Category: Issue #6

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…

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…

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,…

With a single run-through playtime approaching 120 hours, there are few pieces of art I’ve spent as long with as Elden Ring. This 2022 computer game from the famous Japanese company FromSoftware is an expansive open-world fantasy whose story was authored by Hidetaka Miyazaki and George R. R. Martin and its setting is rife with…

Run in association with the British Film Institute, the London Film Festival premieres some of the biggest and most talked about films of the year. This includes those in the science fiction, fantasy and horror genre, with previous years having featured the likes of Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, Cartoon Saloon’s Wolfwalkers and…

The most powerful witch of the East In the last quarter of the 16th century, two mighty “Elizabeths” loomed over the European nobility. Dominating the West, Elizabeth I, Queen of England and Ireland, challenged the patriarchal underpinnings of Europe’s monarchies and primogeniture. She died old and sickly, possibly the result of blood poisoning due to…

Every Sunday, Maman marched us into the garden, where we knelt in the worm-fresh soil and screamed into holes she had dug for us. “You’ve got to get the poison out of you,” she said, without elaborating what the poison was. She didn’t have to. Inevitably my sister and I vomited fluid like tar, sticky…

A mother whose children have been taken by a monster. Walk with her. She’s howling. Her long black dress reaches her ankles, her hair flows freely now in the wind. Try to keep up as bare feet pound the dark lane. Past the O’Brien’s, where Blathnaid stands in the window with a candle. Past Colm…

The synagogue burns so red that the night sky is dyed in all the colors of blood a human body can produce. I stand amidst the flames feeling lashing igneous whips against my body. I stare at what has been done unto us yet again and I long for the violence that will follow. The…

In the city, smoke clogs the air and paints the buildings in thick soot. They say the sky was blue once, but I have never seen it.  Dark skies, dark thoughts. There’s no color to be found.  No flowers.  No dreams. I’ve forgotten the feeling of hope. I press a cloth to my face every…