Several waystations were confirmed lost, their final moments recorded by radio in a blast of static. Sometimes the loss was dramatic, broken and nigh incomprehensible voices going silent in the middle of a detailed warning. Other times the loss was quiet, an operator stepping away to refresh their coffee and simply never returning, the conversation…
Category: Previous Issues
All previous issues of Seize The Press Magazine
“Blue Movies” by Ian Kappos
Before the whole thing with the ovum, Kekoa and I volunteered at the food kitchen. His parents back in Hawaii told him he needed a job. If it didn’t pay, they’d compensate him for hours put in. This was back when you could get OC 80s for forty dollars, OC 40s for twenty, and forty…
A Collapse of Boundaries: a review of I Would Haunt You if I Could by Seán Padraic Birnie from Zachary Gillan
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…
Reality Is How Horror Stories Are Born: an interview with Carson Winter, author of The Psychographist
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…
In Horror Stories, They Fuck Like Me (A Kink in Five Lessons) by Anonymous
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…
You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Review of Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool from Josh Pearce
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…
Beyond Dualistic Cyberpunk: a review of You Glow in the Dark by Liliana Colanzi from Zachary Gillan
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 Horror on the End of Every Fork by Neal Auch
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;…
“Where Is Your Light, Yvette Jones?” by Victor Forna
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…
“Her Eyes in the Dark” by Curtis Hayden Hill
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…
