Special Issue ’25

What a time to die. 

The year is 2025. Our world is at war: with temperature, history, children. And, in the center of this fiery nightmare, the need to make and embrace art could not be more urgent. Especially creations that challenge us, keep us curious, rub us in the wrong and right ways. For release and resistance often require the recurring death of what we know.

It’s no secret that your HamLit editors champion genre, divisive as it may be in the literary community. What horror, erotica, transgressive, weird, bizarro, dark fantasy and sci fi, and noir writing offers is an end to the status quo. Alt-genre writing requires that we step outside our creature comforts. It shouts down your ear canal a new way of listening, skewing the pictures in your mind’s eye, recalibrating the schema applied to everyday life.

In a country currently hell bent on withholding basic, daily needs, why not embrace the ghoul, the gnat, the gentle stable hand? Escape and come back stronger. Route away from the easy work and get stirred up. That creative frenzy is needed on the front line. Make even as your heart gives out. Read until your eyes see through to planets beyond.

The thirteen stories and poems featured in Special Issue ‘25 promise to crawl under your skin and remove you from your own reality. They are a present from our resilient contributors to stimulate a bystander cease and desist: When the rat gets the cheese. To fight not flight. One kind crow. Society, unfed. For want of the moon. A trail of corpses. How wisps wend. Sweet, sweet favors. If darkness carries to term. The lure of love’s lament. When bunnies know the score. Another yarn in tapestry. The grass is always grave. 

Hurry. Unwrap your gift. Normal is officially dead.

With continued gratitude to past and present editors, designers, authors, and readers; the PNW would not have this Issue, or HamLit, without your partnership.