Morbid Curiosity magazine

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For 10 years, San Francisco-based Morbid Curiosity magazine was devoted to nonfiction first-person essays. Helmed by editor and publisher Loren Rhoads, Morbid Curiosity joyfully questioned authority, consensus reality, and accepted wisdom. It explored the unsavory, unwise, unorthodox, and unusual: all the dark elements that make life truly worth living.

In 2005, Morbid Curiosity was nominated for the Horror Writers Association's Bram Stoker Award for Best Non-Fiction.

1 History
2 Contributors
3 Press
4 External links

[edit] History

The cult magazine debuted in May 1997, but took a while to settle into a purely first-person vein. Early issues included straight nonfiction (a history of auto-erotic strangulation) and interviews (particularly with ceramics artist MJ Bole). Eventually, editor Rhoads realized that what interested her most were survivor narratives:

"There is an undiluted power in reporting what you experienced and testifying about how it changed you. Those are the stories that I like best: the authors' records of When Life Changed. They provide mirrors so that we -- voyeurs and survivors in our own rights -- can examine our own lives." -- Loren Rhoads, introduction to Morbid Curiosity #10

In ten annual issues, Morbid Curiosity included 308 essays, saw the collaboration of 196 authors with 60 artists, and reviewed 197 books. Contributors wandered from Auschwitz to Malaysia and from Hiroshima to Mexico. They gave birth and sat at deathbeds. In the magazine's younger days, contributors did any substance they could get their hands on. Later, they visited a lot of doctors. They woke up on the operating table more than once. They attempted suicide, assisted a suicide, sat on a jury that sentenced two men to life in prison for killing their parents, defended a hammer murderer, and confessed to murdering a woman with a baseball bat. Contributors sat on crashing planes, walked out in hurricanes, survived a 7.1 earthquake, and got buried in road kill. They slept with corpses, dissected and embalmed corpses, photographed corpses (featured on Morbid Curiosity's cover), dug corpses out of the ground as an archaeologist, grave robber, and on a forensic exhumation squad. They also chaperoned corpses on a movie set. Contributors worked in a vivisection lab and at a slaughterhouse, fished the bodies of jumpers out of San Francisco Bay, paid the bills as a stripper and by starring in porn movies, worked as a corset model, counseled teenage sex offenders, managed a Halloween superstore, and did research for The X-Files.

[edit] Contributors

Contributors to the magazine included Brian Hodge, Nancy Kilpatrick, T.M. Gray, Trey R. Barker, Simon Wood, and others at the cutting edge of horror, speculative fiction, and mystery.

See contributors: Michael Arnzen, M. Christian, Aaron Cometbus, Ray Garton, Charlee Jacob, Brian Keene, Shade Rupe, Julia Solis, Jill Tracy, Don Webb, David Niall Wilson.