In these pages you will find beautiful, terrifying, and disturbing stories inspired by Cronenberg’s movies, stories that deal with our fears of technological advancement, disfigurement, illness, science, experimentation, physical and psychological pain, and death. In Andrew Coulthard’s “The Six Phase,” a terrible disfiguring plague creates human monsters with a taste for flesh and violence. Andy Paciorek’s visual artwork-story tells the gory tale of a man who murders his family and blames the government for experimentation with biotechnology, genetically engineered parasites, eye webcams and other nightmares. Sarah Walker’s “Spectacular Optics” follows a character through the horrors of artificial intelligence, and in “Hangar 18,” Nora B. Peevy tells a cautionary tale about military sanctioned experimentation. Andrew Freudenberg explores the horror of a military veteran’s chip being hijacked by the Chinese military for their own development in his cyberpunk story, “Lifecycle.” J. Edwin Buja takes us in “Burning Rain” to the horrors of WWII and mustard gas, with one character bent on revenge for the pain he has suffered, and in “Beyond The Ice Palace,” by Glynn Owen Barrass, a Virtual Reality expert is employed to find and fix the bugs within a VR realm. How can a virtual world become haunted, and are there other forces at work here? Impossible horrors await Alina within the artificial halls of The Harmony Grove Hotel. Richard Alan Scott serves up a monstrous cup of tea with mysterious healing powers and side effects in “Qinglong”, and Michael F. Housel continues a Cronenberg body horror gem, in “Long Live the New Brood” (A Cronenberg Mashup). Finally, in “George Street and The Man in Black,” John Chadwick’s main character has a strange encounter in Hull, where David Cronenberg makes a mysterious, illusory appearance. Or does he? These stories will thrill you, and your delight at these disturbing tales will ease the pain that you sometimes feel as a human being and remind you that life is fleeting and delicate. I hope they inspire you to find joy in being alive and when you close your eyes at night, you remember we all share the same fears. Nora B. Peevy