When night falls, new worlds open up. The time after sunset is typically the domain of romance: dinner dates, cocktail flirtations, dancing as a prelude to going home together. Bad things, also, happen more easily under cover of darkness. Criminals prowl and monsters lurk. For Shooter’s Nightlife issue, many writers were drawn to tales of the latter, and so this edition ended up developing a pulsing vein of supernatural horror.

It also turned out to be a particularly strong edition for poetry. Featuring the work of ten poets (including the 2024 Shooter Poetry Competition winner, Maryah Converse, for her political “Web of Resistance”), the issue opens with two poems that capture something of the essence of the night: “as you light up” by Dilys Wyndham Thomas and “Shivering Out” by Paul atten Ash. (The latter takes the form of a “golden shovel”, plucking lines from Sylvia Plath’s “Full Fathom Five” and using each word at the end of each line in his poem: “You float near / As keeled ice-mountains / Of the north, to be steered clear / Of, not fathomed.”)

Partygoing – raves, gigs, midnight celebrations – feature in Miguel Cullen’s “Deep Mourning Dream”, Laurie Eaves’ “Ode to My Favourite Security Guard at Kentish Town Forum” and Warren Woessner’s “New Year’s Eve – Tribeca – 1984”, yet the euphoric antics are frequently laced with sadness, loneliness, or nostalgia. Casey Lawrence’s short story “The Hunt” also stalks this terrain, though with a delicious supernatural twist.

Sleep, of course, forms another obvious element of the nocturnal realm, along with one of slumber’s mortal enemies: offspring. In her poem “nightly rodeo”, Michelle Penn crafts a delightful lyric metaphor for this sort of challenge to sleep. Two prose pieces – the fictional “Acetaminophen” by Charles Cline and non-fiction “Sleepless Nights” by Laura Healy – arrive at the intersection of sleep and children, and take off in very different directions. “Zones”, a poem by Jeff Skinner, plays with the idea of counting sheep in different time zones around the world. In “Little Slices of Death”, another personal memoir, Lisa Simone Kingstone charts the impact of drug-induced insomnia upon her life during cancer treatment.

Two fiction writers, Ross Anderson and Harley Carnell, explore the devastating emotional and physical impacts of night-time shift work in “The Sleep of Reason Begets Monsters” and “Long Night” respectively, about suicide hotline workers and food delivery drivers. Jenny Danes, in “Case History”, and Gillian Fielder in “Standing on the Bridge” evoke similarly resonant, poignant scenes of confusion and distress in their poems.

For the most part, the writing in the Nightlife issue conjures states of fear and menace, loneliness and struggle, but two prose pieces also inject joy and humour. Craig Aitchison shares his fascination with bats in “Small Packages of Delight”, while J D Strunk’s “Clean Kill” depicts a midlife-crisis camping trip gone wrong with comic suspense.

And yet, even there, fear still plays a part – so if you tend to be spooked by the shadowy forces of darkness, perhaps best to enjoy Shooter’s Nightlife issue as part of your sunlit breakfast reading.

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