Nightmare Magazine 73: October 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 Joanna Parypinski ("The Inheritance") and Halli Villegas ("A Mother's Love Never Ends"), along with reprints by Micah Dean Hicks ("Ghost Jeep") and John Langan ("The Underground Economy"). In the latest installment of our column on horror, "The H Word," Karin Lowachee meditates on the psychological draws of watching horror movies. We also have our usual author spotlights with our authors, and a feature interview with author and editor Amber Fallon.
"Madeline had a plain, dull face that only a mother could love, even though hers hadn’t. She’d been a clever child, clever enough to realize early on that fairness was a fairy tale, and clever enough to realize that it wasn’t her mother, really, who was to blame, even if she couldn’t help but blame her. Whenever Madeline’s stepfather had told her to get out of his sight, her mother had repeated the phrase in a ghostly echo. When Madeline emancipated herself at sixteen, she figured that was the end of that, and she looked ahead to a future of possibilities. She’d been clever—but not clever enough to realize that the future only built itself from the refuse of the past. Now, as she waved goodbye to thirty-five, Madeline had taken on sharp, greedy eyes and a hungry mouth. Her husband frequently vanished at night, bound for gambling dens and seedy basements to win at poker. By day, he looked for employment, although he never seemed to look too hard. He told Madeline to stop worrying, he would find something. Whenever she suggested she try to find a job, he said, “Doing what? You don’t even have a high school diploma. Who’s going to hire you?” He told her any day now he’d put a baby in her, and then she wouldn’t be so caught up in such stupid notions."