Good news, ghouls. The long-awaited fourth issue of our magazine, Ghoulish Tales, is finally out.
This thing has seen one delay after another but that’s all in the past, baby. It’s out! You can read it! Fiction from (at time of acceptance) never-before published writers. Stories from Madelyn Lunnen, Melissa Nowark, Harrison Stypula, Miguel Villa, M.E. Wilczek, & M.M. Williams. Mindy Rose joins as our new assistant editor. Art by Betty Rocksteady. Order HERE, or come pick up a copy at our shop in San Antonio. (We will re-open submissions for issue 5 next week, so stay tuned.)
See below for Betty Rocksteady’s cover art and Mindy Rose’s introduction essay…
CONFESSIONS OF A HORROR POSER
Hi. My name is Mindy, and I’m a horror poser.
Recently, my friend Max Booth (who you have probably never heard of, don’t worry about it) shared a thought provoking essay they’d come across. Written by an esteemed colleague within the horror community, the essay detailed the stark differences between legitimate horror fans – worthy of calling themselves such – and people who claim the title but don’t engage in true horror practices.
As I read through this essay, I was shocked and dismayed to find that I did not recognize myself among the ranks of those who truly desire to be disturbed; who wish to be psychologically damaged by each piece of horror media they consume, who don’t even bother watching true crime documentaries unless they are promised each and every descriptive detail of the torture that was inflicted upon the victim. No, embarrassingly, as I went methodically through the checklist, I came to the shameful conclusion that I was firmly on the poser side of the spectrum.
It’s difficult for me to admit this, but for the sake of transparency, it feels necessary: I don’t enjoy things that make me feel bad. I don’t enjoy things that upset me. I don’t like reading about animals being abused, or watching profoundly brutal films. I like corny, predictable slashers. I like jump scares. God help me, I like fun. I like to have a nice, silly, moderately spooky time. I like gazing in gape-mouthed awe at icky, charmingly absurd practical effects.
As you can imagine, this revelation was quite jarring for me. If I’m being honest, it sparked a bit of an existential crisis. I started questioning whether I can genuinely call myself a fan of anything at all. For instance, I’ve unfortunately been aware for many years that I’m not a real fan of punk music, because I think the Sex Pistols sound like dogshit and Black Flag bore me to death. This harsh truth of course haunts me daily, and immediately came to mind as I began doubting myself as both a self-proclaimed lover of horror and, ultimately, a sincere human being.
Rather than continue on the dishonorable path of the poser, I’ve decided to start taking steps to desensitize myself so that I may become numb to—
Nah, I’m just fucking with you. Max did show me a post from some pissbaby edgelord whining about ‘horror posers,’ but can you imagine giving a shit? Lmao! We had a nice time making fun of that person, and then Max suggested I use that poser line as my intro to this thing they want me to write, so I did. They also suggested that I talk a bit about how I first got into horror, but truthfully, I don’t fucking remember.
It would be super cool to be able to recount an experience during which small Mindy had snuck downstairs after bedtime and caught an episode of The X-Files that blew her tiny mind, or perhaps stumbled across a battered VHS of Sleepaway Camp in the gutter and was forever changed, but alas! Neither of those things happened.
(I did once stumble across a VHS in the street, but it was the 1994 action-romance film Speed, starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock [Great movie, highly recommend.].)
When I scour my mind for standout horror memories, by far what I’ve been most impacted by was reading The Amityville Horror when I was eleven years old. I picked it up solely because it was A Book That Was In My House, and no one stopped me from reading it because it was the 90s. That book, to put it lightly, severely fucked me up. I was just a dumb little kid, so the “Based on true events!” boast on the front cover could just as well have said “literally every single god damn thing written in this book actually, for real, happened.” Long story short, I had a bizarre fear of both flies and pigs until I was fifteen.
So like, that happened, but that’s more an anecdote about me…hating horror, which is not at all what Max asked for. I am failing this assignment!
Really, I was just always a Halloween Kid. I adored a bit of gentle spookiness, and I’ve viewed the world through a slightly distorted lens of creepiness for as long as I can remember—the leaf blowing across the road is always, first and foremost, a sinister skittering beastie, the power outage surely caused by a masked, axe-wielding intruder, the growl in the night is never my dog, but a demon in the walls. One of my toes is eternally edged just outside of the circle of salt, baiting a sweet, fleeting scare.
Despite this disgraceful preference for the more lighthearted side of horror, Max has allowed me to join their Ghoulish empire, first as Publicity Ghoul, then assistant slush reader, and now, tentatively, as an editor as well—my foray into which began as follows: I asked Max “Would you wanna, like, teach me how to edit, maybe, at some point?” and Max was like “Yeah, maybe, at some point,” and the next thing that happened was that Max sent me the stories that are contained within this very issue of Ghoulish Tales and said, “Here, try to edit these.”
So, reader, I tried. And here we are. I’m…an editor? While this is the first Ghoulish Tales issue to feature yours truly under the Assistant Editor role, we also did a fun thing with the submission process and only considered writers who had never been published before, which means that this issue contains six stories from six authors who, at least at the time of their acceptance, had previously never published fiction. We are fiercely pleased to be the ones to grab them by the throats and fling them off the cliff of novice writers and into the churning and savage sea of published authors.
I could go on and on about how honored I am that Max trusted me enough to let me shove my grubby hands into this art and twist it up into new shapes, and I could make a lengthy list all of the big gross emotions I have about it, but no one wants to read that and more importantly I do not want to start crying while writing this right now, at 3:34am. So. Thanks. I hope I didn’t fuck it up too badly.
—Mindy Rose
Assistant Editor
