NIGHTMARE MAGAZINE - Horror and Dark Fantasy Story Podcast (Audiobook | Short Stories)

Katherine Quevedo | Until It Has Your Reflection

18 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

I hold the crayon to the mirror, ready to swipe it across my reflection’s neck just as my husband, Tomas, instructed. Make a quick horizontal line, ...

James L. Sutter | To Cheer as They Leave You Behind

04 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

She comes early, forcing you to reschedule meetings from the car as Alan drives, white-knuckled. You don’t mind---sending contract notes while in la...

Mari Ness | Wallers

21 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The day her mother brought Mr. Nelson home, Martha faded into the wallpaper. It seemed the safest thing to do. Martha had never met Mr. Nelson, but sh...

Emma Osborne, Jess Essey, and Cadwell Turnbull | Break the Skin If You Have To

07 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The base of my skull buzzes as I pick up some bleach and a new scouring pad from the market. I’ve been away from my house for too long. When I get b...

Amanda Song | Only When You Laugh

23 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Twenty-four hours to go. The Ultus Theater was all lit up, the marquee emblazoned with his name, glowing in the haze of the heavy rain. Laffing Farm ...

Gordon B. White | Devil Take Me

09 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The caveat is that I’m going to lie to you. That’s how confessions work, isn’t it? There are those things that even though we want to confess, w...

Spencer Ellsworth | The Ghost Eaters

19 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The Man had come and gone, other Someones too, and all the lessers, but Barley still guarded the House. He still patrolled, passing right through the ...

A.C. Wise | Sharp Things, Killing Things

05 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

We saw the first billboard while driving along Lake Road. We’d driven the road a hundred times before, because it was the only road out of town that...

Kiera Lesley | Concerning the Upstairs Bathroom

21 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Congratulations on the purchase of your new home! I’m sorry to inform you I was not very upfront with the terms of sale and would feel guilty if I ...

Clara Madrigano | The Gold Coin

07 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

She remembered the day Sophie’s grandmother told her about the gold coin. The gold coin existed only if you were paying attention. It existed only d...

Adam-Troy Castro | The Arm Ouroboros

17 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

I take the hammer in my right hand and raise it up over my head to bring down, screaming, against the left hand I have placed flat on the tabletop. My...

Endria Isa Richardson | Every Atom Belonging to Me as Good Belongs to You

03 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

We came down to Independence in the afternoon. The sky as we descended was white, gray, pink smeared on a dirty canvas. I had the sense---because that...

Laura Blackwell | What the Dead Birds Taught Me

20 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The first time I saw him, I was crouched in a ditch by the highway, lancet poised, holding a crumbly-paged book open to the words to reanimate a dead ...

Robert Levy | The Closet Game

06 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

You know the game, don’t you? All you need is a closet, and a book of matches---and a willing participant. Not much to it, considering. Jesse first ...

Lavie Tidhar | Dr. Wasp and Hornet Holmes

22 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Dr. Wasp and Hornet Holmes were gathering nectar one day when Holmes made a startling observation. “The Queen has been behaving rather oddly in rec...

Alex Saint-Widow | The Last of the Juggalos

08 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

My grandfather was a clown prophet. I mean he was a clown. A literal clown. He wore clown makeup. And he foretold the end. Accurately. John, the Pura...

Juan Martinez | Esther (1855)

18 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The Saints saw nothing but rock and scrub, the one lone Joshua tree dead, its arms defeated. They traveled by wagon, the four still alive, their cloth...

James L. Sutter | And All Their Silent Roars

04 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

“But why?” Charlotte whined. In the front seat, our mother consulted the map. “I’m not going to keep answering that.” Anyone who’d come ...

Shaoni C. White | Where the Heather Grows

20 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Clara drinks from water bottles so she doesn’t have to hear the tap running. She puts all the dirty dishes in the dishwasher and leaves the building...

Shannon Scott | Synchronous Online

06 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

It could have been ketchup. Or sriracha sauce. V8 or cranberry juice or pinot noir. It could have been Karo syrup with food coloring as it had been in...

