Nightmare Magazine, Issue 74 (November 2018)

by John Joseph Adams

  Ligotti covers the death of self as a goal of Buddhism, to let go of the notion that we are anything but a series of responses to stimuli, the most habitual of which make up what we refer to as our personality. The popular aphorism, “I can’t change who I am,” becomes impossible when you face the fact that all that’s required to change is a choice—to not be like this, or do that. If we invent ourselves, there is no reason we can’t reinvent. As Captain James T. Kirk told warring factions, even if you insist you are killers because you always have been, you can decide not to kill—today. And repeat.

  I disagree with Ligotti that Buddhism is a form of pessimism. I see it more as pragmatism, as is the idea that dukkha, human suffering, arises only when we don’t get what we want, or things don’t go “our way.” When our reactions are about us, our needs, not the world. To see things as they are, to react to the now as animals instinctually do, Buddhism says can lead to an easier existence.

  That could lead to a stance that the only meaning to be found in life is life, a fair challenge in and of itself, and that our time is better spent living it than trying to wonder why it is. I think the majority of us who think about such things are more practical than optimists or pessimists. We know life has good and bad in it and ideally respond to either appropriately, knowing death is ahead, but not dwelling on something that hasn’t happened yet.

  That attitude would simply be another form of denial to Ligotti’s pantheon. There was a time when I would have agreed. Through decades of depression from high school through my thirties I called myself a pessimist, saw the world as cold and unyielding, until ten years of therapy left me with the realization that inside every pessimist is an idealist who really wants the world to be a far better place, doomed to endless disappointment that it can never live up to their high standard.

  For philosophers who see life as time spent waiting for and dreading death, the end should be viewed as a welcome relief, even if most of us would never consider taking advantage of its relatively easy availability. Many of Ligotti’s citations who survived their conclusions seem only to have deferred their final solution to remain with us long enough to shake the finger of meaninglessness in all our faces, until we feel as resolutely hopeless about humanity’s lot as they do.

  Yet, I cannot despise my questing mind, even after the many years it weighed me down with depression that would have made many of Ligotti’s citations more appealing then than they are to me now. The ability to explore the thoughts in this book, and agree or disagree, debate, consider and learn, all require being aware. Experience is a bell curve, and consciousness may make me feel the bad times more keenly when they are here, but also lets me remember the good. I can anticipate an end to pain as well as I can dread future horrors.

  So while I must go with the middle range majority of humanity on this one, diving deeper into the mechanics of how we see the world, remembering that we all live in subjective ones of our own making, is a fascinating journey worth taking. Despite the seemingly morbid subject, the book isn’t at all dark or depressing, and well worth re-reading to fully absorb.

  Infidel

  Pornsak Pichetshote (Author), Aaron Campbell (Artist), Jose Villarrubia (Artist), Jeff Powell (Letterer) (Artist)

  Paperback / Ebook

  ISBN: 978-1534308367

  Image Comics, October 2, 2018, 168 pages

  I almost always enjoy effective transformative reboots of old tropes, like Get Out, which recently revived the “sinister small town/things are not what they seem” movie thriller. Author Pornsak Pichetshote has nicely found a way to make the haunted house convention terrifying again, in a five-part graphic novel that effectively raises more monsters than it puts to rest.

  Aisha is living with her mother-in-law in a building being rebuilt after an accidental bombing. She is a brown Muslim, Leslie is a white Christian, and according to her son, no matter how nice his mother acts, she’s manipulative and deceitful. It’s obvious Tom’s had issues with his mother for some time, but it’s also our first cue that nothing is as it seems, no one can be trusted.

  We meet Aisha in mid-nightmare, under assault by a demonic form that begins to slip into her waking view. Half a dozen people died in the explosion downstairs, and despite the rent reduction that motivates the survivors to stay while the damaged floors are reconstructed, it has become the kind of sinister space described by Ligotti, off-kilter, wrong, and unnatural. Aisha’s friend Medina, who she grew up with, moved in to take advantage of the low rent and support her friend, but won’t believe anything weird is wrong there.

