Nightmare Magazine #165, June 2026

“What Grows Back” by Aishatu Ado

“Patterns of Dentition in Transgender Adults” by Izzy Wasserstein

“NoMouth” by Marianne Kirby

Reviewed by Axylus

Each story in this issue features body horror, particularly as related to teeth and the mouth. Two stories put politically-charged topics and themes front and center as their raison d’être.

“What Grows Back” by Aishatu Ado is a Horror + Religion/Myth hybrid involving predation, survival, and historical violence. Its narrative, told in fractured, competing versions of each event, gradually reveals a pattern involving buried histories and the exploitation of vulnerable women. Mirlande, a woman living in a New Orleans shotgun house, discovers she is growing extra teeth (counted obsessively) beyond the usual human thirty-two. A mysterious genealogy document links her ancestry to a Ugandan ancestor, Nakibuuka, who had forty-seven teeth and resisted colonialists. Mirlande’s body transforms into an otherworldly, ancestral predator of the men and systems that prey on displaced women. In the end, she ultimately claims violent justice at the cost of her own humanity.

“Patterns of Dentition in Transgender Adults” by Izzy Wasserstein again leans into politically-charged content, combining supernatural horror with depictions of social horror. A transgender woman named Maddie repeatedly discovers human teeth hidden in her apartment laundry. As the inexplicable phenomenon escalates, it intertwines with persistent harassment from a neighbor and her growing fear that violence shadows her life. En route to visiting her best friend Kels, she passes the scene of a murdered woman dumped by the highway. At Kels’s apartment she finds a bloody appendix in the washing machine. The body parts keep arriving, including a pair of tonsils, and Maddie draws a personal parallel between the teeth/organs and her own history of physically remaking herself since childhood. In the climax, a hostile neighbor corners her in the laundry room; she avoids violence by dropping the tonsils into his hand, unnerving him long enough to make her escape. The story ends unresolved, but contrasts isolation with solidarity, as its ending shifts attention toward community, resilience, and cautious hope rather than solving every supernatural mystery. It closes with Maddie describing herself as “part of a chorus.”

“NoMouth” by Marianne Kirby is a horror story narrated by a body-swapping insect predator. The creature traded its wings to a witch for the power to be desired. Driven by a fascination with human intimacy, it targets and courts a lonely man. In an ironic twist, the creature wears a human tongue that originally belonged to this very target, who had previously bartered it away for wings. The relationship soon shifts into predation. While early, uncanny descriptions hint at danger, the horror is confirmed in the final paragraphs: the creature’s kiss is a delivery mechanism to lay eggs in the man’s throat, the result of which is best left for the reader to discover.