CHM #54 December 2024 (Patreon)

 We’re closing the year with a quieter issue, one about the precise contours of pain and loss. We open with Rex Burrows’ “The Head in the Pantry,” a strange and touching tale that proves that humans will pack bond with anything. We then have Shelley Lavigne’s furious lesbian horror about adoration and exploitation, “Bilious Green Envy, Burning White Fury,” where a woman minimizes her own art career and uses her strange talent to make her wife famous instead. We follow that with Dorian Wolfe’s “A Mugful of Dates,” a wry and feminist folk tale (my favorite mix). Rose Sky’s “Shall Not Perish” follows a young woman who finds both freedom and unfathomable horror in the concept of Schrodinger’s Cat. Jes Malitoris’ “The Conjurings of Elderly Widows” is both funny and horrific, when Dolores brings back her dead granddaughter using dark magic, her old friend Cora wants to know how. We also have D. Marmara’s “In the Amygdala of the Beholder,” a cozy cosmic romance about accepting your partner warts (or tentacles or unknowable visage) and all.

Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic alum Joe Koch makes his CHM debut with “Child of Rawfrog,” where a desperate gentleman is given a netsuke by his therapist. This month’s entry into The Crypt is Mary Elizabeth Counselman’s “The Tree’s Wife,” which introduces us to Florella Dabney after an unfortunate Romeo-and-Juliet incident kills both the boy she intended to marry; the town priest marries her to a tree in Joe Ed’s stead, and the tree has since acted in supernatural, protective, and strange ways. The story was originally published in Weird Tales in March of 1950.