Nightmare Magazine, Issue 37 (October 2015, Queers Destroy
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TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 37, October 2015 Queers Destroy Horror! Special Issue FROM THE EDITORS On the Destruction of Horror: Notes from Your Queer Editors FICTION edited by Wendy N. Wagner Golden Hair, Red Lips Matthew Bright (illustration by KG Schmidt) Alien Jane Kelley Eskridge The Lord of Corrosion Lee Thomas (illustration by Eliza Gauger) Rats Live on No Evil Star Caitlín R. Kiernan Dispatches from a Hole in the World Sunny Moraine (illustration by Elizabeth Leggett) Bayou de la Mère Poppy Z. Brite Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers Alyssa Wong (illustration by Plunderpuss) Let’s See What Happens Chuck Palahniuk (illustration by Elizabeth Leggett) POETRY edited by Robyn Lupo On Moving Into Your New Home Brit Mandelo The Great Unknown Joel Lane Worm and Memory Lucy A. Snyder In Memoriam: Robert Nelson W.H. Pugmire Flourless Devil’s Food Shweta Narayan The Skin-Walker’s Wife Lisa M. Bradley No Poisoned Comb Amal El-Mohtar The Rotten Leaf Cantata Rose Lemberg NONFICTION edited by Megan Arkenberg The H Word: A Good Story Lucy A. Snyder The Language of Hate Sigrid Ellis Creatures of the Night: A Short History of Queer Horror Catherine Lundoff Effecting Change and Subversion Through Slush Pile Politics Michael Matheson Putting It All the Way In: Naked Lunch and the Body Horror of William S. Burroughs Evan J. Peterson Queers Destroy Horror! Roundtable Interview Megan Arkenberg Artists’ Spotlight: Five Queer Artists Destroying Horror Art Cory Skerry and Megan Arkenberg Artists’ Gallery Eliza Gauger, KG Schmidt, AJ Jones, Elizabeth Leggett, and Plunderpuss AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS edited by Traci Castleberry Matthew Bright Kelley Eskridge Lee Thomas Caitlín R. Kiernan Sunny Moraine Alyssa Wong Chuck Palahniuk MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Upcoming Events Stay Connected Subscriptions & Ebooks About the Nightmare Team © 2015 Nightmare Magazine Cover by AJ Jones Ebook Design by John Joseph Adams www.nightmare-magazine.com FROM THE EDITORS On the Destruction of Horror: Notes from Your Queer Editors The Editorial Staff of Queers Destroy Horror! | 1,700 words Wendy N. Wagner, Guest Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor Welcome to issue thirty-seven of Nightmare. It’s our second installment of the Destroy All Genres project (see destroysf.com for more information), Queers Destroy Horror!, a double-issue of Nightmare that’s entirely written, edited, and illustrated by LGBTQUIA creators. It’s been an honor and a privilege to work with this remarkable team. The first horror story I ever read was Stephen King’s “The Raft,” a terrifying little gem that appeared in the collection Skeleton Crew, a book whose cover instilled in me a sense of disquiet that was only enhanced by the horrible things it contained. I was seven or eight years old, but everything about that book made sense to me. Anything in the world could be dangerous, even toys and dolls and harmless-seeming animals, like the monkey on the cover of that book. I huddled under my blankets and read my books and imagined how I could possibly survive the dangers of the world. Now as an adult, I turn to horror stories not to train myself to survive the world but to make sense of it. The world is horrible sometimes. Terrible things happen for no explicable reason, and the rules that run society can be unfair and cruel and horrid. But horror stories reframe the terrible things of the world. They hold a mirror up to the revolting so we can put it into some kind of taxonomy. They place wickedness and evil in a context that helps us see their limits and comforts us with the notion that darkness can be labeled, lit, and even survived. The work of the horror story is to define and demarcate the uncanny and the dark. But to be queer and to love horror stories is not always easy. Those stories are spun out of our culture and our societal norms, and the labels and definitions that come out of horror stories aren’t always inclusive or healthy. How many slasher flicks depend on rules about “appropriate” female sexuality? Enough that in Scream, the first rule for surviving a horror movie is to never have sex. How many thrillers about psychos rely on the idea of a gender-confused sadist to power their stories to success? Just ask Thomas Harris and Robert Bloch, plus all the writers who’ve ripped them off over the years. Be normal!, the tropes tell us. Be straight! Follow the rules! The top- level lessons of horror stories can feel stifling with their emphasis on the WASPy, heteronormative society that came to its zenith in 1950s Americana. But for all those stories that tell us to stop asking questions, stop trying to figure out our own unique relationships to our bodies and our sexualities, there are dozens of other stories that