R.L. Meza | The First Year

16 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

When you were inside me, I knew you were mine. Now, I’m not so sure. Cradled in my arms, you are an assemblage of parts I recognize: Noah’s cleft ...

Erica Ruppert | The Golden Hour

02 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Thomas woke alone, and opened his sticky eyes to the dusty golden light filling the bedroom. He expected to see Benjamin in the other bed, beside him,...

Jonathan L. Howard | In the Walls and Beneath the Fridge

16 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

It was the unexpectedness of the scream that pulled him to his feet from a sofa slouch before the television, that sent him in a run the short way to ...

Ray Nayler | The Summer Castle

02 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

I have spent my life trying to understand what the thing called memory is. I know some of what it is not. It is not the opposite of forgetting. And it...

Kiyomi Appleton Gaines | The Elements of Her Self

19 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

She remembered the scent of rain and bamboo. The squish of her shoes in the soft loam as she followed her father through the forest. He with his axe o...

Ian Muneshwar | Dick Pig

05 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Ass o’clock in the morning and it’s black out. BLACK black, the kind of black you only get in these miserable, middle-of-nowhere places. No, “mi...

Steve Toase | To Rectify in Silver

22 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

At least twice a day it occurs to Marissa that the photos she uses to find Neolithic long barrows and Roman forts were taken to better plot destructio...

Manish Melwani | The Plague Puller

08 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Stopping by the canal to piss, and only a third of his way back to the House of Death, Ah Keng found his friend Leung, dead of the cholera. He recogni...

Julianna Baggott | Inkmorphia

17 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

For my eighteenth birthday, I get a tattoo. A small red heart on my shoulder, Loot inked across it in black cursive. Loot was my brother’s nickname....

Adam-Troy Castro | Glimpses in Amber

03 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

My visitor gazes at our family bookshelves. I perceive right away that this is less the helpless bibliophile’s habit of scanning the titles of any ...

Jon Padgett | Flight 389

20 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

This time I will definitely die, Jeffords thinks. He feels that this conscious thought affords him a certain immunity from such a fate, though logical...

WC Dunlap | Caw

06 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

He looks at me, and I am his. A steady rhythm of flickering light cast from above, pursuing me like a shadow. I scurry through tunnels, crawl through ...

Gillian Daniels | Frost Bloom

22 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

I would call her beauty “otherworldly,” but that doesn’t really describe her cheekbones like scalpels, the ice that rimes the bird’s nest knot...

Orrin Grey | Chanson D’Amour

08 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You wake with a start, your dream cutting off like a break in the film. If you could just remember it, you’d be getting somewhere, but it’s gone, ...

B. Narr | Cadaver Dogs

18 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

They didn’t find anything but the teeth. I heard somewhere that’s what pigs do, eat everything but the teeth. Except there were no pigs here. Just...

Ally Wilkes | Where Things Fall from the Sky

04 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Spitzbergen, 1881. The whaling station stinks, metallic and rank, even though it’s slap-you-in-the-face cold. David Grace---born and raised in the W...

Gordon B. White | Gordon B. White is creating Haunting Weird Horror

21 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You’ve enjoyed a few of his stories and you follow each other on Twitter, so when you see that horror and weird fiction author Gordon B. White has s...

Benjamin Peek | At The Periphery

07 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

He asks for a table by himself, in a quiet part of The Periphery. It’s late, nearly ten, and the pub is just about empty. Ali has twenty minutes lef...

Steph Kwiatkowski | Cake Between the Teeth

23 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

I only know what you’ve told me. Around 11 p.m. while I’m checking yogurt expiration dates for tomorrow’s continental breakfast, you are pullin...

Caspian Gray | Empty Houses

09 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The new house had a lot of mirrors in it. Not, like, a freakish number---just more mirrors than I’d ever had before. They were in the usual places: ...

Maria Dong | The Cabbit

19 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

“It’s a cabbit.” He wiggles his fingers through the grille of the hard plastic kennel. He is John or Tim, or maybe Jim: some name that means ran...

