Category: Previous Issues

The remorseless villains are holding a parade. It’s been months since they’ve hatched a major plot against our fair burg, so we attend, our children firmly mounted on our shoulders, miniature flags awave, hopeful the villains might view our compliant gesture as communitywide recognition of their evil genius. Their marching bands drone from Holst to…

By some accounts, the clarinetist’s origins lay in the desert. In Phoenix or Tempe or another such grid of roadways and parched concrete gullies. Some likened him to a shaman, a sorcerer working in subtle intricacies and procedures, though this was emphatically not the case. Had he been able to verbalize it, the clarinetist might…

The morning after the ritual, the horse-girls wake to the sting of the straw that prods the fresh seams of their new bodies. They wince and twist to get away from the crude stalks stabbing at their tender guts, but this only brings new and more unpleasant sensations. The stitches that join their flesh together…

From its first tense, gruesome moments to its explosive finale, Gretchen Felker-Martin’s debut novel Manhunt grabs its reader by the balls and refuses to let go. Set in a post-apocalyptic world in which an enigmatic virus turns anyone with sufficiently high testosterone levels into a violent mutant, Manhunt primarily follows two trans women as they…

MVU: Hi John! Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me about your story “Everything You Want to Be, Everything You Are,” which will be published this year in Dark Matter Presents: Human Monsters, A Horror Anthology, edited by horror power women Sadie Hartman and Ashley Sawyers. First, let’s talk about…

MVU: Hi, Nat. Thank you so much for chatting with me about your short story “Jubilee Juncture,” which will be published in Dark Matter Presents: Human Monsters, A Horror Anthology, edited by the amazing horror-fiction duo Sadie Hartman and Ashley Sawyers. One of my favorite feelings when immersed in a story is to be unsettled,…

Taoism and anarchism are systems of thought that Ursula Le Guin engaged deeply with throughout her oeuvre. The Dispossessed, her most overtly anarchist work, is reified and beloved for its unapologetically leftist stances. Its Taoist influences are less discussed. Yet when the Tao te Ching is read alongside the novel, and especially when it is…

Night is not the right time to come here. The parking lot never contains more than a spattering of cars to give some hint of the presence of life. But now in this grim time, after most sensible people have finished their dinners and are filling the screaming void of their lives with the sound…

Towards the crumbling edge of a hungering abyss, I saw that which was monstrous; swirling oceans of ink, blood, and phlegm congealed with thick foaming waves of rust and bone. There below, a mouth of mirrors, swallowing dismembered closets and hopeless fags like me into an unholy maelstrom of sequestered norms and white oblivion, where…

Low Tide Jenny sat in her folding deck chair on the beach, stationed right where the sand met the ice plants, staring out at the black ocean with her eyeless sockets hidden behind oversized sunglasses. Her red bikini top was faded, slopping off her deflated tits, and the few strands of hair that still clung…