Category: Issue #10

There’s a special kind of relationship between the second person and stories of ontological horror. If a narrative is already destabilizing the world, then explicitly and directly situating the reader within it makes it all the more unsettling. I’ve argued that this affect lies at the heart of weird fiction. I can think of no…

It’s been a hell of a few years for Carson Winter, with short stories published in various magazines and Best Of’s, and a growing number of weird horror novellas under his belt. Jonny Pickering chats with Carson about Thomas Ligotti, what it means to be an American, and the deep seated unease lurking beneath the…

I When I was eighteen, I saw Hostel for the first time. Growing up, my parents didn’t want violent films in our house (to such a degree that I wasn’t even allowed to watch Forrest Gump until I was eighteen because of the war scenes). I was an anxious child, so I started my journey…

Infinity Pool, written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg, is a failure. Sure, it has a premier cast. The film is visually engaging, with interesting Croatian locations, the kind of vivid colors found in Argento’s Suspiria or Cosmatos’s Mandy, and a proper amount of squick and WTF moments. And it did perform better at the box…

Cyberpunk is usually inextricably dualistic in its approach, most obviously in the dichotomy between cyberspace and meatspace, but also usually in its physical setting of the imperial core of the capitalist world-system; towering metropolises forcibly situating plenty and poverty side by side. In her superb new collection You Glow In The Dark, Liliana Colanzi excises…

The publication of William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch was met with great controversy. The book was characterized as “a devastating ridicule of all that is false, primitive, and vicious in current American life” by its defenders, and as “ literary sewage” by detractors. Naked Lunch was eventually banned in several states because of obscenity laws;…

pastel on sanded paper The girl, Yvette Jones, stands alone. Eastern Police, Freetown, at the rot of day and birth of night. She has a tray of unflayed oranges on her head. She needs the crowd, the monster with a thousand eyes and endless limbs, to see her. Swit ɔrinch de, swit ɔrinch de! Her…

1 Almost daylight. Or so the deep fog that settles across your brow tells you. The cramps in your body. The murmuring heart that pumps prickled blood through your limbs. You wait. Listen to the last sounds of night and of a living house, the bones of which ache with blight and whispers. It waits…

Sometimes, when Boyd squints hard enough, when windows in Brick City line up just right, when sunlight glints off shards of twisted iron fire escapes and bounces between rain-slicked alleys, he sees her.  She’s not there, though. She’s never there.  Brick City clicks. Grinds. Boyd steps away from the window and stands in the center…

For years we were as inseparable as flesh fused together by wound-welding time. Until the night before twelfth grade, when you decided to rend us asunder with a few simple words: “I would like to go back to being normal until graduation.” Normal, you said. Normal being straight. Being girlish. Being girl. What would you…