Category: Previous Issues

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…

It’s dawn when I leave our house, the cold sting of night sharp on my cheeks. Adrian is sleeping, but it’s better this way. He doesn’t want me to go. Thinks we should just enjoy the time we have while we can. I watch him for a few moments through the window, breath fogging the…

My grandmother’s kitchen was dark, and that was where she kept her dog. He whined all the time. He was made of glass. I lived with my mother, but I never seemed to be at home. Maybe I was distracted when I was home, lost in a daydream, so I didn’t notice where I was….

“The woman who’s just given birth is feared even by the mountains,” Irene mumbled and brought the baby to her breast for the third time that night. From all the things her mother had told her about what happens after birth, that phrase had stuck with her the most and kept surfacing to her thoughts…

Rick Claypool’s The Mold Farmer is an imaginatively sinister, outside-the-box, weird little novella, pitched as a story of cosmic claustrophobia and workplace survival horror. It’s the story of Thorner, an everyday family man who finds himself crushed under the weight of an alien occupation, trying to make ends meet for his family in a future…