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 © 2015 Nightmare Magazine Cover Art by Tran Nguyen Ebook Design by John Joseph Adams www.nightmare-magazine.com FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, January 2015 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. • • • • 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! • • • • 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.