whisper—or even shout—that the way to beat back the darkness and the danger is to be more yourself, to break more soul-squashing rules, to be as queer as you need to be. The heroes of horror stories are often the oddballs and the weirdos, like the kids in The Monster Squad or every character in a Shirley Jackson novel. This special issue is about celebrating queer work, about breaking rules, and tweaking tropes. It follows in the footsteps of terrific anthologies like Bending the Landscape: Horror (edited by Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel), Queer Fear I and II (edited by Michael Rowe), and Night Shadows: Queer Horror (edited by Greg Herren and J.M. Redmann). Do readers really need another all-queer horror collection? My experience editing the personal essays for Lightspeed’s Queers Destroy Science Fiction! special edition certainly says they do. In that project, writer after writer spoke on the painful lack of QUILTBAG representation in popular culture, and how much they wanted to see more stories by queer creators and about queer characters. As Jerome Stueart put it: “When we’re not there, we’re not here.” So here’s a collection that puts more of us out there, with terrific essays and nonfiction exploring the role of queers in horror, stunning poems by LGBTQUIA voices, and eight works of short fiction that are dark, timely, and just plain eerie. I hope you will enjoy reading this issue as much as I have enjoyed bringing it together. I’d like to give special thanks to Ellen Datlow, Ross Lockhart, and Steve Berman for all their assistance with the project. And of course I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to John Joseph Adams, who is not only the most supportive and encouraging publisher any editor could ever hope to work with, but also the best mentor and friend. Everything I know about this work, I have learned from him. Now go read the destruction! Megan Arkenberg, Nonfiction Editor As queer writers and readers, we find ourselves feeling both at home and deeply unwelcome in the horror genre. Sexual and gender nonconformity are in the genre’s DNA; queer people began writing horror long before it was a recognizable fiction category, and our ranks include some of the biggest names in the contemporary horror scene. There’s also something thoroughly queer about the themes that preoccupy the genre, the thrilling or threatening friction between outsiders and communities, attraction and revulsion, sex and violence, power and vulnerability. As people who fall on the ever-expanding spectrum of lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual, trans, intersex, and nonbinary identities, we think about desire, embodiment, and belonging in ways that are rarely simple and never unexamined. It makes sense that many of us are drawn to fiction that tackles these topics in unexpected and often unsettling ways. But, as the essays and interviews in this special issue demonstrate, if we often see ourselves reflected in horror stories, it can also feel like the genre wants us gone—or dead. Horror’s queer figures include both monsters and victims: the demonically desirable predator and gender nonconforming serial killer, but also the solitary hitchhiker, the disposable gay or lesbian friend, the young woman who has sex in the wrong way or with the wrong people and is punished with death and dismemberment. Queer writers navigate pockets of homophobia or well-meaning ignorance, where our characters’ queerness is seen as either a moral failing or an act of exceptional bravery in-and-of itself. Equally frustrating are the readers who dismiss queerness in fiction as an “unnecessary” complication that isn’t “integral to the plot.” If on the one hand, a certain brand of mainstream horror cannot envision anything but monstrosity or victimhood for queer people, there is also a brand of horror criticism that resents the presence of queerness in the first place, viewing it as an intrusion of faddish political rhetoric into horror’s proper sphere. Of course, there are many possible responses to those who claim that there is no place for queer people, queer relationships, and queer sexuality in horror. We can point to the genre’s history. We can insist that representation is a moral issue. Personally, I find myself thinking that the readers who place queerness outside of horror’s boundaries are demanding a poorer and duller version of what this genre can be. At its best, queer horror acknowledges the way our vulnerability is shaped by what we desire and how our bodies are recognized. It asks us to dwell in the messy consequences of exclusion and isolation, of family-making and community- building, of finding names for ourselves or coming to recognize that no name fits quite right. It gives us characters with uniquely vexed or uniquely rich connections to their genders, people for whom the body is more than a sack of viscera waiting to be splattered across the walls.