The first time you fall in love, you are hiding in the catacombs. In that cold, dry labyrinth of bones, the feeling comes on suddenly and takes the form of an unfamiliar ache in your chest. It’s a bit like rat flu; blood rushes to your nethers, your throat constricts. The tag hanging around her…
Category: Previous Issues
All previous issues of Seize The Press Magazine
“Rusalnaya” by Rae Knowles
I wake in June, free from my former self. Rhythmic beating of the tides have washed away most of the troublesome details from before: my name, how I came to be, relations. Scrubbed and purged by my mother the sea, I stretch upon a bed of shifting sands. Glowing orbs twinkle through the otherwise impenetrable…
“Immaculate” by Avra Margariti
The girls will enter the convent on two feet. They will walk belly first, some showing crescent slivers, others August full-moons. The nuns will watch, stone-angel-faced, as the girls sniffle and cry. This is your home, the nuns will say. For now. The statues and icons will also watch. The Lady of Sorrows most intently…
“What the Ghouleh Said on Thursday of the Dead” by Sonia Sulaiman
For seventy years, a Biblical age, the shadows hungered in the village. Daylight, moonlight. Growth of weeds, and slumber of stone. The settlers smashed in the domes of the houses to keep away the living. They forgot to ward off the dead. Thirsting, the shadows raised desiccated tongues to catch the benevolence of Baal Haddad,…
Interview with Tim McGregor by Sammi Leigh Melville
SLM: Hi Tim! Thank you so much for chatting with me about your new novella, “Lure”, Tenebrous Press’ most recent novella release. First of all, I need to say, such an enrapturing story. The allure that tiny little isolated seaside village has is like a gravitational pull. What drew you to telling this story? Any…
Helpmeet Review by Zachary Gillan
Naben Ruthnum’s Helpmeet is a story of possession, but not in the way you’d expect from a work of horror. Rather than ghosts, it confronts readers with the question of what it means to truly possess, to have, someone you love. A slim, beautiful, and disgusting novella of complicated love and even more complicated body…
“He Drinks Her Into His Lungs” by Marc Fleury
This is the boy. This is how he is. He comes to the fair, uneven. Doubling forward, leaning improbably, weaving through and around. His bottle drained, he drops it. Brown glass pops and tinkles. A dozen brown moons stare up from the shards. The boy is not yet eighteen. He’s not tall. His hair isn’t…
“Homunculus” by Rebecca E. Treasure
Oh, how Pilot hated them all. She hated Eyes, lying and deceitful, always trying to please. She hated Ears, passive and flapping. She hated greedy, grimy Hands and rough, flat Feet. She particularly hated the middle line – Lips, Tongue, Chest, Torso. She’d loved them once. They had been one, unified and together. But as…
“The Remorseless Villains’ Parade” by John Joseph Ryan
The remorseless villains are holding a parade. It’s been months since they’ve hatched a major plot against our fair burg, so we attend, our children firmly mounted on our shoulders, miniature flags awave, hopeful the villains might view our compliant gesture as communitywide recognition of their evil genius. Their marching bands drone from Holst to…
“Clarinet” by NM Whitley
By some accounts, the clarinetist’s origins lay in the desert. In Phoenix or Tempe or another such grid of roadways and parched concrete gullies. Some likened him to a shaman, a sorcerer working in subtle intricacies and procedures, though this was emphatically not the case. Had he been able to verbalize it, the clarinetist might…