Category: Issue #8

As it exists, the border between the United States and Mexico occupies a weird space in wider discourse: namely, as it relates to fearmongering over migration by White America. Every time I see my hometown on the news or Twitter, it’s in direct relation to this exact issue: whether it be Ted Cruz recently forgetting…

Some authors, even when dedicated overall to the art of unsettling their readers, pull their punches when it comes to horror stories about children. Not so J. Ashley-Smith, whose debut collection The Measure of Sorrow is full of parents and children lost in a world of darkness, grasping for meaning and connection, and often using…

You might think, based on the cover (a giant robot) and promotional materials (“Giant robots stomp around” begins Tamsyn Muir’s blurb), that Emma Mieko Candon’s The Archive Undying is a novel for people who like giant robots. You’d be wrong. It’s a novel for people who like being confused. This might sound like an insult,…

Indrapramit Das’s second book-length work, The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar, is a novella about a child growing up amidst dragons, set in Kolkata during the turn of the century—undated, except through references to films, video games, novels, and the barebones of immigration policies of the state—like the city of a bygone childhood, drawn with flourishes…

First off, massive congrats on your Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Award nominations! How have you found the experience of your work gaining this kind of attention and acclaim? Thank you so much! My friend George was just asking me about this and it’s very, very surreal. I didn’t anticipate this. I had high hopes,…

No one has ever seen Simone’s fiancé, not in person or in photographs. Annecy doesn’t care. When she stares at Simone’s engagement-ringed finger she’s imagining it inside her. Not the void who’s marrying Simone. “Annecy, darling, you should really find someone.” Simone’s lips are against Annecy’s ear under the pretense of discussing entomology. The slit…

Bituin was not a tiyanak, but in their far-flung wooded corner of the Philippines, she grew up always feeling like one.  It didn’t help that her mother loved to joke about it. “My cute little hellspawn,” she used to lull her to sleep.  As she grew older, Bituin realized it was just her mother making…

The man wakes to wind whipping through the hem of his ragged cloak. The horizon is flat obsidian; a plane of dark glass that stretches to the limits of his vision. From behind unbroken clouds, the ruddy glow of the dying sun sheds just enough light for the man to see his barren surroundings. Enough….

Only the lost found the city at the caravan’s end. The poorest of the salt miners crept through its streets, dragging their pickaxes behind them with work-roughened hands and faces kept oddly young by the restorative properties of their saline surroundings. Camel drivers led their burdened beasts through arid courtyards dotted with date palms, looking…

As the little bear ate berries from his cupped and open palms, the shadow watched his paralytic venom take and peeled the cub alive. The shadow had been cast from a convoy of refugees fleeing the cold: a trail of rickety carriages and tents dragged across the rotten moor by sclerotic chimaera, too old now…