There’s an eye in the back of my husband’s head. It opens only after he’s fallen asleep, lid splitting silent as a dream in the night. My husband’s eyes are amber, no brighter than a penny in the sun. The eye on the back of his head is different. It looks out at me through his dark hair, pupil white and glowing.| Nightmare Magazine
Archaeology is a method and practice which resurfaces the past. It can help us reconstruct the history and culture of ancient (or not so ancient) people, and give us insight into what it means to be human. Archaeology produces more than museum displays, and it can be used to manipulate and disempower.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
I wrote this poem as a critique of certain political parties that espouse pro-life policies for “life” in the womb but won’t lift a finger to enact laws to help children once they’re actually born (anti-gun legislation, free healthcare and school lunches, etc.). They regard children as disposable fodder.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
People really don’t like confronting the unknown and they really don’t like conflict. So much of this brief window into this couple’s relationship is about avoidance, distance, observation from far away but with no real knowledge gained. And they both know it’s wrong; the Magic 8 Ball didn’t appear for no reason.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
Philip K. Dick is not a household name but much of his science fiction is: Hollywood adaptations of his work include Blade Runner, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly. He never wrote a vampire or werewolf story, and he almost never played with the common tropes of the horror genre.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
Most of us speak and eat/swallow without thinking about how complicated these processes actually are, how a single malfunction in the system can completely alter how we live or interact with others. A few years back, I accompanied an elderly family member to their first swallow test.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
Many of us are feeling anxious about what’s going to happen to each other and our beautiful planet. I sometimes lose heart, myself! But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from working with so many amazing horror writers over the years, it’s that when things get dark, humans have the capacity to come together and shine.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
What strikes me about Hannah is she’s not afraid of the bunny-ear kids, by all appearances the most fearsome thing at Colden Hills Music Camp. Instead, her anxieties are laser-focused on walking around in her swimsuit, and having to be social at the ice cream social, and not getting picked up at week’s end.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
Hannah’s first impression of Colden Hills Music Camp is that, for a place with “hills” and “music” right in the name, it’s too flat and way, way too quiet, and the one thing she initially thinks must be a weird rustic flute propped up against the side of the welcome cabin turns out to be just an extra-straight stick.| Nightmare Magazine
The Saw series debuted in 2004---and Kevin Greutert, perennial Hollywood horror editor, was there from the beginning. Greutert edited the first five Saw entries, helmed the next two (Saw VI and Saw VII), edited the two succeeding installments and finally directed what seems to be the swan song in the fictional universe of this Saw series, Saw X.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
CW: intent to harm an animal. Writing this piece felt like a hard look in the mirror. I wanted to be honest and vulnerable about feeling helpless, about the true cost of being a bystander. So, I anchored those ideas to the time in all of our lives when we have almost no agency or […]| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
I’ve never experienced online dating myself, but I’ve experienced a lot of the kinds of racism this character is subjected to. We live during a time when many people like to think of themselves as not being racist, but then they’ll say these things that reveal how clueless they are.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
Used to be, you’d buy paper offerings and burn them to provide for your ancestors. Spirit money ensured they were taken care of in the underworld and wouldn’t have to roam the pitted streets of the afterlife suffering from starvation or homelessness. In this way, you could help your late loved ones avoid the terrible fate of becoming hungry ghosts.| Nightmare Magazine
The hearth is a trope of holiday songs and stories. It’s a warm place in a cold time, and families gather around it---for love, laughter, storytelling, a cup of cheer. This short story is an attempt at redefinition. I’m taking the familiar and approaching it from an unfamiliar, upsetting angle.| Nightmare Magazine
Weird fiction, it seems, is having a moment in the zeitgeist; horror, we’re told, is also having a moment in the zeitgeist. It isn’t surprising, given the state of the world, that these two modes are increasingly attractive to readers.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
The first and last time Calvin asks me about ghosts is on our fourth date. He wears green because I told him it was my favorite color. His hair is freshly cut, and his jaw still bleeding from a hurried shave. I smile at these small things he’s placing before me as an offering.| Nightmare Magazine
Luckily for me, the ghosts in my house aren’t nearly as toxic as the ones in this month’s issue. Sure, we sometimes wake in the night to feel phantom dogs jumping on the bed to join our pup (who seems unfussed by these strangers).| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
