Nightmare Magazine #162, March 2026

“Will the Last One to Leave Please Turn Out the Lights?” by Gordan B. White

“The Doll Problem” by Angela Liu

“Her Dark Places” by Adam-Troy Castro

Reviewed by Michelle Ristuccia

Gordan B. White brings us a unique and wonderfully weird vision of a slow apocalypse in “Will the Last One to Leave Please Turn Out the Lights?” I have some ideas of what the nicknamed Idiot of gross flesh floating in the sky represents and where its creatures come from, but I also enjoyed the way readers are expected to draw their own conclusions, so I won’t put mine here. What’s more interesting is the trickle-down collapse of a small country-ish town, the seamless plot and backstory, and the faint ray of hope. Weird, body-horror style imagery makes this story one to remember, while at the same time hitting comfortable notes of post-zombie and monster horror. Efficient, pointed sensory detail helps seal the deal. Friends Bailey and Hector manage to show readers both the resilience and fragility of human life in a world where animal violence sometimes falls from the sky, threatening the nugget of humanity wrapped inside our petering survival.

“The Doll Problem” by Angela Liu is a visually imaginative piece of flash fiction written in first person. Unfortunately, while the structure of layered flashbacks and present actions provide a steady rhythm for the story, the young characters never show agency in the present. This risks the reader experiencing the story as a half-formed dream that ends too soon to reach its full potential.

Much worse than the elephant in the room is the elephant that no one else sees. Adam-Troy Castro’s “Her Dark Places” takes us into a murky world where psychological horror blends indistinguishably with the supernatural. Castro deftly utilizes first person to throw us into the doubts of a husband whose marriage is falling apart—all because his wife’s eyes have disappeared. Like good horror often does, “Her Dark Places” gives no answers as to the how or if there is any fix at all, but when we read between the lines, we wonder if our main character could have prevented this by trying a little harder to stay in love. Eerie echoes of real life conflict show a maturity of subject matched by mature, smooth writing that toes the line of a classic and modern feel. Castro shows how sometimes relationship issues are subtle and complicated and take time to reach their full elephant-in-the-room form. Fair warning that there is a somewhat detailed bedroom scene. The twist at the end is well-timed and fitting, helping the story crawl into the reader’s head.