TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 27, December 2014 FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, December 2014 In Memoriam: Karen Jones, Nightmare Art Director FICTION Embers Tim Lebbon Bodywork Christa Faust Bog Dog Seras Nikita Night Falls, Again Michael Marshall Smith NONFICTION The H Word: The Strange Story Simon Strantzas Artist Gallery Brom Artist Spotlight: Brom Marina J. Lostetter Interview: Robert Shearman Helen Marshall AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Tim Lebbon Seras Nikita Michael Marshall Smith MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Stay Connected Subscriptions & Ebooks About the Editors © 2014 Nightmare Magazine Cover Art by Brom www.Nightmare-Magazine.com FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, December 2014 John Joseph Adams Welcome to issue twenty-seven of Nightmare! The World Fantasy Awards were presented in early November at the World Fantasy Convention in Washington, D.C. Your humble editor was once again nominated for the award . and again managed to lose, for the sixth- consecutive nomination! But many other wonderful folks won, including a lifetime achievement award for our illustrious guest editor of the Women Destroy Horror! special issue, Ellen Datlow. Congratulations to all of the winners and nominees! (If you’d like to see a complete list, visit worldfantasy.org/awards.) • • • • 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 Tim Lebbon (“Embers”) and newcomer Seras Nikita (“Bog Dog”). For reprints, we have work from Christa Faust (“Bodywork”) and Michael Marshall Smith (“Night Falls, Again”). In the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” Simon Strantzas talks about the strange and the weird. We’ve also got author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview with Robert Shearman. This issue is sponsored by our friends at Samhain Publishing. Learn more at samhainpublishing.com. 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. New projects coming out in 2014 and 2015 include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Operation Arcana, Wastelands 2, 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. In Memoriam Karen Jones Nightmare Art Director The Nightmare family is sad to report that our art director, Karen Jones, died suddenly in early November, of natural causes. In tribute to her, we offer these words of loving memory from two of her best friends in the field, Jennifer Heddle and John Picacio. —John Joseph Adams Jennifer Heddle Karen Avery Jones was my friend for over 17 years. We initially bonded over our mutual love of The X-Files, and soon enough she was a fixture in my life. We went to countless movies together, vacationed together, attended Comic Cons and literary conventions together. She spent more than one Thanksgiving with my family. I never questioned that she would always be there when I needed her. I guess that’s how it happens, right? You assume someone will always be there, until they’re not. If you never had the opportunity to hear Karen laugh, you missed out on something truly special. Her laughter was loud, frequent, and completely infectious—and usually preceded by one of her trademark wicked one-liners that left us all gasping for air. Her easy laugh reflected the simple joys she found in life. She loved reading, seeing movies, gaming, cooking, going to concerts. But that never stopped her from trying to do more, to learn more. She had an intellectual curiosity and a dogged drive to continually improve herself that I envied and admired. She taught herself Japanese and traveled to Tokyo. She decided to learn to draw—and became a capable artist. She taught herself computer programming languages and helped friends with their websites. She assisted on independent films and taught herself everything there was to know about personal finance. There was never a time that Karen wasn’t teaching herself something. As evidenced by her work for this magazine, she also had a great eye for art. Karen wouldn’t just tell you she liked a painting, she would be able to tell you why, with her background in archaeology providing a context for it all. She loved her work for Lightspeed and Nightmare; she took delight in searching out new artists and was genuinely excited every time she offered someone a contract. I don’t think it was a role she’d ever imagined for herself, but like every other task set before her, she took to it with dedication and enthusiasm. Karen was a woman of many talents who filled many roles (not least of which was adoring aunt to her nieces), but the quality for which she will truly be remembered is her friendly, open nature. Everyone around her enjoyed her company. We often attended the World Fantasy Convention together, and by the end of the weekend it seemed like half the people there knew who Karen was. Every friend I introduced her to became her friend, too. That was just how it worked. No one had an unkind word to say about her. Everything was more fun when she was around. She made my world brighter, and I would do just about anything to hear her laugh again. John Picacio A great person died last month. Her name was Karen Jones and she was my friend. I heard the news when I was heading out to the World Fantasy Convention Art Show Reception on Nov. 8. Jennifer Heddle phoned me and let me know. It was a shock, to say the least. She introduced me to Karen at the World Science Fiction Convention in 2002, and they were very good friends for the better part of two decades. Rather than dwell on Karen’s death, I want her to be remembered for the good that she brought. She had an infectious smile and laugh, and for several years, a group of us including Chris Roberson, Allison Baker, Lou Anders, Paul Cornell, Jen Heddle, Alan Beatts, Jude Feldman, and Karen were a rolling “rat pack” of sorts that banded together at more conventions than I can count (shoutout to Joe McCabe and Jess Nevins, as well). We were all building pro careers in various publishing capacities, whether it be as editors, illustrators, writers, retailers, or publishers—all of us it seemed, except Karen. She was a voracious reader and connoisseur of film, TV and video games, and she wasn’t chasing a career in publishing. She was simply one of us. She was strong, quietly confident and true to herself. I think it was Chris that once said Karen was the smartest one amongst all of us, and it was true. I don’t know what Karen’s IQ was, but if one of us was officially “genius,” it was her, without a doubt. She never flaunted. She was unabashedly geek-proud, passionate about the things and people she loved. She brought joy wherever she went, and I’ll always remember her for that. She may not have been chasing a career in the arts or publishing back then, but lo and behold, in recent years, she ended up becoming the art director for Lightspeed and Nightmare, once again proving how diverse her talents were. She was funny. She was brilliant. She was luminous. You will not be forgotten, Karen. ABOUT THE AUTHORS Jennifer Heddle is senior editor of adult fiction at Lucasfilm/Disney Publishing Worldwide, handling Star Wars novels and comic books. Prior to that she spent 15 years in publishing in New York, primarily at Penguin and Simon & Schuster. She writes for the official Star Wars Blog at starwars.com and has had pieces published in Star Wars Insider and at io9, and recently has been trying her hand at writing Star Wars Rebels Early Readers. She is originally from New York City, but currently resides in Alameda, California. John Picacio is an award-winning illustrator of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.