Tim Waggoner | Negative Space

05 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You’re sitting on a couch in a home that’s not yours. On the floor in front of you are three young children---two boys and a girl---playing with t...

Marc Laidlaw | Paradise Retouched

21 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

To mark the first day of vacation, Jeff Caldwell, extremely jet lagged after a day of travel and two nights of little sleep, took a surfing lesson and...

A.T. Greenblatt | The Family in the Adit

07 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

My reasons were selfish, but I hoped the dinner guest would succeed. She had made an effort to be presentable, even though that only amounted to plait...

Joanna Parypinski | It Accumulates

17 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

It is a frequent yet mild aggravation to return to one’s car in a public parking structure and find stuck beneath the windshield wiper or in the doo...

Woody Dismukes | A Cast of Liches

03 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

“For how long must we keep doing this?” the first lich asked the second. His dreadlocks were dry and had faded near to white, a smell not of fragr...

Stephen Graham Jones | Hairy Legs and All

17 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Like the time you put the shoes on you hadn’t worn for maybe two years but you just saw there in the corner of the closet and you wondered why you’...

E.A. Petricone | We, the Girls Who Did Not Make It

03 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

We are not where we are buried. We are where they kept us. We float now, and see the low building in the woods from above, the long plates of rusted m...

Desirina Boskovich | I Let You Out

27 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

I watch the closet door. I watch around them as they pray above me, their eyes closed and their hands clasped in ecstasy. Their voices drown out all o...

Stephen Graham Jones | How to Break into a Hotel Room

06 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Javi is short for Javier. Javier is short for Has the Perfect Scam. He hasn’t told anybody about it yet. Especially not the hotels. It’s not the k...

Angela Slatter | The Wrong Girl

23 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

“The problem is,” she says as she spears a piece of crispy bacon skilfully enough that it doesn’t shatter, “you’ve got a revolving door for ...

Caspian Gray | The Book of Drowned Sisters

09 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

They lived on the last street that had been constructed before investor money ran out, and behind their row of seven houses was a long unfenced field ...

Kurt Fawver | Introduction to the Horror Story, Day 1

18 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Welcome to Introduction to the Horror Story. This is an upper level course with extensive reading and writing assignments as well as a practical compo...

KT Bryski | Tiger’s Feast

04 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Every day after school, Emmy feeds the tiger with her sin. Deep in the park’s brush, past poison ivy and a rotting lawn chair and dented beer cans, ...

Adam-Troy Castro | The Monkey Trap

21 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Amber needed a book. It was The Estates of Sarah Holliday, a delicate comedy of manners following a young woman’s trials and tribulations in 1870s N...

David Tallerman | Not Us

07 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

When he comes home that evening, he wants to talk. He tells her about his day, about an argument with his boss, about the new contract. He relates a ...

Sonya Taaffe | Tea with the Earl of Twilight

23 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

For the first week, she thought he belonged to the power plant; after that she knew better. She had read the obituaries. She saw him first as a silho...

Ray Nayler | Outside of Omaha

09 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

You would have hated your funeral reception. Potato-nosed husbands clomping around our parlor in their cheap suits, stinking of naphtha and condolence...

Vajra Chandrasekera | Redder

19 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

I chew the leaf and spit out my red days. They splatter. You chew the leaf and spit out your hours of mad redder. They splatter. They chew the leaf an...

Claire Wrenwood | Dead Girls Have No Names

05 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Our bones are cold. It is the type of cold that comes only after death, and it will never leave us now. We mourn what must have come before: hands hol...

Adam R. Shannon | We Came Home from Hunting Mushrooms

22 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On Saturday afternoon we piled into Ben’s old Civic, the five of us and two dogs, and as we drove out to the edge of the state forest to hunt mushro...

Carlie St. George | Spider Season, Fire Season

08 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

The house is haunted, of course. That’s why the rent is so cheap. It doesn’t matter that it’s only April, that ghosts dream quietly when the wor...

Ashley Deng | Dégustation

17 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

You are a spore, barely more than a twinkle in your many parents’ breeding-breathing air. They are your family, among other things, living as a colo...

