing the darker side of humanity, which everyone possesses?

The darker side of humanity is represented by the men outside the cabin . . .or maybe they just represent humanity under dark circumstances. The thing inside the cabin (also the story’s narrator) is something else entirely. And the hollow man himself is part vessel, part host, part puppet.

You don’t explain the motives of your main character, nor do you explain why he’s in the situation he’s in, and yet you write with such authority that the reader doesn’t question anything going on. Where does this authority come from, as a writer?

I’ve always believed in tossing the reader into the water and making them swim. Sometimes the water is deep. Besides, explanations are overrated. I find as a reader that authorial explanations by their very nature often take me out of a story. Too much opportunity to stop and consider, and all of a sudden I’ll start asking questions that expose cracks in the setup. So I do try to operate with authority, and I keep things moving. No matter how strange the situation, I aim to invest the setting with a strong sense of reality, even moreso the characters and their actions. If the reader buys into all that and matches the pace, I’ve got them.

The setting is at once both generic and yet specific enough for the reader to understand without question. Does a slowly revealed, somewhat vague setting enhance the suspense of the narrative?

That’s a good question, and one I’m not sure I can answer. With “The Hollow Man,” I do know that I wanted a setting that would allow the characters to be cut off and threatened by the elements. That was an essential. I also needed a setting that would allow them to focus on a single place of safety, so the cabin came from that. Also in the mix: I’d been reading a lot of Jack London. I wanted that sense of naturalism, and I thought it would be interesting to twist it up by tossing in another viewpoint — one that belonged to a monster.

As a writer of both short and long horror fiction, is your approach to writing one different than the other? Which is more difficult? These days, it’s much harder for me to write short stories. My ideas almost always want to expand.

Your novel, Dark Harvest, won the Bram Stoker award for best long fiction — congratulations! What was your reaction? Does it make you feel pressure in relation to your next projects?

It’s great to have a piece of work recognized, especially by your peers. As far as pressure goes, I always feel pressure to try to raise the bar with each new project. Mostly, that’s self- imposed pressure. And I think it’s part of a writer’s obligation — to make the next story better than the last, to try something different, to push yourself out on a limb. Of course, it’s not always possible to do that, but it’s an attitude that keeps you honest when you sit down to work.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Britt Gettys currently attends Pratt Institute where she is pursuing a BFA in Creative Writing. She is the editor of Pratt Success, a student-run blog, sponsored by Pratt’s Center for Career and Professional Development, which reviews the work of current Pratt students and alumni. Additionally, she illustrates graphic novels and her work has been featured in two Pratt sponsored exhibitions. An editorial intern at Lightspeed and Nightmare Magazine, Britt hails from Seattle, Washington where she spends her time writing, cosplaying, and painting. Author Spotlight: Christopher Barzak

Lisa Nohealani Morton

What inspired you to write “The Trampling”?

I’ve been writing retellings and adaptations of classic genre literature for the past few years, investigating some of my favorite genre novels and stories from the past with a modern sensibility, reinventing language, or contextualizing scenes from the originals that seemed utterly contextless, or emphasizing particular themes that were either not perceived or else purposefully buried in the originals. “The Trampling” is an adaptation from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Early in the first fifteen or twenty pages of the original, a lawyer tells a friend of his about a night where he witnessed a girl trampled by Mr. Hyde, and how he and a group of witnesses forced the man into paying the girl’s family money for his misdeed, only to discover that Mr. Hyde pays with a check signed by Dr. Henry Jekyll. In the book, this anecdote is summarized, and serves mainly to display how horrible Mr. Hyde is, and to pique the curiosity of readers to find out how he’s connected to such a respected member of society. Because of its summarization in the book, it leaves out a lot of context. Why was the little girl running down a street in winter at two or three in the morning? I wanted to dramatize what Robert Louis Stevenson decided to summarize, in order to look more deeply into Victorian England, child labor, exploitation, and to connect those themes to the figure of Mr. Hyde, who is in fact Dr. Jekyll, just under the influence of a chemical concoction that allows him to release his darker side. In the book, it seems the reader should sympathize with Henry Jekyll. But I always thought Jekyll shouldn’t receive such sympathy when he clearly knows what his potion does, and continued to use it despite knowing the awful things he/Hyde would do while Jekyll moved back into the dual personality’s recessed consciousness. In many ways, I wanted to create a new reading with “The Trampling” that would indicate that Jekyll shouldn’t have been handled so gently all these years, and to also take this story, steeped in symbolism and metaphor, and connect it to the very real world that the Jekyll/Hyde duality continues to exist in, even today, where the wealthy and powerful are still largely respected and admired, even when so much of their wealth and power has been founded on the backs of the poor and the powerless. The Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story is, unfortunately, a universal one that hasn’t yet ended.

