Nightmare Magazine 67: April 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 have original fiction from Adam-Troy Castro ("Pitcher Plant") and Emma Osborne ("Don't Pack Hope"), along with reprints by Lee Thomas ("Fine in the Fire") and Carmen Maria Machado ("Horror Story"). Author Desirina Boskovich turns her attention to Midwestern horror in the latest installment of our column on horror, "The H Word." We also have author spotlights with our authors and a feature interview with haunt travel writer Chris Kullstroem.
"The mansion is a study in architecture at war with itself. It’s not just the windows that don’t match and the turrets that don’t overlook anything and the roof that sits flat here while looming at impossible angles there. Nor is it just the exterior walls that, seen from one angle, seem rotted and decrepit and about to collapse, and seen from another, gleam like jewels. Nor is it the gnarled skin of the columns that support the overhang at the front entrance, or the glistening scarlet door that seems poised to open until you see that it’s not a real door at all, but just a reasonable facsimile, carved with great love into what would otherwise be just a featureless brick wall. It’s the way that way none of this stays the same for more than a second or two; the way you can focus on one bay window or one turret or one balcony only to see it shift, retract, and sink beneath the house’s surface like something swallowed by an amoeba, only to emerge, seconds or minutes later, wearing a different shape, a different character, a different purpose in the overall design. It is impossible to face the mansion without knowing that it has always been changing, plank by plank, brick by brick, for as long as it has stood in this damned and isolated place beneath scarlet skies, in a blackened country, far from any roads."