TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 55, April 2017 FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, April 2017 FICTION Red Hood Eric Schaller The Adventurer’s Wife Premee Mohamed Figs, Detached Jenn Grunigen But Only Because I Love You Molly Tanzer NONFICTION The H Word: Powerful Visions of Suffering and Inhumanity John Langan Interview: Stephen Graham Jones Lisa Morton AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Eric Schaller Premee Mohamed Jenn Grunigen Molly Tanzer MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Stay Connected Subscriptions and Ebooks Also Edited by John Joseph Adams © 2017 Nightmare Magazine Cover by Dusan Kostic / Adobe Stock www.nightmare-magazine.com FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, April 2017 John Joseph Adams | 1736 words Welcome to issue fifty-five of Nightmare! We have original fiction from Eric Schaller (“Red Hood”) and Jenn Grunigen (“Figs, Detached”), along with reprints by Premee Mohamed (“The Adventurer’s Wife”) and Molly Tanzer (“But Only Because I Love You”). In the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” John Langan discusses the influence of Shirley Jackson on the genre. We also have author spotlights with our authors, and a feature interview with Stephen Graham Jones. Coming Soon: Cosmic Powers My new anthology, Cosmic Powers, will be available from Saga Press on April 18. It’s a collection of epic-scale science fiction, inspired by movies like Guardians of the Galaxy and Star Wars, featuring brand-new stories from Dan Abnett, Jack Campbell, Linda Nagata, Seanan McGuire, Alan Dean Foster, Charlie Jane Anders, Kameron Hurley, and many others. To learn more, or to pre-order, visit johnjosephadams.com/cosmic. You can also read one of the stories appearing in the anthology in this month’s Lightspeed: “Infinite Love Engine” by Joseph Allen Hill. Awards News In case you missed the news, the first of the major awards have announced their lists of finalists for last year’s work, and we’re pleased to announce that “Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea” by Sarah Pinsker and “Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station│Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0” by Caroline M. Yoachim are finalists for the Nebula Award this year. Congrats to Sarah and Caroline and to everyone else on the Nebula ballot! That brings Lightspeed’s lifetime Nebula nomination total to eighteen since we launched in June 2010. Lightspeed has currently lost sixteen in a row, so here’s hoping Sarah and/or Caroline breaks the streak! (Though of course, Alyssa Wong’s story, “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers,” from Nightmare won the Nebula last year, making us 1-for-1.) You can find the full slate of nominees at sfwa.org. The Nebulas will be presented at the 2017 Nebula Awards Conference, held this year in Pittsburgh, PA, May 18-21. “The Bad Hour” by Christopher Golden, from my horror anthology co-edited with Douglas Cohen, What the #@&% is That?, made the final ballot of the Bram Stoker Awards, so big congrats to Christopher for that honor. You can find the full slate of what made the final ballot at horror.org. The Stoker Awards will be presented at StokerCon 2017, which is being held in Long Beach, CA, April 27-30. In art award news: Galen Dara’s illustration of Kat Howard’s story “Seven Salt Tears” (Lightspeed, Jan. 2017) has been nominated for the Spectrum 24 Awards. Congrats to Galen and all of the other nominees! You can see the full list of nominated works at fleskpublications.com. Locus Recommended Reading List / Locus Awards Voting Locus Magazine released their annual recommended reading list, and we’re pleased to report Lightspeed has fifteen stories on the list, Nightmare has five stories, and my anthology What the #@&% is That? has two stories: “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” Dale Bailey (Nightmare) “Fifty Shades of Grays” Steven Barnes (Lightspeed) “Salto Mortal” Nick T. Chan (Lightspeed) “Ghost Pressure” Gemma Files (What the #@&% Is That?) “Little Widow” Maria Dahvana Headley (Nightmare / What the #@&% Is That?) “Red Dirt Witch” N.K. Jemisin (Fantasy) “The One Who Isn’t” Ted Kosmatka (Lightspeed) “The Finest, Fullest Flowering” Marc Laidlaw (Nightmare) “Sparks Fly” Rich Larson (Lightspeed) “A Good Home” Karin Lowachee (Lightspeed) “Those Brighter Stars” Mercurio D. Rivera (Lightspeed) “Angel, Monster, Man” Sam J. Miller (Nightmare) “Unauthorized Access” An Owomoyela (Lightspeed) “The Red Thread” Sofia Samatar (Lightspeed) “Vulcanization” Nisi Shawl (Nightmare) “Wednesday’s Story” Wole Talabi (Lightspeed) “Dragon Brides” Nghi Vo (Lightspeed) “Secondhand Bodies” JY Yang (Lightspeed) “Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station | Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0” Caroline M. Yoachim (Lightspeed) Congratulations to our authors, and to everyone who made the list! The release of