My head. Let’s start with my hair, more specifically, follicle by follicle. Brown in color to match my eyes; curly like traps—I’m Black—see it now. My hair lies fluffy on my head, like a good wig for the wrong owner. Like something too precious for me to have.| Nightmare Magazine
We know that these feelings are unreasonable. We ideally know that comparison is the thief of joy. But it also doesn’t change the fact that people feel these things. I think that’s why I feel some comfort in having this story out there, because it’s necessary to discuss these themes.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
Raised in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, known for the uncanny woods one oughta avoid at night, I know fear. Growing up, fireside ghost stories (i.e., oral horror storytelling) felt too real. At church, I swore the shadows . . . lingered down corridors.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
This poem was written in response to the LandBack movement and as part of the brainstorming process for my unpublished cli-fi novel The Everwhen.| Nightmare Magazine
Honey, the spirits are here with us tonight and they are deeply disappointed. [audience laughter] Momma, do you not own a mirror? Did you think you looked cute when you walked out of your house tonight? My brother, I’m so sorry for your loss. Losses.| Nightmare Magazine
We always try to pull out the stops in our birthday issues, and this year is no different. There’s no real theme this month---although regret and reparation loom large---but every single piece is out to squeeze your heart or slap you across the face.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
In an interview, the iconic drag queen Sasha Colby said something like---drag for her was a tool to empower people who had been disempowered. And that sparked the essence of Courtney’s character and her journey.| 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 Magazine
Adam-Troy Castro recommends a movie and two new books. Find out what he's excited about!| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
I was reading Genesis but I kept imagining everything happening where I grew up, in my childhood home. When I reached the part about Lot and his daughters, I became fixated on them. I never finished reading Genesis. This poem came out of that.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - 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
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 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
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 Magazine
Inherent in saving face, there’s a backdrop of protectionism. A fear of losing your community, in losing everything. There’s pressure to be fastidious and appear too powerful to mess with. Many families, mine included, have a history of keeping their heads on a swivel to survive war.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
To save face, turn away from the sun. Turn away from the spatter of cold rain against the cheek, away from the hard light of the moon at its roundest, away from the snow-flecked wind, away from the barky scratch at the fork of an oak.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
There’s a Bugs Bunny cartoon from 1954 called “Baby Buggy Bugs.” Maybe you’ve seen it? It’s the one with the extremely short bank robber who disguises himself as a baby and tricks Bugs into taking care of him while he searches for his lost loot.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
When I proposed to Caroline, I told her that as long as we lived I would deny her nothing, but I had one request for myself: that we fulfill my own lifelong dream and build a haunted mansion for us. Caroline was amenable to this.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
If there’s one thing I learned this summer, it’s that we need each other more than ever. There are so many terrible things happening, and there’s no way we can survive all of them without a helping hand. We must invest our time and our energy into our relationships.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
The thing that got me excited to write this story is the jaded and familiar voice of Bangkok taxi drivers. They’re my biggest driver, literally. Taxis decorated for spiritual protection aren’t such an uncommon sight either. This voice became irresistible when I was playing Cyberpunk 2077.| Nightmare MagazineRSS - Nightmare Magazine
Krungthep means “The City of Gods.” A much more charming name than the bawdy Bangkok that foreigners joke about. But to Somsak, it is the city of ghosts. He drives his taxi slowly along through the glittering blocks of shopping malls, the neon signs of Yaowarat restaurants.| Nightmare Magazine
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
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
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
“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
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
