Issue #9
“The Horror Noire Issue”

Readers, can you believe we’ve been doing this zine for NINE ISSUES!? The Scream Team has been losing our minds over this! As we start 2025, already tumultuous for many reasons, the team here at Night Terror Magazine can’t help but feel like this year is OUR year. As proof of concept, we’re starting the first issue of the year with a thought-provoking, eye-opening, mind-blowing interview with the Black horror trailblazer herself, TANANARIVE DUE. Can you all believe I had the chance to interview her!? This is literally a bucket list item for a Black Horror Scream Queen such as myself, and I will be on cloud nine for the foreseeable future. 

It's not all rainbows, though, as being an LA resident was an extremely scary way to bring in the new year. As I write this letter, the LA fires in both Pasadena and the Palisades are still burning, others have broken out, and many people have lost their homes. The historically Black community of Altadena has been tragically affected, many losing family foundations that had been passed down for generations. You’ll hear us mention Pasadena/Altadena native, Octavia E. Butler, quite a bit in this issue, and that’s because of the foretelling in her dystopian novel, Parable of the Sower. Ms. Butler based the novel on the fires from her hometown of Pasadena and spent her career studying the trends of climate change as well as political unrest, of which we now see the effects in real time. However, Butler wasn’t a pessimist. Her revelations weren’t oracle tellings but were based on research, and she didn’t write about them so we could be left in despair. She meant for us to learn from our pasts in order to create a new future! 

Both Elli’s article and my own this month focus on this same rallying cry: learning from our histories and our communities’ mistakes to inform a better future! You cannot change if you do not learn what can be changed. Due expressed during her interview that making those like Octavia E. Butler or Martin Luther King Jr. prophets doesn’t serve the larger meaning. It instead puts them on a pedestal, making the rest of us question, “How could I ever be grand enough to make anything happen?” The better question is, “Who are you NOT to be grand enough to make EVERYTHING happen?” We learn of Black History in books and films, but we all have to remember that WE are history in the present. The change you make today has the possibility of being someone else’s history to be told! 

I hope everyone can look to the fires as evidence of what is possible for a simple human wanting to enact a “difference.” Those fires took everything away from some and terrified the entire city, but we did not falter. We acted! We showed up! Let these stories both here in this issue as well as out in the world encourage you to be what you want to see in the world. 

This is the message a lot of us Black people take for ourselves every year when Black History Month rolls around, and I’d like to extend that same message to our allies who feel as if they are only a small part of trying to change a big issue in our world. You are far more. 

With that, I hope the stories, the reflections, and the history within this issue’s pages can educate some of you, comfort others, and ultimately encourage you all to be a part of a greater change for a better community and a better world. 

Until the next one, sweeties!

Kelsee