The girl in the story has an encounter with a classic horror monster in Mr. Hyde, but that’s not the real monster in the story. Is the real monster in horror usually the world, do you think? Well, I think you’re right to say that Mr. Hyde isn’t the real monster in the story, but I’m not sure if it’s the world either. For me, Dr. Jekyll (and those he embodies or represents) is the monster, and has largely escaped justice in the readings we tend to give the book, often because we read this story and those like it as a morality tale, where we watch Jekyll come undone and lose control to Hyde, and the narrative attempts to solicit our sympathy for him even while it’s warning the reader not to enter into the dark dealings Jekyll did with his transformative potion. As I mentioned, though, I’ve always thought Jekyll — a person of power and influence, someone from the class of people who run and/or make up at least some of the rules of the world — is the true monster. He lives two lives, and is aware of what Hyde does during his transformed periods. That, to me, places culpability on Jekyll, specifically. I do think, though, that when we accept the exploitation of various classes and minorities (like children in Victorian England) for the profit of the powerful, that we tend to see “the world” as inherently unjust and cruel, when it’s actually a particular group of people creating and enforcing that world. If you think, for instance, about some of the most resonant horror stories, you can see this too. The Stepford Wives, for instance, might seem like suburban America as a world in general is horrific, but it’s actually the men who live in Stepford who have created that horrific system that disappears women and replaces them with submissive robot versions. It’s a nightmare, but that nightmare isn’t just the nature of how existence in this world works. There are specific people who have created the nightmarish conditions for women in Stepford, and there are specific people who create nightmarish conditions for various groups of people in our world too.

You’ve got a novel coming out soon. Care to tell us a little bit about it? Any other news or upcoming publications you’d like to tell readers about?

Yes! I’m really excited. The novel is called Wonders of the Invisible World. It’s a story about a seventeen-year-old who stumbles upon a forgotten ancestral family sin that — if not resolved — will result in the destruction of his family. It has a lot of magic in it. A white stag. A man in a black suit who is an agent of Death. Visions and spells that are enacted by telling stories. And beyond the large-stage drama being carried out, there’s a small-stage story about how this young man discovers that there’s a lot more to him than he ever knew, because parts of his own life have been obscured as well.

What are you working on these days?

I just finished the page proofing for Wonders of the Invisible World, and now I’m returning to work on a novel called A Manual for the Most Effective Usage of Fallen Stars, which I hope to bring to completion by the time this interview sees print.

What’s your favorite horror novel?

This is the hardest question so far! There are so many I love. But I’ll go with a gut instinct answer here and say Stephen King’s It.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Born and raised in Honolulu, Lisa Nohealani Morton lives in Washington, DC. By day she is a mild-mannered database wrangler, computer programmer, and all-around data geek, and by night she writes science fiction, fantasy, and combinations of the two. Her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, and the anthology Heiresses of Russ 2012. She can be found on Twitter as @lnmorton. Author Spotlight: Lucy Taylor

Sandra Odell

“Blessed Be the Bound” opens with a subtle blend of fears which coalesce into something much darker than the sum of its parts: bondage, imprisonment, body mutilation, loss of identity, helplessness, sexual deviancy, death. What scares you about this story?

Just about everything. My number one terror is of captivity, so much so that when I was a teenager I made a promise to myself that if it ever became apparent I was about to be imprisoned, incarcerated, or taken hostage by crazies claiming to have my best interest at heart, I would kill myself before allowing that to happen. The protagonist in the story is already imprisoned and helpless and facing terrible mutilation, the price she is paying for committing what is considered sexual deviancy in her world. Eugenia’s primary enemy is her mother, who continues to profess her love even while setting events in motion that will clearly destroy her. The people I find most frightening are those who use love as a reason to engulf, manipulate, and confine. Add religious zealotry and erotophobia into the mix, and you get a real cornucopia of horrors. Among other things, the story is about body mutilation in which the body itself becomes a prison. As people age, of course, they often become more aware of physical limitations, but we are all vulnerable to maiming and mutilation, simply by virtue of the fact that we inhabit such delicate and ultimately fragile body-shells. It’s a fine line, though. Obviously a lot of people derive pleasure from practices like bondage and body mutilation, and loss of identity is a powerful force behind addiction, be it to substances or to sex. There’s that exceedingly thin edge, where it’s difficult to know where ecstasy ends and terror begins. That’s another gift/drawback to inhabiting a flesh and blood body.

From the gel compression restraints to touching the flaccid female leg of the Bound to clawing at the flesh graft, you make great use of tactile sensory input to drive the horror home. What inspired you to explore this particular style to tell your tale?

I think it just came naturally. “Blessed Be the Bound” is a very short story with a possibly unreliable narrator, and I knew I needed to create as real a setting as possible in a very few words. I tried to be very specific about things I invented (the gel clamps, the oblivion dot, etc.) so that Eugenia’s narration has the tang of truth to it even if we can’t be sure if her version of events is always accurate. Since this is a story about body horror, about mutilation and the helplessness of the body to defend and protect itself, I also felt that the more vividly I could get the reader to feel what was going on, the more impact the story would have. I wanted to create a sense of the terror and claustrophobia that someone facing Eugenia’s fate might experience and to make the reader a bit uncomfortable, if I could. I also hoped to convey a sense of malice in small details that might otherwise seem innocuous. For example, when Eugenia’s mother touches her while wondering which of her arms will be amputated, that to me was very horrific. The loving touch that’s worse than pain, because it carries the underlying message that basically comes down to, this is my idea of love, and yeah, you are so fucked.

