The Dark Issue 100: The Dark, #100

By TJ Cimfel, Adam Callaway, Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada and Osahon Ize-Iyamu

Each month The Dark brings you the best in dark fantasy and horror! Selected by award-winning editor Sean Wallace and published by Prime Books, this issue includes four all-new stories:

 

"House" by TJ Cimfel
"Big Dead Clown Things" by Adam Callaway
"When the Wiliwili Blossoms, the Shark Bites" by Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada
"Chop! Chop! Chop!" by Osahon Ize-Iyamu

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Books
• Release date: Aug 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223071587

Book preview

THE DARK

Issue 100 • September 2023

From the Desk of The Dark . . . by Sean Wallace

House by TJ Cimfel

Big Dead Clown Things by Adam Callaway

When the Wiliwili Blossoms, the Shark Bites by Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada

Chop! Chop! Chop! by Osahon Ize-Iyamu

Cover Art: Medusa by Mx. Morgan G Robles

ISSN 2332-4392.

Edited by Sean Wallace.

Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

Copyright © 2023 by Prime Books.

www.thedarkmagazine.com

From the Desk of The Dark . . .

by Sean Wallace

One hundred issues! This is what The Dark has accomplished, with the generous help of our readers, our staff, our supporters, and I am proud to have published so many authors, showcasing well over three hundred unsettling stories over the last ten years. But times are now a’changing, and not always for the best.

As you may have heard, especially if you are an Amazon subscriber, the Kindle Newsstand is now effectively gone, which is a massive blow to our business model and not easily replaced, at least not quickly or even easily. It will take time and energy, either way, and I definitely want The Dark to be still here, with another one hundred issues, over another ten more years.

So, in that light, I encourage everyone to find a way to subscribe to the magazine, whether it’s through our Patreon page or through Weightless Books. (https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/amazon-subscribers/) After all, we really can’t pull this off without you, and it has always been with your support that we have done so much, and I’d love to see that continue.

In the meantime, let’s all celebrate together our special anniversary, a decade in the making, with many sincere hopes that with every month to come, another issue of The Dark> will soon find its way to you, with stories both unsettling and unique . . .

Sean Wallace is the founder, publisher, and managing editor of Prime Books. He has edited or co-edited a number of projects, including three magazines, Clarkesworld Magazine, The Dark, and Fantasy Magazine, and a number of anthologies, including The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, People of the Book, Robots: Recent A.I., and War & Space: Recent Combat. He lives in Germantown, MD, with his wife, Jennifer, and their twin children, Cordelia and Nathan.

House

by TJ Cimfel

House does not want you here. Does not want your laughter in its halls. Does not want your gentle breathing at night. Your cheerful demeanor. Your smiling brood. It does not want your hopeful words to echo off its walls. Your quiet murmurs. Your awkward silence. Your profanities, inanities, the slickness of your sex. Your steps are clumsy when you have drunk too much. Your bickering too comfortable. House does not want the smells of your dinners, your candles, your biological functions. It does not want your spills and scratches, your shattered glasses, your furniture scrapes. Most of all House does not want your lamentations, your soft weeping in the middle of the night, your profound regrets. You may try to hide them in your pillow where your children will not find them, but House will. House knows where you hide all your things. It would tell you this, but it cannot. It is just a house.

House has grown to dread the sound of heavy, heavy steps. If it had eyes to close it would still hear the virile grunts and clumsy thumps, cumbersome shuffles against shifting wood. Would still smell the fresh air coming through its propped open front door. Would still feel boots against its grain, wrapped edges wedged against corners and frames. Fresh weight slowly dispersed throughout its halls.

A helpless electricity courses through House upon the arrival of strangers. Not the electricity of the old cloth wiring still secreted in some of its cavities. An energy that only comes when the people approach with their boxes and bundles, their trucks and their vans. Each time there is a moment, a moment when House believes. This moment is filled with warm light and clinking glass and a nameless wish. Maybe this time, it thinks, even as it shudders from beneath. House knows hope is a hollow thing, like the space above its mortar bed.

House wonders how you never feel it. When you come with your three sons