face-hugged from the black then ditched like a flesh vessel, the worst of it now is wondering where you are. who you’re with. glowing on every grimy corner, I wear you so heavy it feels impossible you could be anywhere but curled beneath my ribs, preparing to pop. Stephen Ground is a multi-faceted writer and…
Tag: Horror
Social Science
“Social Science” was first published in Tuesday Magazine It is the early morning. A man, dressed in a suit, walks alone to the bus. He feels a pleasant and uplifting sense of solitude, but slowly becomes aware of a matched sense of desolation. He sighs, his feet feeling heavier than before. A researcher, hidden in…
Neon’s 2020 Shirley Jackson Awards Nominations
The annual Shirley Jackson Awards recognise outstanding achievements in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic. They’re named after Shirley Jackson, a prolific novelist and short story writer whose output includes “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House…
Neon Literary Magazine Issue 51
[ Download Digital Edition | Print Edition SOLD OUT ] Issue 51 of Neon Literary Magazine is our horror issue, and it’s all kinds of scary. There are dragons, ghosts, and star creatures lurking on every page. An expedition to locate a mysterious cryptid goes tragically wrong. Polar bears stalk through the streets of a…
Steam Dragons
They breed them in factories now, of course, hatch them in incubators in the rolling mills, and our young people would be shocked to ever come across one that could use its wings, or that was any bigger than, say, the house of a foundry manager or civil engineer along one of the tree-lined streets…
Thicket
You didn’t go in the thicket. We all knew that. – Dan Layton was the eldest of us, and when he turned 13 he, of course, knew better. We’d heard the stories and we’d seen our mothers out at midsummer, tying ribbons to the spiked branches. We’d looked out of high windows at midwinter when…
After the Wedding
On our first visit to the beach we could see something going on in the water, beyond the cliffs, buggering the view. Local divers and boaters had set up a kind of makeshift no-go zone. Ropes drooped from buoy to buoy in a wobbly oval, and there were small boats with winches and ropes and…
On Certain Days
there is inside my house a flightof rooms removed by halfan inch in a directionthat I can’t quite nameoff a little at an anglelike in the drawing of a childbut how to get there seemsimpossible to figure out. I sometimes feel the wallsand listen. I wonder ifthere’s something hiddenin those rooms. A cornerwhere the puppeteers…
Nights
It is my wife who always gets the phone. When she is not in, I just let it ring until it stops. “It is Paula,” she said as she slapped the receiver into my hand, and then, “Leo, who the fuck is Paula?” * This was nearly four years ago and she was very tense…
Do Something Amazing Today
A blood van has just parked outside. Don’t look surprised; you’ve let the summonses pile up over the past fortnight or so. A man and a woman get out. He checks your house number. She opens the boot and gets the equipment for taking blood and, where necessary, bodily restraint. Whichever one’s knocking, they make…