Nightmare Magazine, Issue 122 (November 2022): Nightmare Magazine, #122

By Wendy N. Wagner

NIGHTMARE is a digital 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 122 of NIGHTMARE! We have original short fiction from Gordon B. White ("Caveat") and Amanda Song ("Only When You Laugh"). Our Horror Lab originals include a flash story ("Ant Twin") from Sean Noah Noah and a poem ("For You Were Strangers in Egypt") from Elizabeth R. McClellan. We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, "The H Word," plus author spotlights with our authors, and a panel interview with Lee Murray, Rena Mason, Geneve Flynn, K.P. Kulski, and Angela Yuriko Smith discussing the work of South East Asian voices in horror.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adamant Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215929216

Book preview

Nightmare Magazine

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 122 (November 2022)

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: November 2022

FICTION

Devil Take Me

Gordon B. White

Ant Twin

Sean Noah Noah

Only When You Laugh

Amanda Song

POETRY

For You Were Strangers in Egypt

Elizabeth R. McClellan

NONFICTION

The H Word: Sole Survivor

May Haddad

Panel Interview: Lee Murray, Geneve Flynn, Angela Yuriko Smith, Christina Sng, Rena Mason, and K.P. Kulski

Frances Lu-Pai Ippolito

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Gordon B. White

Amanda Song

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

© 2022 Nightmare Magazine

Cover by Jesse-lee Lang / Adobe Stock Images

www.nightmare-magazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

From the Editor

Editorial: November 2022

Wendy N. Wagner | 466 words

Welcome to issue #122! And welcome to November, a month I’ve always had mixed feelings about. It’s a time here in the Pacific Northwest when the trees finish transitioning from trees into sticks, when the insects have all tucked themselves away, and the air turns from the mellow gold of fall to the smoked blue of early winter. It is the time when the sepulchral takes hold of the world and our hearts, and reality skews weird.

I use the word weird all the time, plus its allies uncanny and eerie. All three imply a state of affairs that are deeply uncomfortable or un-understandable by the human mind, or at least the ordinary social mind. Every civilization has had its specialists in the weird, often those who isolated themselves in the deepest woods to meditate on the strange connections between the things we can see and the things we cannot.

Weird, uncanny, and strange things can appear in fantasy and science fiction and even literary fiction, of course, but I think there are deep structural weirdnesses horror is willing to explore but other genres resist. There is room within horror for things to make less sense, because the world often stops making sense when terrible and terrifying things are happening.

Those of us who create horror often have a special sense of the weird. In fact, I’d argue that negotiating the weird is a bigger part of our job than simply scaring people, and some kinds of horror deal primarily in weirdness and not in dread, terror, or gruesomeness. This issue focuses on such writers. It is our Weird Issue (although I think we’ve actually had a lot of Weird and bizarro work this year).

With such a theme, it makes perfect sense that we’re opening the issue with a new short story from up-and-coming Weird writer Gordon B. White: Devil Take Me. It’s a story about lies and confessions, the difficult business of family, and a most terrifying jelly jar. Amanda Song brings us a short story about the darker side of comedy in Only When You Laugh. Sean Noah Noah’s flash story Ant Twin mixes the unsettling with natural history, and poet Elizabeth R. McClellan has a SF-horror poem about labor and faith in For You Were Strangers in Egypt.

Things return to the Earth in the nonfiction department, where May Haddad discusses empowering endings in horror in her essay The H Word: Sole Survivor, and Frances Lu-Pai Ippolito has created a panel interview with a group of writers of the Asian diaspora working across a variety of horror forms. We also have spotlight interviews with our short fiction creators.

It’s a very weird issue, and we hope you enjoy it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wendy N. Wagner is the author of the horror novel The Deer Kings and the gothic novella The Secret Skin. Previous work includes the SF thriller An Oath of Dogs and two novels for the Pathfinder Tales series, and her short stories, poetry, and essays have appeared in more than fifty venues. She also serves as the managing/senior editor of Lightspeed Magazine, and previously served as the guest editor of our Queers Destroy Horror! special issue. She lives in Oregon with her very understanding family, two large cats, and a Muppet disguised as a dog.

FictionDiscover John Joseph Adams Books

Devil Take Me

Gordon B. White | 5830 words

The caveat is that I’m going to lie to you. That’s how confessions work, isn’t it? There are those things that even though we want to confess, we can’t confront, and so we talk around. Lying isn’t even second nature; it’s our primary condition. The best I can do is tell you the truth about when I’ve lied.

Let’s start at the beginning. I come from a deep and worn out notch on the Bible Belt, the only child of Peter and Trudy Cadigan. Well, no. You’d need only look at the graves to know that’s not entirely true. While I can’t promise I’ll fix every misstatement, allow me to clarify that I am their first-born son and their only surviving child. Adam was the other.

Please forgive the confusion, but there are certain moments in life, it seems, that blind you to the others. Perhaps the rest of life is duller than these bright peaks of experience, and so only they stand out. I worry that maybe those spikes of experience are so deeply affecting that they gouge the eyes of memory and wiggle around like icepicks until nothing is left in the brain but the singular moments. It makes me wonder what I’ve lost, both good and bad.

Whatever else you take from me, though, this part is absolutely true: There was something wicked in our house. A darkness grew like mold from the baseboards and hung like lichen from the walls. It stitched itself together