A mother whose children have been taken by a monster. Walk with her. She’s howling. Her long black dress reaches her ankles, her hair flows freely now in the wind. Try to keep up as bare feet pound the dark lane. Past the O’Brien’s, where Blathnaid stands in the window with a candle. Past Colm…
Category: Previous Issues
All previous issues of Seize The Press Magazine
‘The Golem’s Joy’ by Zachary Rosenberg
The synagogue burns so red that the night sky is dyed in all the colors of blood a human body can produce. I stand amidst the flames feeling lashing igneous whips against my body. I stare at what has been done unto us yet again and I long for the violence that will follow. The…
‘They Say the Sky Was Blue Once’ by Rebecca Birch
In the city, smoke clogs the air and paints the buildings in thick soot. They say the sky was blue once, but I have never seen it. Dark skies, dark thoughts. There’s no color to be found. No flowers. No dreams. I’ve forgotten the feeling of hope. I press a cloth to my face every…
‘To Replace a Broken Heart’ by Lyndsey Croal
It’s dawn when I leave our house, the cold sting of night sharp on my cheeks. Adrian is sleeping, but it’s better this way. He doesn’t want me to go. Thinks we should just enjoy the time we have while we can. I watch him for a few moments through the window, breath fogging the…
‘Glass Pet’ by Ivy Grimes
My grandmother’s kitchen was dark, and that was where she kept her dog. He whined all the time. He was made of glass. I lived with my mother, but I never seemed to be at home. Maybe I was distracted when I was home, lost in a daydream, so I didn’t notice where I was….
‘She Cradles Her Son Beneath the Aspen Trees’ by Angeliki Radou
“The woman who’s just given birth is feared even by the mountains,” Irene mumbled and brought the baby to her breast for the third time that night. From all the things her mother had told her about what happens after birth, that phrase had stuck with her the most and kept surfacing to her thoughts…
From the Editor: Reflections on Seizing Our First Year by Jonny Pickering
When the first issue of Seize The Press launched in February 2022, it didn’t occur to me to have any expectations that people would read it. My only goal was to carve out a little space for dark, unsettling, and specifically uncomfortable stories in a short fiction landscape that tends towards the aspirational, the edifying…
Book Review: The Mold Farmer by Rick Claypool
Rick Claypool’s The Mold Farmer is an imaginatively sinister, outside-the-box, weird little novella, pitched as a story of cosmic claustrophobia and workplace survival horror. It’s the story of Thorner, an everyday family man who finds himself crushed under the weight of an alien occupation, trying to make ends meet for his family in a future…
Book Review: Tender Is The Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
Este mundo se tiene que acabar is something church ladies mutter to each other when something offends their moral sensibilities. This world has to end – but what if it didn’t? What if it kept grinding along, getting worse and worse, and everyone simply adapted to it? What would we do? This is what Agustina…
Genesis Zero: The Suppressed Class War Behind the War in Heaven by Edmund Schluessel
Judaism, Christianity and Islam all share stories of a War in Heaven: Satan, jealous at the love God has for humanity, leads an army of angels in rebellion, but is defeated and cast down to Hell. The story is so influential that, thousands of years after it entered the Tanakh, it inspired Dante’s Inferno and…