Review: Nightmare Magazine: People of Color Destroy Horror! Special Issue

Nightmare Magazine 49: October 2016. People of Colo(u)r Destroy Horror! Special Issue by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I got this to read together with my wife who lives horror I ended up really enjoying most of the stories.

Wish you were here - the history of a revolution and civil war overlaid on a ghost story with a set of entitled tourists. First story out of the gate meets The editor’s mission perfectly.

None of this ever happened - An incredibly meta story with Lovecraftian overtones. Reading it felt like someone was talking in one non-stop run-on sentence. But the ending and payoff were pretty brilliant.

Diet of Worms: It was ok, but I didn’t buy the logic in the story.

The taming of the tongue: This one was very unique with its setting and Lovecraftian monster. It really brought home how much the dynamic in the south didn’t change much after the war.

Cruel Sistah - I was able to predict the inciting incident, but not where the story would go. An interesting variant on a ghost story.

The Show - Based on a ghost reality show. It started off predictable (to me anyway) and then went off the rails in an exciting and gruesome way.

Wet Pain - an interesting story that combines Hurricane Katrina and America’s history of race.

Monstro - haunting to read post-COVID

Non -Fiction

Interview: Victor LaValle - continues a few issues, including whether POCs can about Loveseat and what responsibility POCs have to write ritious characters.

The H Word: The Darkest, truest mirrors - the essay is written in a similar form to many sort stories I’ve read over the years. It gives it a poignant intimacy as the author speaks about writing horror as a release from the horrors is the world.

Terror, Hope, Fascination, and Fear in Filipino horror - explains how the lived experiences of Filipinos and the rich culture that has not been completely subsumed by Western culture leads to a fascination with horror

Horror, Inside Out - a good essay to share when people complain that pop culture is becoming too woke. That is a very privileged point of view from someone that hasn’t always been the other in pop culture.

The thing we have to fear and Horror Is… - I’m combining these together because they’re both making similar points. Essentially, most horror is written by European and European-descended folks. Therefore, often-times the Other is represented as a person from a colonized space. Both these essays focus on African and African-Americans. The second essays also adds complaints about gate-keeping in the horror genre that mirror some of the gate-keeping issues that John Scalzi has documented in the Science Fiction and Fantasy genre.

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