the Recommended Reading List also means that voting for the Locus Awards is now open. Anyone is eligible to vote. Visit locusmag.com to cast a ballot or learn more. Voting closes April 15, 2017. Locus Feature Speaking of Locus, in their March 2017 issue, there’s a long feature interview with yours truly, in which I discuss my origins as an editor, editing my first anthologies, launching Lightspeed and John Joseph Adams Books, and all manner of things. (Surprisingly, I somehow got through the whole thing without once mentioning death metal.) If you’d like to check it out, you’ll need to buy the issue, but they’ve got some extended excerpts up on their website. To investigate either option, visit locusmag.com. Best-of-the-Year Reprints Several stories from Lightspeed, Nightmare, and the Destroy special issues have also been selected for reprint in several best-of-the-year volumes. They’re listed below, with the original venue and then the best-of-the-year editor(s)’s name following in parenthesis: 1. “RedKing” by Craig DeLancey (Lightspeed | Horton, Dozois) 2. “I’ve Come to Marry the Princess” by Helena Bell (Lightspeed | Horton) 3. “A Good Home” by Karin Lowachee (Lightspeed | Clarke) 4. “Those Brighter Stars” by Mercurio R. Rivera (Lightspeed | Dozois) 5. “Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea” by Sarah Pinsker (Lightspeed | Clarke) 6. “The Jaws That Bite, The Claws That Catch” by Seanan McGuire (Lightspeed| Guran) 7. “Fifty Shades Of Grays” by Steven Barnes (Lightspeed | Horton, Dozois) 8. “Red Dirt Witch” by N.K. Jemisin (Fantasy | Strahan, Guran) 9. “Whose Drowned Face Sleeps” by An Owomoyela & Rachael Swirsky (Nightmare | Guran) 10. “Wish You Were Here” by Nadia Bulkin (Nightmare | Guran, Datlow) 11. “The Finest, Fullest Flowering” by Marc Laidlaw (Nightmare | Guran) 12. “The One Who Isn’t” by Ted Kosmatka (Lightspeed | Dozois) 13. “The Bad Hour” by Christopher Golden (What the #@&% is That? | Datlow) This month’s list now incorporates selections from Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year anthology, and one story (“The One Who Isn’t”) which we previously neglected to include. We’ll update this list if we uncover any additional such honors! John Joseph Adams Books News I’m pleased to announce a new novel acquisition for John Joseph Adams Books: Upon a Burning Throne and The Blind King’s Wrath, the first two books in a new epic fantasy series by Ashok K. Banker, about a group of siblings battling for control of a vast empire while a powerful demonlord pits them against each other. Regular Lightspeed and Nightmare readers might recognize Ashok’s name from the stories of his we’ve published recently—and you’ll see his name several more times in the near future, as we have several works of his in inventory—but though Ashok is new to our pages, he’s a bestselling author in India, and, indeed, pioneered the entire fantasy genre in Indian publishing. So I’m super excited to be helping to introduce his work to a new audience. Otherwise, here’s a quick rundown what to expect from John Joseph Adams Books in the coming months: In July, we’ll be publishing two books: (1) Carrie Vaughn’s novel, Bannerless—a post-apocalyptic mystery in which an investigator must discover the truth behind a mysterious death in a world where small communities struggle to maintain a ravaged civilization decades after environmental and economic collapse; and (2) Sand by Hugh Howey, a reissue of his acclaimed indie-published novel. In September, we’ll be publishing Retrograde by Peter Cawdron, a hard SF novel about an international colony of astronauts on Mars, who have been prepared for every eventuality of living on another planet except one: What happens when disaster strikes Earth? In October, we’ll be publishing Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey, a short story collection including three stories set in the world of Hugh’s mega-hit Wool and two never-before-published tales, plus fifteen additional stories collected together for the first time. In November, we’ll be publishing Molly Tanzer’s Creatures of Will and Temper—a Victorian-era urban fantasy inspired by The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which an épée- fencing enthusiast and her younger sister are drawn into a secret and dangerous London underworld of pleasure-seeking demons and bloodthirsty diabolists, with only her skill with a blade standing between them and certain death. A bit further out, in Spring 2018, we’ll have The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp, about a magician with a talent for finding lost things who is forced into playing a high-stakes game with the gods of New Orleans for the heart and soul of the city. That’s all the JJA Books news to report for now. More soon! • • • • Well, that’s all there is to report 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 editor of John Joseph Adams Books, a new SF/Fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.