Nightmare Magazine 65: February 2018

NIGHTMARE is an online horror and dark fantasy magazine. In NIGHTMARE's pages, you will find all kinds of horror fiction, from zombie stories and haunted house tales, to visceral psychological horror.
This month, we've got original fiction from Theodore McCombs ("Six Hangings in the Land of Unkillable Women") and Emily B. Cataneo ("Seven Steps to Beauty for a Girl Named Avarice"), along with reprints by Laura Anne Gilman ("Exposure") and Joe McKinney ("Sabbatical in the Ohio Methlands"). Douglas Wynne brings us the latest installment of our column on horror, "The H Word," plus we have author spotlights with our authors, and Terence Taylor reviews a pair of new horror novels.
"Mill a charmer and a rake of no respectable talent whatever insinuated himself into the home of the widow Annie Holcomb and her seventeen-year-old daughter, Alice. But Mrs. Holcomb turned him out, once she realized he’d been gallanting Alice as much as her. Mill spent the next four nights chanting obscene tirades under her window and left a dead rat in the mail slot on the fifth. Night patrols chased him off park benches; friends robbed him. Sleepless and humiliated, he broke into the house and strangled Mrs. Holcomb with her tin necklace, and when it snapped, with a pajama cord and when that failed, he dragged a kitchen knife over her throat and when the knife chipped, and the shard cut Mill’s eye, Mrs. Holcomb ran into the street calling for help, towing her bewildered daughter by the wrist.
Mill pled guilty. Alice Holcomb wept profligately through his sentencing. On the scaffold, Mill’s last words were, “Finally finally.”