“A Bleak 2020 Begins: from Status Update” by George Toles

FLASH FICTION: “They know everything. I should leave town pronto….” –February 12

“Eldritch” by Gary D. Rhodes

POETRY: “Nobody laughed when everybody laughed….”

“Death and Gingerbread” by Joseph Hirsch

The sergeant of the watch…stumbled onto the once-enchanted house…. We pulled up at the oxbow bend in the driveway paved with crushed sugar shards. The officers secured the crime scene, unspooling yellow tape between candy canes large as lamp standards. I lit a cigar to cover the smell of death and gingerbread. “What do we […]

“At the Other End of the Hall” by Kevin Pilkington

She was staring the way a novel does that no one will ever open…. I learned a lot about hunger early on. It was the way cancer ate, always starving, feeding on my grandmother in the bedroom down the hall from mine. It was the last month and the only time she lived with us. […]

“Nursemaid, Heavyweight, Gatekeeper to the Stars” by Dan Bronson

At the end of the business day, these assets walk right out of the vault and put themselves at risk….The only thing I know about publicity is how to suppress it. I’m a nursemaid. Six-two. Built like a heavyweight. A dandy scar across my cheek. And what do I do? I babysit…for the studios. One […]

“From Ridge to Norristown: A Few Days Away” by Tony Knighton

I counted out nine one hundred-dollar bills onto the desktop and took the pistol and ammunition. I considered suggesting that he give up the business for a while…. I drove through Philadelphia, onto Ridge Avenue and headed west. The antenna farm was visible above the horizon for a stretch, long lines drawn against the gray […]

“An Inclusive Genre”: Stephen Jones on The Art of Pulp Horror

I have always regarded horror as an “inclusive” genre—you can take almost any genre and turn it into a horror story. That has been one of the things that’s always attracted me to it. The whole crime/horror crossover is just another example of that. STEPHEN JONES lives in London, England. A Hugo Award nominee, he […]

“Gray” by Gerald So

Fading bleakly, / truer to life…. Noir’s original palette projects no choice for all in the frame, their desperate acts fading bleakly, truer to life than we care to say. Gerald So edits The Five-Two weekly crime poetry site. Previously he served as an officer of The Short Mystery Fiction Society and fiction editor for Kevin Burton Smith’s www.thrillingdetective.com.

“Stranger Dangers: Sexuality, Adolescence and The End of Everything” by K.A. Laity

Abbott uses the crime and its investigation to upend all manner of assumptions about how we view girls and – as narrator Lizzie discovers – how they view themselves and one another. Megan Abbott’s 2011 crime novel The End of Everything deals with the situation most parents dread – and most news outlets exploit: the […]

“Wikipedian Was” by Joseph Hirsch

But I needed the teen to be alive…. Why, then, was this balm for my soul’s remainder? By which I mean, to watch a movie from 1957 on a computer screen at 3 a.m.? The shaggy monster creeping like a dirty Labrador draped in a pile of shag carpets making slow progress toward the chrome […]