Horror often goes hand in hand with sexual expression. There is a sense that Eugenia is not a reliable narrator and that she encouraged the relationship with O’Dell rather than succumbing to his advances. You also explore the shadows of intimacy between both Eugenia and O’Dell and their mother. What is it about sex that invites such a comfortable coupling with horror?

Well, sex and death are certainly the two sides of the horror coin. For a lot of people, I think sex combines the greatest desire coupled with the greatest fear, of entering or being entered by another body, which is, after all, a fairly intrepid undertaking for both parties in the act. Even more frightening is the potential for engulfment on a psychic, emotional level. Some people find amazing transcendence of ego in sex while to others, that same transcendence might trigger the terror of annihilation. Not for nothing do the French refer to orgasms as the little death. Sex, after all, is both thrilling and potentially dangerous on many levels. When at full throttle, it’s both hypnotic and diabolical — it usurps everything. And I think this is why sex is so viciously controlled, manipulated, and subverted in many cultures, including our own. Like the proverbial Bonsai tree, sexuality grows into a stunted, freakish shadow of itself. Is Eugenia a reliable narrator? I really don’t know, but I will project myself into Eugenia for a moment and say that, my best guess is that, yes, she very probably seduced her brother and enjoyed the hell out of doing so, as it gave her a moment of freedom from and power over those in control of her. I think the sexuality between O’Dell and Eugenia springs from the much more deviant sexual relationship each of them had with their mother — and which Eugenia briefly refers to. After all, if sex is dangerous, then sex stewed in the cauldron of a dysfunctional family system has the potential to be the most grotesquely twisted.

What authors inspire you? To whom do you turn to feed your own horror needs?

I’ve always loved and admired the work of Clive Barker. The Books of Blood and The Damnation Game are still vivid in my memory even though it has been years since I read them. Same with Dan Simmons’s wonderful Song Of Kali, as well as all of his other work. And I never tire of reading Joyce Carol Oates, who has written so many powerfully disturbing pieces that fit within the framework of Southern Gothic. More recently, I’ve enjoyed Windeye by Brian Evenson, The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus, and I just reread Norman Partridge’s terrific Dark Harvest for Halloween. Above all, I enjoy reading anthologies, such as Year’s Best Weird Fiction (edited by Laird Barron and Michael Kelly) and The Cutting Room (edited by Ellen Datlow).

You were nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for your collection Close To The Bone, and have a long and distinguished horror and dark fantasy bibliography and an admitted fascination with Southern Gothic themes. How did you first set foot on the darker literary path?

By getting born into my family of origin, of course! Seriously, little could better prepare one for writing Southern Gothic fiction than being the only daughter of a powerful but absent father inhabiting a mansion far away (Meadow Farm in Orange, Virginia), a narcissistic mother who gave birth in order to produce a hostage, and an anhedonic mother/grandmother team who filled the household with a virulent and repressive dread of men and sex. Which, needless to say, provoked a passionate interest on my part for both. There was also imprisonment at age fifteen and torture (EST) though thankfully, not even in Richmond, Virginia, had anyone come up with the nifty idea of Binding disobedient daughters. Beyond that, with a few exceptions (I wrote erotica for a while in the early ’80s) I never really wrote any fiction that wasn’t in some fashion dark. It’s something that gives me pleasure, perhaps as a way of taming down the things that scare me by manipulating them to my own ends. I know that the world is not always dark and bleak, but I enjoy imagining that it is, that danger and deception lurk around each corner. By writing about scary things, I make my own world seem safer and more manageable. And bottom line, it’s fun!

What’s next for Lucy Taylor? What terrible, intimate surprises are in store for readers?

All I can say at this point is that they will probably take place in New Mexico, as I have truly fallen in love with this part of the country since moving here in October of 2013. New Mexico is a place of incredible contrasts and, frankly, if there were ever a place where the weird, the outlandish, and the macabre would flourish, this would be it. And I say that with much love for my adopted State — I hope that its occult undercurrents (and other pleasures) will keep me here a long time.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sandra Odell is an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. She attended Clarion West in 2010. Her first collection of short stories was released from Hydra House Books in 2012. She is currently hard at work avoiding her first novel. MISCELLANY In the Next Issue of

Coming up in February, in Nightmare . . . We have original fiction from Karen Munro (“The Garden”) and Carmen Maria Machado (“Descent”), along with reprints by Halli Villegas (“Fishfly Season”) and Brian Evenson (“Cult”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Nightmare. Thanks for reading! Stay Connected

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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, 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 winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated eight times) and is a six-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.