Slouching Toward Halloween

With Halloween coming up, I thought it might be nice (?) to serve up a few horror stories. Zombies have become a bit too trendy, as Becoming Normal shows. When She’s Ready isn’t supernatural horror, and might not be categorized as horror at all, but it still seems to merit a place here. Childhood Fears is about… well, you know.

With election day approaching before my next issue will be out, I decided to run a Classic Flash by Lord Dunsany. The Day of the Poll is a little masterpiece, and is worth reading right down to the last revealing sentence.

But as the issue was laid in place, I felt I couldn’t have a horror issue without including H.P. Lovecraft. My worldview and his are utterly different (though now, perhaps, the late author’s view is closer to mine), but he writes bewitching stuff. Since I already had a classic story, I thought it reasonable to include a poem: hence, “Despair.”

Finally, since Bruce Holland Rogers is not in this issue, I also thought it would be worthwhile to include Lovecraft’s excellent article, “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction.” Like Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition,” the information in it seems to hold true through the few generations separating us from the author.

For a variety of uninteresting reasons, we’ll probably be shifting to a mid-month publishing schedule generally from now on. I hope you enjoy the stories whenever they arrive.