The title came to me first, and I built the story around that concept of asking for it. How I might subvert it. Because that phrase, to me, has always been how someone’s wants are placed on another person. The justification they hunt for to allay any guilt or anxiety or sense of culpability.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
Adam-Troy Castro argues that Ryan Coogler's Sinners is a new horror classic. Find out why in his review.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
Money rituals are inhumane practices carried out by different traditional religions in Nigeria. They, unfortunately, contribute to and are influenced by the kidnapping problem in the country.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
The landlord requires proof of the infestation, and proof---per clause twelve, subsection three of the lease---must come in the form of a living specimen, safely contained. A dead specimen is insufficient, he has repeatedly explained.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
“Happy birthday, my love. You deserve this.” Bruce lifted the blindfold and waited, counting the heartbeats, as my eyes acclimated to the harsh lighting. Above us, bare fluorescent bulbs flickered and sputtered in their aluminum housing.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
For such an infamous book, the original edition Dévorer is decidedly ordinary. It is a small, clothbound book, written in French. It is one hundred and forty-seven pages long. It was privately printed by its author, Edgar Addison, in the final years of his life.| Nightmare Magazine
It seems to me if you can afford to abuse people, flout social rules, and treat people like garbage, you will. I wasn’t really trying to say anything about social hierarchy, just presenting it as is, as it takes place around us.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
This will be a placeholder for the fiction category.| Nightmare Magazine
The bedbug bite is unlike any insect bite I’ve experienced before. You’re covered in these welts, and the cumulative effect of their itching is the inability to concentrate on anything other than that sensation. If horror is about extremity, then this story is about extremity of sensation.| Nightmare Magazine
Séances are as common in horror as the unwitting purchase of a haunted house. Fans and auteurs alike enjoy the frisson of a spirit speaking through a medium to nervous and skeptical séance attendees.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
Every once in a while I am lucky enough to disgorge a story almost fully formed from the get go. This one was born from a stew of rising fury with ambient misogyny, irritation with discourse about the declining art of music playlist design.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
Welcome to what might be our most meta issue ever. I’m no expert on postmodernism (seriously, I fell asleep every session of my 20th Century Philosophy class), but I do love fiction that recognizes it’s working within a larger schema of texts all inescapably linked by culture.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
In the original ABBA song, the singer dramatically bemoans her inability to stay away from her lover. “Here I go again” is a sigh of resignation for an outcome that the singer considers predetermined due to her inability to escape the cycle.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
This woman---walking alone, at night---is going to be killed. Here I go again. Watch my finger. See how the passive voice takes you by the hand? See how it leads you to understand the object and the verb? The trouble is, it leaves out the deliverer of the sentence.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
Nat Cassidy writes horror for the page, stage, and screen. His acclaimed novels, including Mary: An Awakening of Terror, Nestlings, and Rest Stop, have been featured in best-of lists from Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, NPR, and more. He's just released his new novel The Wolf Comes Home.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
I wanted to paint an eerie portrait of the Brooklyn Bridge area as I first experienced it, capturing both a feeling of wonder and unease, for any place with enough character and history can feel like it has an undercurrent of old magic that may ensnare you.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
Everyone dreams, whether we remember it or not. Scientists tell us that dreams are the warnings of our subconscious---a means of exploring that which we cannot bring ourselves to say aloud. Religion tells us that dreams can be revelations or assurance.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
he found the first man on Tinder, or maybe on Hinge, and the restaurant where they met was glowing with antique lamps and green brocade wallpaper and velvet couches, everything soft and inviting, not a single hint of what was to unfold in an hour or two.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
But in folklore the fool has also played the role of the teacher. They make mistakes so we don’t have to. This month’s issue is full of fools and those who take advantage of them.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
Growing up listening to folktales about reanimated corpses made this aspect of horror a pretty normal one for me, and in this story, their presence made sense with the location being the former cursed burial ground.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
