Category: Issue #7

In 2022, small Canadian horror press Undertow Publications released two of my favourite books of the year: the unsettling, Cronenberg-esque Victorian body horror Helpmeet by Naben Ruthnum, and The Talosite by Rebecca Campbell, a science fiction/horror story in the tradition of Mary Shelley set in the mud, blood and trench laboratories of First World War…

When Tananarive Due began writing fiction in the early 1990s, Beloved was absurdly left out of the horror canon, she wasn’t aware of Octavia Butler’s work, and her earliest fiction centered “contemporary realism about white male protagonists having epiphanies.” It’s a bleak thought to imagine a world where she continued on that trajectory. Thankfully, in…

Applying the capitalist ideology of endless growth to horror fiction, one might decide that hauntings need to be bigger. Instead of a house, detached and single-family, what if a high rise was haunted? What about an entire metropolis? What if our whole way of life is haunted?  Andrew F. Sullivan’s The Marigold sets out to…

Let’s talk about science fictional concepts. Imagine a Utopian world where all creatives like writers get paid fairly for their labor.  Did it work?  The Great Resignation is upon us. More and more Americans are fed up with low paying jobs with long commutes that don’t offer benefits like healthcare or paid time off, and…

A hail of bullets, each as fast and dull as the next, fly through the air. They are definitions, periods, punctuation marks. Our hero answers with a word, an open hand. Time freezes. Horns swell. Bullets stop. The coding that makes up the world glimmers, bright and brittle. You say your name, your real name,…

David Cronenberg’s 2022 Crimes of the Future shares no story connection with his 1970 film of the same title but, in the larger meta project that all Cronenberg movies seem to be puzzle pieces of, this one extracts and recombines DNA from almost the entirety of his body of previous work. It has been 23…

I heard him before I saw him. A stop-start scream that chk-chk-chk’d like a stuttering lawn sprinkler. Full-throated, punctuated with glottal stops, high-pitched. “Ahh! Ahh! Ahh!” I was in a coffee shop, curled up in warm neon. Rain came down so hard it looked like the white lines in a comic panel. I turned my…

Asher lives in a shithole. It wasn’t always a shithole. A couple of centuries back it would have been a nice townhouse for a respectable family of means. Since then it’s been chopped into two flats, the old inner stairs torn out and replaced with a metal staircase out back. It’s poorly maintained, not soundproofed,…

I walk to skoo every morning, but today chains hung across the door. Line of black buses waiting. Sternoids jumped out and shoved us inside. No seats, no windows. Us bigger ones hung onto the bars up top. Littles hung on us. The bus started with awful shaking—rattle rattle rattle. You couldn’t hear. Skoo made…

There had been a time when people knew that before being ripped away and becoming the land of shadows, dreams, and the abode of immortality, the Moon was home. People said that in her heavy metal core, a remembering of love had made her stay. And in the dark nights, the Moon reminded them of…