Readers might be forgiven for concluding there’s a somewhat domestic aspect to our proud new issue. But nothing is quite what it seems here. Not if you include carnivorous mothers, high-school students mutating into elephants, and the former mind of your brother transplanted to a brand-new body in your definition of domestic.
It was Sigmund Freud who wrote about “the psychopathology of everyday life.” I wonder if he also had in mind the psychopathology of everyday people. There’s a sense of what may just be lurking around the corner in normal town in many of these tales. Several invoke the intrusion of ‘otherness’ into relatively ordinary lives; one story might even be regarded as a timely reminder that pets are not just for Christmas.
Stylistically they run the gamut from speculative fiction to cyberpunk, steampunk, and not so plain old horror and fantasy. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.