Nightmare Fiction

Horror fiction upsets apple carts, burns old buildings, and stampedes the horses; it questions and yearns for answers, and takes nothing for granted. It's not safe, and it probably rots your teeth, too. Horror fiction can be a guide through a nightmare world, entered freely and by the reader's own will. And since horror can be many, many things and go in many, many directions, that guided nightmare ride can shock, educate, illuminate, threaten, shriek, and whisper before it lets the reader loose.

Robert McCammon, Twilight Zone Magazine, October 1966