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

Haw Par Villa in the rain was a splash of garish color. The dark red footpath, glistening wet. The ornate tiered gate that greeted visitors with a carving of a tiger, etched in gold and blue. | © 2024 by Megan Chee. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This month's Nightmare Short Shots episode features "Automaton Boy" by Sara S. Messenger (© 2024 by Sara S. Messenger) and "Phantom Taste of Apricot on My Tongue" by Richard Leis (© 2024 by Richard Leis), both narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The soldiers start rounding up us factory girls just before sunrise. | © 2024 by Thomas Ha. Narrated by Susan Hanfield and Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This poem sprang from its title, a product of old-school random-generator email spam. | © 2024 by Sonya Taaffe. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there . . . | © 2024 by Ally Wilkes. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the tiny abbey in the province of Tasselt—the only abbey in the region with both an abbot and his monks and a dozen nuns as well (a temporary matter that had somehow become permanent)—the abbot, whose skin had gotten paler even as the veins beneath it had become more pronounced, and who preferred darkness to light of any kind, had taken over the West section of the abbey, with its many, darker...

If you haven’t seen it yet, you will. | © 2024 by Manish Melwani. Read by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This poem began as a letter from a grandmother to her grandchild. It warns of uncontrollable wickedness and gifts them wisdom for how to survive despite it. | © 2024 by Beatrice Winifred Iker. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I first saw them one evening in May. I couldn’t tell what they were: small, like kids, like me, but they rustled, raffia fronds for skin. | © 2024 by Victor Forna. Narrated by Mirron Willis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The question is, who dies at the end of this story? | © 2024 by Carlie St. George. Narrated by Alison Belle Bews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There is something uniquely squalid and sad about estate sales. To traipse through a cluttered house, one of a teeming crowd here to bear witness to the end of a life and all that it held, not to pay respect but instead to lunge for whatever goodies you can find. | © 202 Daniel David Froid. Narrated by Ruth Wallman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The opening line is my riff on Bach’s chorale prelude “Come, Sweet Death,” one of his most profound. | © 2024 by John R. Turner. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It didn’t come as a surprise when AJ told me she wanted to open our relationship. We’d been an item for four years, but by the middle of the third year the two of us had long since checked out. | © 2024 by James Tatum. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When a nice man with a smart phone camera approaches them. It is also the phone he uses to record his real real reviews of the tacos from the authentic food trucks in Brooklyn and the scenes of the noble and earnest people at the bodegas in Queens. Places where honest people hang out and where he doesn’t make friends with anyone. | © 2024 by Mark Galarrita. Narrated by Annette Oliveira. Learn more...

When the American saw me sitting on a stone in the river, his mouth opened and closed, a brown trout caught on a fishing line. He kept his eyes on me as he hurried to pull off his socks and shoes, as if I would vanish otherwise. | © 2024 by Shannon Scott. Narrated by Annette Oliveira. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This poem began as flash fiction, and was then whittled even smaller—perhaps ironic, given its subject. I wrote this to explore how we change in a relationship, how it isn’t always healthy or best for us—or necessarily consensual. | © 2024 by E. Catherine Tobler. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I like car journeys in the passenger’s seat. They give me time to think and rethink things beyond the shape of my life. I’m not allowed to play music, but I can in my head. Places blur. Memories tangle. Pitying voices from long ago garble in my ear on the thickened tongue of regret. “Muniza,” my husband says, eyes on the road. “Your skin is slipping.” | © 2024 by Fatima Taqvi. Narrated by Janina E...

Before we left camp, we were informed about the dos and donts for living in our respective communities, considering we were strangers. Happenings that we newcomers saw as strange should not be enough reason to contravene the laws of the land. | © 2024 by Oyedotun Damilola Muees. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chuck was wire-sick again, so he hobbled up onto Jerome’s porch one sunny afternoon, need curling his spine like a bent clothes hanger. Jerome was the guy who could get you whatever you needed, as long as what you needed was wire, or crank, or a pallet of Captain Chompberry cereal, or twenty cartons of stolen Lithuanian cigarettes. | © 2024 by Keith Rosson. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more abo...

John Joseph Adams here, publisher of NIGHTMARE. I recently had the honor and great pleasure of collaborating with Jordan Peele to edit the anthology OUT THERE SCREAMING: An Anthology of New Black Horror, and I'm pleased to present this story from the anthology for NIGHTMARE's listeners. So please enjoy "The Most Strongest Obeah Woman of the World" by Nalo Hopkinson, read by Robin Miles. To learn m...

curses take root from root to root / is what they said / when they came for the tree /the tree that had shaded her since she was a baby | © 2024 by Adriana C. Grigore. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Her fingers, then, had folded around the clay, her mind entranced. Her fingers traced the soft wetness, pressed gently, pressed firmly, bent, rolled, pulled, pushed. The clay yielded to her rough-skinned hands like a willing lover. She had bent closer to the orange-red clay and closed her eyes. | © 2024 by H.B. Menendez. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone...

I wouldn't survive a slasher film. When the killer comes to town and starts popping off fresh-faced coeds, I’d eat it before we hit Act II. I have a great affection for those initial victims who seem to linger hauntingly over the narrative. | © 2024 by Jessica Luke Garcia. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As Annie slips into the club, she grins at Robert, all trepidation and excitement. She hardly disturbs the velvet curtains with her passing, so their weight surprises him. He pushes at the fabric to force his way in. The atmosphere is muggy and heavy. | © 2024 by George Sandison. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I was inspired by my body, and bodies in general. What it means for a body to exist in spaces that find it unworthy, unholy. And how sometimes, we also have to carry our ancestry, our birthplace, in these very bodies. So we have bodies weighted with history and ancestry, but still found sacrilegious. How does one reconcile that? | © 2024 by Somto Ihezue. Narrated by Mirron Willis. Learn more about...