  Tom leaves for a shoot in upstate New York that will take him off the grid for a week. Aisha is left alone with his mother and daughter, with only Medina to ground her. There are all the classic warning signs—quick flashes of demonic faces, fresh food suddenly rotten and fly-ridden, a knife that is suddenly bloody and then not. As the phantoms grow stronger, stay longer, they vent hate-filled rants—towelhead, whore, killer, trash, terrorist, and worse. As is the norm in this genre, Aisha is left trying to explain something no one else can see . . . until they do.

  By then it is too late.

  Events rapidly build to a pitch as Leslie is thrown down the stairs to her death by either a devil or her daughter-in-law. A white blonde neighbor swears she saw no one but Aisha on the landing, but her view of things soon seems colored by the same innate intolerance exhibited by Leslie when Aisha arrived. As Aisha lies in a coma, Medina and her friends gather and start trying to unravel what is really happening.

  What follows descends rapidly into deep horror as the illusion that everything is all right gets torn away. Without revealing the intricate and enjoyable plot, suffice to say that the rigors of the convention are fully fulfilled as we’re dragged into the same nightmare as the characters, one beautifully evoked in the art team’s atmospheric images that roll effortlessly from moody realism to chillingly surreal as the spirits of the dead come back to settle their grudges.

  In the end it is unclear if an amateur terrorist stockpiling homemade explosives caused the bombing that sets off events, or hate-filled neighbors determined to find fault in him snooping through his things. The story weaves in the widely disparate attitudes of all its characters, their beliefs slowly shifting as the story progresses. What makes it new is that it’s not just a series of cheap scares designed to shock and appall . . . The horror lies not only in death and the supernatural, it’s in our hearts and heads. In the classic words of the comic strip Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

  Stripped of their supernatural trappings, the story could play out every bit as sadly chilling, just following the path of prejudice and the pain it causes, set in the familiar world that we live in. I think that’s the true test of any really effective horror story—that the humanity of it could survive without the supernatural.

  The quest for answers to my literary crisis found some resolution in these readings. We are only what we believe ourselves to be, and the world is only as good or bad as we see it. No matter how bad it seems, we are always capable, thanks to the curse of consciousness, of imagining worse. To find effective horror in fiction, I must uncover the unnatural in the ordinary, whatever that may be now, seek out the darkness in our hearts, and bring it all to the surface, into the light for examination and understanding.

  It’s also remembering that writing, like life, is about the journey, and not the destination. So set sail, fully aware, and enjoy the trip, wherever the sea takes you. It really does beat the alternative.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Terence Taylor (terencetaylor.com) is an award-winning children’s television writer whose work has appeared on PBS, Nickelodeon, and Disney, among many others. After years of comforting tiny tots with TV, he turned to scaring their parents. His first published short story, “Plaything”, appeared in Dark Dreams, the first horror/suspense anthology of African-American authors. He was included in the next two volumes, and his short stories and non-fiction have appeared in L
ightspeed and Fantastic Stories of the Imagination. Terence is also author of the first two novels of his Vampire Testaments trilogy, Bite Marks and Blood Pressure. He is currently writing the conclusion, Past Life. Follow him on Twitter @vamptestaments.

  AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

  Author Spotlight: Usman Malik

  Wendy N. Wagner | 690 words

  Let’s start with an easy question: How do you know so much about snakes?

  When I was ten or eleven I read this series of children’s books in Urdu featuring a boy who travels with snake charmers and has a pet snake. He and his snake have many adventures. Subsequently I dreamed about becoming besties with a snake or two for years. I’ve been fascinated by them ever since. The Indian subcontinent, of course, has many myths about snakes who assume human shape after a hundred years. I wanted to write a story about that. The research and details naturally followed.

