We're only ever a lost map and a couple of wrong turns away from falling foul of the wildness that lies beyond the safety of our streets and walls. Here at the world's edge, I grew up with wilderness creeping over the back fence, the dark horizon creaking with elder trees, rough with savage tides, scattered with ovine husks desiccating on gorse-choked hillsides.
When I came to edit Midnight Echo 19, I was pleasantly disturbed when I started consuming the burnt and bloody offerings from our writers. Stories and poems vivid, terrifying and insightful in their visions of the merciless wilds, and of how those wilds reflect the violent, haunted spaces within us. The potential for horror storytelling in the untamed reaches out past the city spill are quite literally boundless, and our contributors have stepped well off the beaten track into uncharted places to hunt those stories down.
This issue presents tales of isolation and madness, of ghosts and things that should not be, all trussed up for the campfire in settings raw, desolate and free. Tales of monsters without, and monsters within. Of places where spirits lie, and places where the spirits are the wilds itself. Sometimes hungry, or vengeful, or murderously protective. Always watching. For existing in the eye of the wild is to be prey to a power that will breathe on long after we are gone.
Yet amidst the stark terror these journeys take us on, where we learn the soul-withering truth of just how insignificant we are in the vastness of land and sky and sea, there remain moments of hope, even if that hope is borne in the terrible knowledge that without us, the wilds will always find a way to claim back what has been lost. And that maybe, what is lost, is us.