Edition 33 (The Stygian Lepus Magazine)

Edition 33 sinks its teeth into transformation—of body, of identity, of the fragile boundaries we trust to hold. These stories and poems burrow beneath the skin, exploring what happens when instinct overrides reason, when the familiar turns predatory, and when something within begins to answer back.Across the issue, nature and the ordinary alike become sites of quiet menace. Andrew Harrowell’s Lost in the Forest and Andria Kennedy’s The Final Wave strip away any illusion of safety, while Aubrey Boneck’s Don’t Feed the Squirrels and Charles Williams’s Just Like Granny Used to Make twist domestic spaces into something far more unsettling.Elsewhere, the self fractures under pressure. Irina Vérène’s The Thing is Not Me and Jim Nemeth’s It’s What’s Inside That Counts unravel identity from within, while Nicholas Kellogg’s Yolk and Nikki Blakely’s Electric Hearts explore the uneasy intersection of flesh and mechanism. Reality itself falters in Kevin Holochwost and Anna Varlese’s Glitch and Whitney R. Holp’s Telephone Bugs, where something unseen presses at the edges.Isolation, decay, and inevitability take hold in Dalton Vann’s Room Zero, Damir Salkovic’s The Arborist, Daniel A. Rabuzzi’s Well-preserved, and D. Winchester’s The Last Watchman’s Vigil. Transformation becomes deeply personal in Davis Pratt’s Coming of Age and Jake Stein’s A Little Light in the Darkness, where change is as dangerous as it is necessary.Belief and ritual thread through J. Harris’s Behind the Veil, Jessica Clem’s Cheers to You, and Lawrence Dagstine’s The Jesus Engine, each probing the cost of devotion. Meanwhile, Mason Ritter’s Put on the Costume, Michelle Brett’s Just Run, and Ngo Binh Anh Khoa’s Missed Fortune, T. Hobbs’s Vera, and Tony Sapienza’s The Joy of Sedation Dentistry, each finding fresh ways to unsettle, disorient, and disturb.Interwoven throughout are sharp, intimate moments—Arvee Fantilagan’s Postpartum and Ken Cathers’s there are no witches distil dread into something close and unflinching, while A.J. Dalton’s The Bite and Barend Nieuwstraten-III’s Teeth Like Iron leave their marks in blood and bone. Barbara Candiotti’s Nighttime Longings lingers in the spaces between, and Paul Lonardo’s Juggling Multiple Writing Projects offers a brief, grounding shift before the darkness closes in again.Edition 33 is not a single scream but an accumulation—stories that linger, unsettle, and refuse to resolve neatly. This is horror as pressure: slow, deliberate, and impossible to ignore. Read more