  It sounds like this story took a long time to get from its inspiration to Nightmare. Can you tell us a little about how that happened?

  Between April 2012 and December 2013 I was on fire in terms of creative output. Sometimes I wrote a story a week; most were junk and eventually trashed. However when I applied for a spot at the Clarion West Writers Workshop in end 2012. I specifically wrote nine to ten stories for my submission sample. An early draft of “Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hung” was one of them.

  It was too long to be useful for workshop submission and I ended up putting it away for months, but eventually I returned to it in 2014 and after minor revisions began submitting it. I believe three or four markets turned it down which disheartened me, newish writer all, so I trunked it.

  For whatever reason, four years or so later I was about to go to turn in for the night when, suddenly, I remembered a scene from the story. I got up, pulled it up on the computer, and in a fit of inspiration, changed the title and began cleaning it up. Four hours later, at one or two in the morning, I was done and the story was submitted. This time the first market—Nightmare Magazine— picked it up. Funny how these things work.

  This story does a tremendous job balancing the mythic—it really seems to draw on folklore—and thriller elements, like the heroinchie subculture. How did you decide to mash those together, and did you struggle to keep the two elements from overpowering each other?

  I started with a character and a vague idea of the theme: a drug addict drawn into a mythic world. Everything else sort of came together. While the story took several rounds of cleaning, the central drivers and characters remained the same. I honestly don’t remember how the balance, if any, was achieved.

  This story feels both very modern and yet somehow classical. In particular, to me the ending, with its apparent victory unhappily eroded by evil, has a definite Lovecraftian or Blackwoodian flavor. Did you set out to write something that fit that turn-of-the-century Weird vibe? Is that an era of horror that speaks to you?

  I’m influenced by a lot of writers in how I write stories. I think it’s fair to say this story likely does borrow tools from the gaslamp era of macabre stories; yet I imagine most of the influence really is from subcontinental and Urdu literature rife with shapeshifting snakes and back alleys filled with drug addicts. Side note: I have always believed Blackwood to be vastly superior writer to HPL when it comes to generating unease and the feeling of otherworldly terror. He continues to be a vastly under-read and underappreciated writer.

  Is there anything else you’d like to share about this story? Do you have anything coming out that we should be keeping watch for?

  I hope your readers like it. I’m especially interested in seeing the desi reaction to the story. Subcontinental readers will recognize many elements and hopefully enjoy the mishmash I’ve created here. Alas, I’m not the most prolific of writers and have nothing else coming out at the moment, but you never know. Perhaps next year I’ll write a line or two . . .

  ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

  Wendy N. Wagner is the author of the SF thriller An Oath of Dogs. Her other work includes two novels for the Pathfinder Tales series and more than forty short stories. She serves as the managing/associate editor of Lightspeed and Nightmare magazines. She is also the non-fiction editor of Women Destroy Science Fiction!, which was named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2014, and the guest editor of Queers Destroy Horror! A gaming and gardening geek, she lives in Oregon with her very understanding family.

  MISCELLANY

  Coming Attractions

  The Editors | 121 words

  Coming up in December, in Nightmare . . .

  We have original fiction from Adam-Troy Castro (“The Ten Things She Said While Dying (An Annotation)”) and Carrie Vaughn (“The Island of Beasts”), along with reprints by Gemma Files (“Nanny Grey”) and Stephen Graham Jones (“Universal Horror”).

  We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, and a review column from Adam-Troy Castro.

  It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Nightmare.

  Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got new fiction on the way from Natalia Theodoridou, Rafeeat Aliyu, and Cadwell Turnbull.

  Thanks for reading!

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  The Editors

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  Though Lightspeed and Nightmare are separate entities, we decided to create a single “publisher” Drip and Patreon account because it seemed like it would be more efficient to manage just one page on each platform. Plus, since I sometimes independently publish works using indie-publishing tools, we thought it would be good to have a single place where folks could come to show their support for such projects.

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