Apocalypse Confidential presents: Poltergeist

A woman investigating the mysterious disappearance of a team of scientists in what was once the Arctic finds only ghosts, false gods competing for her devotion, and unearthly children in need of care. As the self-proclaimed gods grow impatient and the children’s rituals grow more perverse, her investigations lead her deeper into the fog, where memories of horror movies flicker in the static.

Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece's strange fiction can be found in places like Weird Horror, Exacting Clam, and Apocalypse Confidential, among others; she teaches film history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Lake Markham is a writer and photographer in Chicago, IL. His work is based in the intersection of art and philosophy, and has appeared in ExPat Press, Zero Readers, and The Philosopher’s Meme. Lo Siento, Lake’s first full-length novel, was published with Apocalypse Confidential in October 2025. He no longer writes about Texas.

August Smith is a poet in Austin, TX. He’s published 9 chapbooks, translated a selection of 1970s Icelandic verse, and written a full-length book of poems about UFOs (2024’s Visitors from the Red Star.) He is currently working on his next album of synthesizer music. Read more at augustsmith.net.

Meghan Lamb is the author of Mirror Translation (Blamage Books, 2025), COWARD (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022), Failure to Thrive (Apocalypse Party, 2021), All of Your Most Private Places (Spork Press, 2020), and Silk Flowers (Birds of Lace, 2017). Her work has also appeared in Quarterly West, DIAGRAM, Redivider, and Passages North, among other publications. She currently teaches creative writing through the University of Chicago, Story Studio, and GrubStreet. She is an editor for the magazine Always Crashing and curator of the Always Crashing Reading and Performance Series.

Established in 2021, APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL is a web magazine of edgy extrapolations, fringe fascinations, occult obsessions, risky ruminations, and aberrant associations. We are a literary journal obsessed with the underworld, both demonological and criminological – the collision of crooks in coats wielding machine guns and creeps in cloaks wielding jagged daggers. We are fascinated by the way parapolitics is to history and current events as urban exploration is to architecture. We are turned on by the synthesis of low lives and high strangeness. We excavate the Carcosan aspect of modern life. We are a home for dime-store Dostoevskys and ten-dollar Thompsons. We have been variously described as a psyop sleaze rag, a psychotronic survey of the pyrotechnic insanitarium, and a hypebeast health-goth apparel brand masquerading as a cyber-medievalist woodcut Metal Gear Solid fanzine.

Some of our particular/peculiar interests are schlock/sleazoid cinema (giallo flicks, Mondo flicks, splatter flicks, slasher flicks, skin flicks, drive-in flicks, grindhouse flicks), silent-film sorcery, Hollywood Babylon, lost continents, ancient apocalypses, psychogeography, time-out-of-jointedness, shipwrecks, Rankin/Bass arcana, Looney Tunes as the gesamtkunstwerk of the Twentieth Century, weird menace, Gothic fiction, pulp fiction, pulp esoterica, Westerns, the hidden history of your hometown, liminal spaces, subliminal phrases, libidinal forces, the Cosmic Bomb, splatterpunk, cyberpunk, nostalgia (real or Internet-induced), old wounds, Hasbro hermeticism, the occult roots of [FILL IN THE BLANK], Lovecraft as filtered through Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna, the works of James Ellroy and Theodore Roszak, and smoke-filled back rooms.

1. Lo Siento - A stranger comes to town. A penitent reverend and a shopworn sheriff. A diamond thief with Hollywood ambitions. A disastrous chili cook-off. Act naturally. Samuel arrives to the lonely West Texas town of Lo Siento out of money and out of gas. He quickly finds work at a failing local bar, but finds getting out of town is another story.
2. Visitors - In this prismatic debut, August Smith charts a course through the weird contours of the UFO phenomenon: the lore, the stories, the theories, and the questions it raises about belief and reality. In poems that span a variety of styles—formal to experimental, strange to sincere—Smith harvests insights from otherworldly tales; expect cyclopean robots, unsettling dreams, alien erotica, frogmen careering through the skies, and, at the center of it all, the wandering poet trying to make sense of the impossible.Concluding with an essay, this hybridized collection asks: what can the paranormal teach us about poetry? And what do poems have to do with our mysterious visitors in the skies?
3. The Book Of - When a series of bizarre crimes with disturbingly religious implications occur, four connected stories spanning decades crash together, and then fall apart. An atmosphere of holy paranoia surrounds mental patients and small-time gangsters alike.Pale Townie - An epic poem by Tom Will. Based on Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, a man dies and is resurrected over a weekend in 999 heroic couplets, couplets which have retained all the end rhymes of the original poem. Through a snow-encrusted town, a snow-encrusted townie walks through Dante’s heaven and silent film’s hells.
4. Incurable Graphomania - A woman’s post-breakup bender collides with a defense-tech summer camp. An animal control officer stumbles upon a puppy mill racketeering ring run by ex-CIS mutts. A film student descends into mycotoxin mania while reading Dostoevsky. A pharmacist in Tom’s River takes liberties with patient information. A claw clip connects three women’s eventful week. A spaced-out Ukrainian refugee finds her fangs. A bridesmaid goes missing. A couple fight on Embassy Row. An incarcerated woman meditates on pitcher plants. A suicide on campus sends two students down a rabbit hole. Two dystopias set in 2044 and 2066. 14 stories of voyeurism, paranoia, defense contracts, Russian stewardesses, venomous WASPs, and more.
5. God Is a Killer - The end of the world. MacDougall, a violent and ruthless prophet with visions of the apocalypse, returns to his old compound—and his old family. Sheriff Fitzroy, the man who put him behind bars, must protect Bentham County while protecting himself from the DEA. Meth cooks, biker gangs, and a corporation named Lokust should all say their prayers, because everyone knows—God Is a Killer.
6. Clutch 1900 - Old cowboy Clutch Haggardy waits in a hotel lobby for his biographer. The Wild West rages around him, and Clutch bears, and has borne, witness to tragedy, violence, heartbreak—but he sits, and he drinks, and he waits. In the present, Ray lives only to collect all the Cowboy Clutch yarns, printed in penny stories long-lost to time. In his quest, he finds a fire, a yawning basement, a mysterious paper-airplane-making woman, and who might be the man old Clutch waited for decades ago. This tightly-wound, terse novel by Craig Rodgers examines the mystery of authorship, the obsession of collectors, and the eternal, maddening hope of history, real or imagined.
7. Black Orb - A serpentine tale of warriors and wizards, monsters and mad men caught in a web of dark, otherworldly influence in ages long past and far future. If the destruction of ultimate evil were possible, would you sacrifice yourself to slay it?

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