G.V. Anderson | We, the Folk

03 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

The maypole dancers are restricted by what’s left of the ribbons. I watch them squeeze past each other with shining faces flushed pink from the heat...

Adam-Troy Castro | Decorating with Luke

20 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Hello. Thanks for coming. I know I was a bit mysterious on the phone. This is my house. I live here because a house should be an expression of the ...

Yohanca Delgado | The Blue Room

06 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

When Amada first sees the hotel, she feels her luck has changed at last. One moment she is trudging beneath the palm trees and café umbrellas of Miam...

Millie Ho | A Moonlit Savagery

22 Apr 2020

Contributed by Lukas

My eyes snap open at night. I float out of the tunnel under the concrete wall and settle on the roof of the abandoned hostel. The starry chaos of Yaow...

Benjamin Peek | See You on a Dark Night

08 Apr 2020

Contributed by Lukas

W--- went to the vampire club a couple of nights after E---’s death. It was on M--- Street, in an oddly-shaped bar. When W--- gazed at it from the o...

Merc Fenn Wolfmoor | Flashlight Man

18 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

The legend of Flashlight Man began in the upper Midwestern United States, grounded in rural areas. A variation on mirror summoning, it went like this:...

Benjamin Percy | A Study in Shadows

04 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

One of Dr. Harrow’s survey groups included a church known as The Dawn Triumphant. The congregation believes we are living in a time of punishing dar...

‘Pemi Aguda | Things Boys Do

19 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

The first man stands at the bedside of his sweating wife. He is watching their baby emerge from inside her. What he does not know is that he is watchi...

Adam-Troy Castro | Today’s Question of the Day in Waverly, Ohio

05 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

For today’s question, we visited this small town of about 1700 people. As per our practice of the last six decades, they perceived us as a televisio...

Brian Evenson | Elo Havel

15 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

It is good of you to write, and I thank you for it: I am glad at last to hear from another of my kind---and, above all, to have another of my kind ack...

Meg Elison | Familiar Face

01 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Your camera thinks it spotted a familiar face. “Cameras don’t think,” Annie said, looking down at her phone. “Who taught this thing to identi...

Joanna Parypinski | Dead Worms, Dangling

18 Dec 2019

Contributed by Lukas

When Milo got to the river’s edge, where the log fern gave way to a rough bank, Buck was already there. Shirt tied around his waist, his lean thirte...

Dan Stintzi | Methods of Ascension

04 Dec 2019

Contributed by Lukas

It wasn’t unusual for my brother to send me strange videos he found on the internet. If I’d had enough to drink, sometimes I’d even watch. They ...

Gwendolyn Kiste | The Eight People Who Murdered Me (Excerpt from Lucy Westenra’s Diary)

20 Nov 2019

Contributed by Lukas

The teeth in the neck gambit obviously starts all of this. Don’t think I’ll forget that. Don’t expect for one moment you’re going to get off t...

Adam-Troy Castro | Dollhouse

06 Nov 2019

Contributed by Lukas

There is a man locked in the dollhouse. He is not a doll-sized man. He is a full-sized man. The structure is designed for miniatures, and he is trappe...

Rich Larson | Growing and Growing

23 Oct 2019

Contributed by Lukas

After half a barrel of foaming sour pulque, Ignacio and Hector start the long stumble home. The night is cold but they’re still warm, still cocooned...

Carlie St. George | Some Kind of Blood-Soaked Future

09 Oct 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Here’s the thing about surviving a slumber party massacre: no one really wants you around anymore. All your friends are dead, and your mom is dead, ...

Merc Fenn Wolfmoor | Sweet Dreams Are Made of You

18 Sep 2019

Contributed by Lukas

The girl has no name. As often as internet forums try to dub one for her, nothing ever sticks. One week there will be a consensus for a name befitting...

Ray Nayler | Beyond the High Altar

04 Sep 2019

Contributed by Lukas

A note to the reader: I purchased these letters at the bazaar outside the gates of the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan in 2006. I was working that win...

