Nightmare Magazine, Issue 87 (December 2019): Nightmare Magazine, #87

By John Joseph Adams, Joanna Parypinksi, Siobhan Carroll and 2 more

NIGHTMARE is an online horror and dark fantasy magazine. In NIGHTMARE's pages, you will find all kinds of horror fiction, from zombie stories and haunted house tales, to visceral psychological horror.

Welcome to issue eighty-seven of NIGHTMARE! It's turning into winter now, so we're really excited about "Methods of Ascension," a new short story from Dan Stintzi that will take you out in the snow and make you wish you were just freezing to death. In our second original short,"Dead Worms, Dangling," Joanna Parypinski takes us someplace a bit warmer: the local fishing hole. But don't expect your ordinary fishing story--this is Nightmare Magazine, after all. Our reprints this month are from Siobhan Carroll ("Nesters") and Kurt Fawver ("The Myth of You"). In the latest installment of our column on horror, "The H Word," author Stephen Graham Jones talks about how endings work in this genre. Terence Taylor has reviewed some new fiction for us, and of course, we have author spotlights with our authors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Joseph Adams
• Release date: Dec 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393717768

John Joseph Adams

John Joseph Adams is the series editor of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and the editor of the Hugo Award–winning Lightspeed, and of more than forty anthologies, including Lost Worlds & Mythological Kingdoms, The Far Reaches, and Out There Screaming (coedited with Jordan Peele).

Book preview

Nightmare Magazine

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 87, December 2019

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: December 2019

FICTION

Methods of Ascension

Dan Stintzi

Nesters

Siobhan Carroll

Dead Worms, Dangling

Joanna Parypinski

The Myth of You

Kurt Fawver

NONFICTION

The H Word: What We Talk About When We Talk About Horror Endings

Stephen Graham Jones

Book Reviews: December 2019

Terence Taylor

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Dan Stintzi

Joanna Parypinski

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

About the Nightmare Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2019 Nightmare Magazine

Cover by Rodjulian / Adobe Stock Footage

www.nightmare-magazine.com

From the EditorBEST AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY 2018

Editorial: December 2019

John Joseph Adams | 287 words

Welcome to issue eighty-seven of Nightmare!

It’s turning into winter now, so we’re really excited about Methods of Ascension, a new short story from Dan Stintzi that will take you out in the snow and make you wish you were just freezing to death. In our second original short,Dead Worms, Dangling, Joanna Parypinski takes us someplace a bit warmer: the local fishing hole. But don’t expect your ordinary fishing story—this is Nightmare Magazine, after all. Our reprints this month are from Siobhan Carroll (Nesters) and Kurt Fawver (The Myth of You).

In the latest installment of our column on horror, The H Word, author Stephen Graham Jones talks about how endings work in this genre. Terence Taylor has reviewed some new fiction for us, and of course, we have author spotlights with our authors.

Exciting news from the World Fantasy Awards

We’re delighted to announce that three stories from our Lightspeed/Nightmare publishing family were nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction: The Ten Things She Said While Dying: An Annotation, Adam-Troy Castro (Nightmare, December 2018—bit.ly/NM10Things); The Court Magician, Sarah Pinsker (Lightspeed, January 2018—bit.ly/LSCourtMag); and Ten Deals with the Indigo Snake, Mel Kassel (Lightspeed, October 2018—bit.ly/LS10Deals). We’re even more delighted that Mel Kessel’s story won, sharing the award in a rare tie. It’s such exciting news, and I know I couldn’t be happier for Mel.

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, an science fiction and fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, as well as the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, including The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent projects include: Cosmic Powers, What the #@&% Is That?, 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 a finalist eleven 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.

FictionDiscover John Joseph Adams Books

Methods of Ascension

Dan Stintzi | 5708 words

Method 1: Subconscious Modification

It wasn’t unusual for my brother to send me strange videos he found on the internet. If I’d had enough to drink, sometimes I’d even watch. They were all about pain, in one way or another, and often made me feel as though someone had poured concrete down my throat. There are afterimages burned into my memory that cannot be removed; grainy flashes of a woman swallowed up by an escalator, handing her child to a stranger before being pulled under; black and white street fight footage that ends with a neck snapped back and blood leaking out into a storm drain; a man’s legs removed by hidden explosives, then parts of him floating out of the sky as if his missing bits were confetti.

My brother never provided commentary, just the videos themselves—the emails subjectless, their bodies empty. This went on for years without much encouragement on my end. Then one day it stopped, and we stopped speaking altogether, not for any one reason, but partially because I remembered that I didn’t have to be friends with a person I didn’t care for. It’s not a requirement—there are no laws against not speaking to your family. But I guess he couldn’t help it, because six months later Robert started sending me new videos, and it became clear that in those six months something inside him had changed.

When his message arrived, I realized that I had—only for a short amount of time—forgotten he existed at all. I did not feel good about this fact, but it was the truth, and I try not to avoid the reality of my feelings. The first email had a subject: I think you’ll like this, it read. Please keep an open mind, was all the body said.

The embedded link materialized a new window that showed a website from another era. The background was black and stuffed with poorly spaced lines of yellow text. The font was so hard to read that when I glanced away from the screen, the words remained in my vision, burning neon bright, hovering in empty space. The text was spliced with uncaptioned, low-res images of paintings and sculptures I did not recognize. The paintings showed deer with too many horns, too many heads, angelic beings offering severed limbs to fire-sheathed deities. There was a video in a box at the bottom of the page. It was a man speaking to the camera. I learned later that this man’s name was Rudyard Vespra.

Vespra sat in an office with wooden walls. The French doors behind him were curtained, leading somewhere unseen. His appearance and accent were vaguely European, although from what part of Europe I couldn’t say. English was not his first language, that was certain. It was clear in the syllables he emphasized. The way he said cosmology. He spoke about the pictures on the website, about the angels and the deer and the things they symbolized, the pool of shared-consciousness the artists pulled from to make them real. He discussed, at length, the mythology associated with divine structures and their representation in ancient Near Eastern art. It was mostly incomprehensible, but there are lines he spoke that I can’t unremember. His face remains in my head.

You are the master of your own mind, he said. You can reshape your reality. What you need is already inside you, it’s only a matter of finding the holes in your dreams.

These lines were a prelude to the sales pitch. A monthly fee bought access to Vespra’s program; to videos, lectures, worksheets, and books. The program’s end goal was unclear. It was broken up into three distinct stages. Methods of Ascension, that’s what he called it, and it cost a thousand dollars. I got an email from Robert a week later, asking me for money.

• • • •

Robert had lived in the cabin since after my dad died. Dad built the cabin in the northwoods, a half-hour drive from the border, hidden in the deep, deep part of the state, where people sometimes went to disappear. We spent weekends there growing up, fetching bottles of beer for my dad and his only friend that I remember—a guy named Kelly—out of an army-colored cooler while they stood on the dock, starlit and wobbling. They pulled hooks out of the lips of fish and told stories about the cars they’d owned. I remember cleaning bluegill right there on the shore, using the tip of the knife to feel for bone, and then we’d wrap the filets in tinfoil and light a fire and watch the sparks fall into the lake.

I guess