READER BEWARE 2025

READER BEWARE is a horror magazine that specializes in the gory, the pulpy, and the weird, coming at you with tales of the macabre from 8 short story writers, 2 comic artists, and 3 poets. 

Excerpt from the cover story, The Slide: 

Try not to look too hard at this next image.

Slide.

shift of edge carving up through haze of noise as whispers emerge through dull fan drone

This photograph of Kevin Carter dead in the driver’s seat of his car was never released to the public, and you can thank our cameraman for obtaining it for us.

The beauty is piercing. Intoxicating.

As was the case with Evelyn Francis McHale, it’s easy to mistake death for sleep, sleep so profound and serene we envy whatever perfect dream flows beneath it.  The way he’s draped across the driver’s seat in a state of such profound comfort—he is a dream himself, an exile from a different place where timeless beauty is as natural as rot and ruin is in ours. He is vital and real, a sigh of pure grace, yet he is, indeed, dead. The hose running from the car’s exhaust pipe and in through the driver’s side window makes that abundantly clear.  

It also means that what we’re looking at should not be physically possible.

Carbon monoxide poisoning ravages the body of the person it kills, turning their skin a hideous, unnatural red.  Kevin Carter was not found until days after he died, during which time his corpse was rotting in a hot car. 

He should not look like a statue carved by a Renaissance master.

He, just like our Sleeping Beauty, left a suicide note.

Four words.

“Don’t look. He’s inside.”

Also featuring: 

• a new kind of lethal injection
  
• a new kind of life sentence
  
• how to lose weight quick
• the secrets of the eel reproduction cycle