Night to Dawn 40 — Barbara Custer

Vaccines may have conquered corona for us, but the characters in Night to Dawn 40 face a different ending. In particular, Lee Clark Zumpe's Worm-sacks and Dirt-backs. The story opens with a maze of dead, shambling people crowding a hospital, seeking relief from their pain. Zumpe's other three stories have grim endings and themes, too. Ken Goldman's Young Girls Are Coming to Ajo starts with an ordinary situation and twists its way to horror, with a vampire using a small lizard to do her bloodletting. Gerald Browning's Giggling in the Dark also has a grim theme, with the dead laughing as they feed on a human. Poetry and illustrations by Marge Simon, Sandy DeLuca, Denny E. Marshall, Richard H. Fay, and other contributors.