TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 41, February 2016 FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, February 2016 FICTION No Other Men in Mitchell Rose Hartley Inspirations Seanan McGuire Princess Dennis Etchison Where Angels Come In Adam L.G. Nevill NOVEL EXCERPTS Bleeding Earth Kaitlin Ward NONFICTION The H Word: Fairy Tales: The Original Horror Stories? Alison Littlewood Artist Showcase: Steven Stahlberg Marina J. Lostetter Interview: David Mitchell The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Rose Hartley Seanan McGuire Dennis Etchison Adam L.G. Nevill MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Stay Connected Subscriptions and Ebooks About the Nightmare Team Also Edited by John Joseph Adams © 2016 Nightmare Magazine Cover by Steven Stahlberg www.nightmare-magazine.com FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, February 2016 John Joseph Adams | 944 words Welcome to issue forty-one of Nightmare! We neglected to mention it in the magazine last month (whoops!), but we’re currently in the midst of crowdfunding our next Destroy project. In 2014, we asked women to destroy science fiction, and they did— spectacularly—in our first crowdfunded, all-women special issue, Women Destroy Science Fiction!. Then, in 2015, we asked queers to destroy science fiction, they did—again, spectacularly—in Queers Destroy Science Fiction! This year, we’re turning the reins over to People of Colo(u)r, with People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!, guest edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Kristine Ong Muslim. Joining Nalo and Kristine will be a team of wonderful POC creatives, including Nisi Shawl (reprint editor), Berit Ellingsen (flash fiction editor), Sunil Patel (personal essays editor), Grace Dillon (nonfiction editor), and more! We launched our Kickstarter campaign on January 18 and surpassed our original goal in just a manner of hours. Our first day’s totals surpassed that of QDSF and WDSF, and as I write this (on the evening of January 31), we’re currently at nearly $26K (518% of our original goal). Thanks so much to all of you who have supported the project thus far! Our two biggest stretch goals are the same as last year: If we receive enough pledges, we’ll not only publish POC Destroy Science Fiction!, we’ll also publish additional special issues POC Destroy Horror! (at $30K) and POC Destroy Fantasy! (at $40K). We’ve already unlocked our first four stretch goals, including a “POC sampler” anthology edited by yours truly, consisting of POC-authored stories previously selected for publication in my various projects. If you’d like to buy or renew a subscription, doing so during the campaign is a great idea because one of our stretch goals unlocked a really great bonus: If you back the Kickstarter and select a subscription reward, you’ll not only get the subscription—you’ll also all 40+ back issues of the magazine! The POC Destroy Science Fiction! Kickstarter campaign will run from January 18 – February 19. To learn more, visit destroysf.com/poc. • • • • In case you missed my big news recently: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, publishers of my Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy (and the rest of the Best American series), have offered me the opportunity to edit a science fiction/fantasy (and horror) novel line for them—and naturally I agreed! The line is called John Joseph Adams Books (their idea, not mine!), and will be a tightly-curated list of 7-10 titles per year. We’ll be pre-launching the line in early 2016 with new editions of three Hugh Howey novels, starting with Beacon 23 (February 9) and then in March, we’ll publish volumes II and III of the Silo trilogy, Shift and Dust (March 22)—making them all available via traditional publishing for the first time. The line will then kick things off in earnest in early 2017 with our first batch of never- before-published works. If you’re a regular reader of my magazines and/or anthologies, then you should already have a good idea of what to expect—and if you like my work as a short fiction editor, then I suspect you’ll like the novels I publish as well. The John Joseph Adams Books website is still under development, but if you bookmark johnjosephadamsbooks.com, that’ll take you to it when it’s ready. And never fear, dear readers—I’ll still be here, working to bring you your monthly dose of Nightmare(s), and I’ll also still be editing Lightspeed and anthologies as well. How (?!), you may ask. Good question—I’m not entirely sure! I will probably have to get much better at delegating! But the good news is, I got lots of practice last year serving as a judge for the National Book Award (Young People’s Literature category), where I had to consider about 300 novels while keeping up with my short fiction duties. So I think I’ll be able to fit everything into my schedule. If not, I’ll just give up some optional extracurricular activities, like sleep. Also, speaking of HMH and Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy —ICYMI, it’s now available. In it, guest editor Joe Hill and I present the top twenty stories of 2014 (ten science fiction, ten fantasy), by the following: Nathan Ballingrud, T.C. Boyle, Adam-Troy Castro, Neil Gaiman, Theodora Goss, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, Seanan McGuire, Sam J. Miller, Susan Palwick, Cat Rambo, Jess Row, Karen Russell, A. Merc Rustad, Sofia Samatar (two stories!), Kelly Sandoval, Jo Walton, and Daniel H. Wilson. Learn more at johnjosephadams.com/best- american. • • • • With the announcements out of the way, here’s what we have on tap this month: We have original fiction from Rose Hartley (“No Other Men in Mitchell”) and Dennis Etchison (“Princess”), along with reprints by Seanan McGuire (“Inspirations”) and Adam L. G. Nevill (“Where Angels Come In”). 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 an interview with award-winning author David Mitchell. It’s another great month for nightmares, so thanks for reading! ABOUT THE AUTHOR John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Nightmare, is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, a new SF/Fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, as well as the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, including The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent projects include: Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Operation Arcana, Loosed Upon the World, Wastelands 2, Press Start to Play, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated nine times) and is a seven-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams. FICTION No Other Men in Mitchell Rose Hartley | 5155 words If I’m gonna tell this story, I’m gonna have to start with the men. In Queensland—right in the middle of it, bum-fuck-nowhere is the word —there’s a town called Mitchell. It has two pubs and a mechanic who services the road trains that pass through, and its only claim to fame is birthing Australia’s shortest-serving Prime Minister ever. I got to know Mitchell’s mechanic while I was driving road trains over the Warrego Highway between South Australia and Queensland. If you don’t know what road trains are, just imagine a B-double truck and whack an extra trailer or two on the end. There are only a couple of roads in Australia you can legally drive them, far away from the cities. They call these roads highways but they’re really just long, narrow strips of cracking tar surrounded by red dust that stretches into forever. Once you get up to a hundred clicks an hour it takes half a kilometre to stop a truck that weighs over a hundred tons, especially if your bastard of a supervisor overweights you. If you apply the brakes too hard, you jackknife the trailers and you’re fucked. If there’s a cow on the road, it’s fucked. If you fall asleep, you’re fucked. I hit a cow once. The sun is so dry along the Birdsville Track it almost splits open your skin like drought-struck earth, but I had my arm hanging out the window anyway. The truck sailed over a crest and the black and white lump was right there in front of me, probably lowing but I can’t remember. I twisted the wheel to the left in reflex, which is a dangerous thing to do at the best of times, and the cow hit the side of the cab and burst open like a watermelon. Red innards and grey brains came sailing in through the window and plastered the inside of the cab. I never thought of myself as a redneck before then, but I sure was after that. I had red all over me. Ever driven for ten hours with brains stuck in your hair? But I was talking about the mechanic. Barry. About a month after I quit driving trucks, Barry left his wife. I think I inspired him to leave.