Fiction

The Doll Problem

No one knows where the doll came from. With its blue glass eyes and ribboned hair, it looks like the ones you see at department stores and wonder who the hell buys them. “It’s gonna kill us in our sleep,” Kathy says, slapping Yuki’s hand away when he tries to play with the doll’s horsetail hair.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 162 (March 2026)

Fiction

Will the Last One to Leave Please Turn Out the Lights?

by Gordon B. White

Author spotlight

The Idiot looms like a tumorous moon in the morning sky as Morris County Animal Control Officer Bailey Butler passes Stantonsville’s last operating gas station and turns off onto Franklin Road. For a merciful half-mile, a run of white ash and pignut hickory screens the Idiot from her sight until the canopy recedes, but then there it is again. Its enormous shadow haunts the feet of the western hills.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 162 (March 2026)

Fiction

Twelve Facts About the Dermestid Beetle

by Marisca Pichette

Author spotlight

1. There is no better friend than the dermestid. I found them first in the woods, adorning the staring sockets of a coyote skull. So small I could have crushed them, they accomplished more than my child hands could—crawling, chewing, cleaning better than any household sponge or brush.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 161 (February 2026)

Fiction

Rest Stop

by Pedro Iniguez

They were on their way to El Paso when Yolanda asked Bernard to pull over. He choked the steering wheel until his fingers turned white. “Are you fucking serious?” “It’s okay,” she said shrinking into her seat, her hands rubbing together nervously between her thighs. “I can hold it.”

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 161 (February 2026)

Fiction

The Ghost in Apartment 5K

by Everdeen Mason

Author spotlight

Nena came to consciousness little by little. She was ever present in the air of apartment 5K in the seventy-unit building in Brooklyn, like the wafting scent of sewer gas coming from old drain pipes: it’s easily ignored but still makes you a little sick. Sofia, the old woman who lived in apartment 5K, believed in Nena.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 161 (February 2026)

Fiction

Jennifer’s Daughter

by Sara S. Messenger

Author spotlight

My mom was sixteen when a band of boys took her out to the woods and bound her to a tree and tortured her to death, like in Jennifer’s Body, so you see her womb was kinda already out of commish by the time she got around to wanting to have me. A year ago, after my thirteenth birthday, she made her first and only concerted effort at explaining it.

In Jan. 2026 (Issue 160)

Fiction

Dregs

by R. Diego Martinez

They fell just to splatter on the concrete, some of them small as ice cubes. It was a day without clouds and the man selling fruit from his stand on the corner was nearly concussed as they began to patter against the street with sound like the early drumming of hail.

In Jan. 2026 (Issue 160)

Fiction

The Tailors

by Kurt Fawver

Author spotlight

The day before the blind missionaries first arrived in our village, we had been raided by one of Jurgen Blanco’s enforcement squads. Blanco’s people were all the same—gaunt, lupine-visaged mockeries of men and women with broken, half-formed grins that perpetually played about their mouths.

In Jan. 2026 (Issue 160)

Fiction

Shahmeran

by Leyla Hamedi

Author spotlight

Up on the hill, past the wrought iron gates, sat the house where twin sisters Sayeh and Roshan lived. As imposing as it looked, the house, like the gate, was kept in elegantly stellar condition. There were no loose shutters banging on windy nights.

In Dec. 2025 (Issue 159)

Fiction

Review: When the Baby Sleeps

by Lyndsie Manusos

The initial spark for this story was a writing prompt I saw online about writing a review for a horror movie that doesn’t exist. It led me to think about my personal relationship with horror movies. Since having children, my tolerance for some of them has diminished, though my love has not.

In Dec. 2025 (Issue 159)