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…
Category: Previous Issues
All previous issues of Seize The Press Magazine
“MYCOPHILIA” by Tiernan Blanchard
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,…
“Endless Yearning” by Judith Shadford
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…
“The Last Sound of the Moon” by Gessica Sakamoto Martini
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…
“Claimed for a Higher Purpose in the True Glory of the Universe for Our Lord” by Andrew Kozma
Herschel was a decent man before the angels arrived. Now there were no decent men or women, just the claimed and the dead. The dead were not truly dead, it was just the name the angels gave them. The dead referred to themselves as the decayed, as zombies, as dung beetles, as bodies without spirits,…
“You Forever” by Maxine Sophia Wolff
Somewhere in the city a judge is counting money. Somewhere in the city three men stand shirtless in the rain. Somewhere in the city a baby cries. ~ The city is long and tall, and made up of many layers. The city sleeps but never dreams; the city pumps blood through its veins. ~ I…
From the Editor: Making Fiction Uncomfortable Again by Jonny Pickering
One of the reasons Seize The Press exists is because contemporary short fantasy and science fiction tends to be dominated by middle class writers who don’t understand what it’s like to have never been economically comfortable, and it’s often reflected in the kinds of stories they tell. Take a look at the big awards for…
High Tech, Numb Life: An Interview with Mário Coelho, author of Unto the Godless What Little Remains
In 2021, Portuguese author Mário Coelho made a splash with his short story ‘Ootheca’ in Strange Horizons. ‘Ootheca’ is the tragic tale of a man who wakes up with cockroaches for teeth, and his attempts to find companionship in an unstable world where sunlight is rationed and citizens are only ever one sleep away from…
Book Review: The Secret Goatman Spookshow and Other Psychological Warfare Operations by Jonathan Raab – Review by Zachary Gillan
Jonathan Raab’s The Secret Goatman Spookshow and Other Psychological Warfare Operations has an utterly perfect epigraph. “I’ve got a message for you, and you’re not going to like it.” It comes from John Carpenter’s 1987 film Prince of Darkness, and it’s a precis of this excellent collection. In the film it is uttered by a…
Book Review: Antifa Splatterpunk edited by Eric Raglin – Review by Zachary Gillan
Antifa Splatterpunk, edited by Eric Raglin, is an anthology designed to strike a killing blow against the absurd truism that horror is an innately conservative genre. Splatterpunk, a violently transgressive, gore-drenched subgenre that sprang out of horror in the 1980s, isn’t really my thing. Explicitly leftist horror/weird fiction, on the other hand, very much is,…