AHHHH Creepy Photographs Of Children's Nightmares AHHHH Now I'm Going To Have My Own Creepy Nightmares AHHHHH

This is one of those things that's both awesome and awful because it's so damn disturbing but so, so cool. "Daymares" is a photography collection by a New York-based photographer named Arthur Tress. Originally displayed (hung? gallery'd? what's the verb here?) back in 1972, "Daymares" featured staged re-creations of children's nightmares, as described to the photographer by the children themselves. The result is a collection of some of the best horror-movies-as-still-photography that I have ever seen. It's like the real-life version of the Miss Peregrine / Hollow City series, only 8,000 times creepier. From his original Artist Statement:

DAYMARES is a series of photographs that attempts to interpret the dreams and fantasies of young children through the medium of documentary photography. Dreams or nightmares were collected by conversations with children in schools, streets, or neighbourhood playgrounds. The children would be asked means of acting out their visions or to suggest ways of making them into visual actualities. Often the location itself, such as an automobile graveyard or abandoned merry-go-round, would provide the possibility of dreamlike themes and spontaneous improvisation to the photographer and his subjects. In recreating these fantasies there is often a combination of actual dream, mythical archetypes, fairytale, horror movie, comic hook, and imaginative play. These inventions often reflect the child's inner life, his hopes and fears, as well as his symbolic transmutation of the external environment, his home or school, into manageable forms (...)

The purpose of these dream photographs is to show how the child's creative imagination is constantly transforming his existence into magical symbols for unexpressed states of feeling or being. In fact, we are all always interchanging or translating our daily perceptions of reality into the enchanted sphere of the dream world.

Emphasis added, because I love it. And I swear, this is not just my clever scheme to trick you into reading one of my stories or something (although dammit that'd be a great story idea...OOOH fiction brain working now....).

You can check out some of Tress's eerie images below, or you can buy a coffee table book of the entire photography series, in case you're the kind of person who enjoys scaring the living hell out of your house guests. Personally, I just wish that I could read the kids' original descriptions of their dreams...

Then again, maybe I'm better off.

The Greatest Feminist Mermaid Horror Story Fairytale Ever Written

This is Alyssa Wong — or as I like to call her, Death Cupcake. Don't let her seemingly adorable exterior deceive you (or do — she'd probably prefer it if you do, as it gives her the advantage when she swoops in to devour your soul): Alyssa is a wonderful, wonderful person who writes some of the most brutal stories I've encountered. Alyssa's stories, much like their creator, are a perfect marriage of cutesy moments and grotesque, gut-wrenching horror. This seemingly incongruous combination is precisely what makes her and her stories so wonderful.

But don't let my biased voice fool you. Take it from SF Site, who just interviewed Alyssa about The Fisher Queen, her first professional fiction publication. I had the pleasure of reading the first draft of The Fisher Queen at Clarion in the summer of 2013, and it's one of the stories that has stuck with me ever since. The best way I can describe it is as a Feminist Mermaid Horror story. If that sounds weird to, well, that's part of the charm of Alyssa's work — she can write a feminist mermaid horror story and actually pull it off. I was legitimately squirming by the end of this story.

Alyssa was one-third of the affectionately named "Team Tiny Bonesaw" at Clarion 2013, alongside Isabel Yap and Gabby Santiago 

Again, don't take my word for it — you can download the entire story for free on Amazon in this exclusive sampler digest of Fantasy & Science Fiction. And yes, I would suggest you do so — if for no other reason than to appease the Death Cupcake Queen, so that she might have mercy on your soul once she rules the fiction landscape (which she will).

And lest I've frightened you too much, here's Alyssa posing with the UCSD Triton. She's get a weird thing for mer-people — but hey, I don't judge.

Last Caress

Every year, I tell myself that I'm going to do #NaNaWriMo, but sadly, I never get very far. November is always an incredibly busy time of year me, and it's not like I'm not writing or working on other things; it's just a difficult time to focus on cranking out those 50,000 words. Still, I use the time I would otherwise dedicate to #NaNoWriMo to work on any of those other projects, including those kind of horror-punk-rock-young-adult story I've been throwing around (tentatively titled "Last Caress" after my favorite song by The Misfits). Over at Five By Five Hundred, I've included a small excerpt, comparing the local punk rock scene to the creation of a living Frankenstein-esque monster (yes, I realize that Frankenstein was the scientist, not the monster, but it would sound kind of ridiculous if I called it a 'Frankenstein's monster-esque monster,' right?)

"Where Eagles Dare" at FiveByFiveHundred.com

(side note, "Last Caress" by the Misfits is also, without competition, the single greatest pop song ever written about killing babies. Just, uh, just sayin')

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F39UP1mjAnc&w=420&h=315]