My grandmother used to say that all fingers are unequal, yet equal. There are long fingers, short fingers, fat fingers, thin fingers, straight fingers and crooked fingers. She said that each finger has a function, and all the fingers work in harmony.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
Guest reviewer J.B. Kish shines a spotlight on a French horror film you might have missed: MadS. Find out why it's a must-see on for both film nerds and horror fans!| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
This piece comes from a childhood of taking piano lessons. I switched to other instruments after high school, but I still remember how to read sheet music.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
This is an Ecuadorian tradition, to burn a poppet doll on New Year’s Eve and leave the bad year behind as you jump across the burning effigy. We burn a body that represents el año viejo---the old year---so we can leave behind all that negative energy and welcome a new year full of hope and possibilities. I wanted to examine this celebration by emphasizing its violence and the borrowing of faces to do so.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
It hides from me deep below. Amidst bubbles and foam, a skull of gills and scales and spine stashes away under waves of blue. Do we share the same creases beneath our eyes, the ones that feel like gashes in the mornings? Is salt buried above its cheeks? When it swims and breathes does it choke like me, now? Like me, before? And when it cries and screams does the ocean swallow it all up, too?| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
In late 2023, I noticed a new subgenre on the horizon, emerging from the intersection of celebrity culture and horror. I call it “Stage Fright”---save the groans, it’s a working title. With the release of Trap, Smile 2, and MaXXXine, this new wave reflects a zeitgeist increasingly disillusioned with the glittering facades of billionaires and icons, and eagerly tuning in when these stars find themselves ensnared in tragic circumstances.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
In the morning room everything is bright and clean, florals and pastels. My wife says it looks tacky and childish, but after some pleading, she agrees not to touch the decorations. The faint lavender-colored walls I hang with dried pressed flowers in clear-plastic frames. The couch is the most expensive thing I ever bought.| Nightmare Magazine
“Glory Hole” is a horrific, although incredibly intimate, look into the ways in which we punish ourselves in ways we think we deserve. What was your inspiration for this story? What was the writing process like, and was it any different from the ways you’ve written other stories? I wrote “Glory Hole” shortly after suffering […]| Nightmare Magazine
Important Note About Kindle Periodicals/Unlimited Subscriptions Nightmare is withdrawing from the Kindle Periodicals Program on Kindle Unlimited due to the draconian terms and conditions. If you’re a subscriber via Kindle Unlimited and wish to continue your subscription (and we really hope you will!), you can subscribe directly via our website or via Weightless Books; all […]| Nightmare Magazine
In many ways, this poem is about an excruciatingly difficult childhood, but it is also about my found family, about the people who have helped me realize that the past is something you can leave behind, that you can exorcise, put away because there are better things to do than stay haunted by the dark.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
A Meditation on the Witch The witch is a shapeshifter, a marvelous creature who evolves with the times. Those who fear her have burned her at the stake, hung her body from the gallows, and drowned her in the sea—none of which were able to properly kill her because the witch is more than a […]| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
I think this is a story about thinking too much. Stop thinking and you become less human, more like an animal; that involves scars, and predators, and living outdoors, and for certain animals it sometimes involves eating garbage.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
Growing up in a small town in southern West Virginia, I’d always heard that a man wasn’t supposed to show his feelings. I mean, think about it, the Mountain State in those days was where generations of males put on hard hats, work boots, and brave faces before heading into the bowels of the earth to mine coal.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
What do the wicked stepmother and the innocent princess have in common? In this retelling, a lot more than you might think. I love a good fairy tale retelling, especially those that subvert the narrative in unexpected ways, and it’s high time for the jealous villainess archetype to be rewritten.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
Welcome to Issue #152 of Nightmare Magazine! And if you’re a subscriber reading this on release day, then happy May Day---a day where many cultures in the Northern Hemisphere celebrate the high point of spring, a day of fertility and growth.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
Little is more crushing than the idea that no matter what you do, you are only capable of destruction, and everyone knows it. I wanted to weave that fear into this story, and to push tenderness and violence up against each other. How can we understand one without understanding the other?| Nightmare Magazine
You know the one about the Gun. The Gun goes where it wants to. On Thursday morning just after recess, the Gun will walk through the front doors of Thurman Elementary, and it won’t sign in at the front office or wear a visitor’s badge.| Nightmare Magazine