Senaa Ahmad | The Skin of a Teenage Boy Is Not Alive

21 Aug 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Parveen isn’t there when Benny falls off the roof. But everyone knows the story. Benny and his dumb demon cult. It happens at one of their houses, a...

Kurt Fawver | The Bleeding Maze: A Visitor’s Guide

07 Aug 2019

Contributed by Lukas

I want to tell you about the bleeding maze at the center of our town. People who aren’t from around here don’t know anything about it. It’s not ...

Isabel Cañas | No Other Life

17 Jul 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Cities like her make men leave their hearts on their shores. “Seeing you,” the men say, “I want no other life.” Each night, as the diadem of t...

Simon Strantzas | Antripuu

10 Jul 2019

Contributed by Lukas

There are four of us left huddled in the cabin: me, Jerry, Carina, and Kyle. And we’re terrified the door won’t hold. Carina shivers so uncontroll...

Alanna J. Faelan | The Taurids Branch

19 Jun 2019

Contributed by Lukas

I wanted to tell you the truth, before the end. I’m sorry it took this long, and I’m sorry I’m too cowardly to tell you to your face, but I don’...

Megan Arkenberg | The Night Princes

05 Jun 2019

Contributed by Lukas

“I’m going to tell you a story,” she says. “And when the story is finished, this will all be over.” There are four of them huddled on the fl...

Nibedita Sen | Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island

15 May 2019

Contributed by Lukas

“There are few tales as tragic as that of the denizens of Ratnabar Island. When a British expedition made landfall on its shores in 1891, they did s...

Mimi Mondal | Malotibala Printing Press

01 May 2019

Contributed by Lukas

I cannot understand why, but the young men of this generation have developed a new sport---to go and spend a night in a haunted house. Every three mon...

Dennis E. Staples | The One You Feed

17 Apr 2019

Contributed by Lukas

There’s an old Indian saying.And I’m an Indian woman who’s worked at an Indian casino as a waitress for almost ten years. My first and only job,...

Mari Ness | The Girl and the House

03 Apr 2019

Contributed by Lukas

She is a girl, coming to a house. Not just any house: a large, sprawling mansion, built up from the remains of a ruined abbey, or a shattered castle. ...

Adam-Troy Castro | Example

20 Mar 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Hector Ortiz sat on the edge of his cot, smoking a cigarette, because why not. For as long as he cared to remember, “why not?” had been the chief ...

Cadwell Turnbull | All the Hidden Places

06 Mar 2019

Contributed by Lukas

“Can we stop?” asked Nikki, panting, her face tingling from the assault of the cold. Her fingers were numb, her nose running. Her lungs burned. “...

Rafeeat Aliyu | 58 Rules to Ensure Your Husband Loves You Forever

20 Feb 2019

Contributed by Lukas

(23) No man jokes with food. Does your husband like a kind of food? Try to change your cooking. Rumour has it that in the early mornings, the expressw...

Micah Dean Hicks | Quiet the Dead

06 Feb 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Stray spirits stirred in the dark. They lay like oil slicks across the asphalt, pulled their misty bodies in and out of the doors of Swine Hill’s po...

Vajra Chandrasekera | On the Origin of Specie

16 Jan 2019

Contributed by Lukas

In the tower where the tax collectors go, I am taken blindfolded up steps and through passages and through interminable pauses in open spaces, myself ...

Natalia Theodoridou | What It Sounds Like When You Fall

02 Jan 2019

Contributed by Lukas

It’s Uncle Pete’s funeral today, so he puts on his good brown suit with the brass buttons, and we all set out for the cemetery before the sun is u...

Carrie Vaughn | The Island of Beasts

19 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

She was a bundle on the bottom of the skiff, tossed in with her skirt and petticoat tangled around her legs, hands bound behind her with a thin chain ...

Adam-Troy Castro | The Ten Things She Said While Dying: An Annotation

05 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Her name was Robyn Howlett, and she was twenty-two years old. Robyn was an alien creature to me, product of conditions wholly at odds with those that ...