Just the other day you were saying to your best friend or partner or spouse or veterinarian, “When in the hell is JDP going to do an issue focused on ambiguity?”

Okay, no one in their right goram mind has ever asked that, but, well, sometimes it’s the literary magazine’s role in society to give its audience not what it wants, but what it needs.

Or, maybe we just got some really cool stories that are a bit amorphous in terms of what exactly happens and decided to throw them together into a single issue to better mess with you.

Because you loved the end of Inception when you weren’t sure if the top tipped over or not. Or the way The Thing ends without telling you definitively if the monster is in Childs or MacReady.

Yeah, I hated that too.

But I do really like the stories we’ve assembled here.

And we haven’t gone completely crazy.

There’s one with cat entrails.

Plus, a few ghosts show up toward the end.

At least, I think they do.

Read it online here or as a PDF here.

Ah, relationships.

The very foundation of our lives, the emotional Higgs boson force that surrounds and holds us together, sometimes whether we want them to or not. This month JDP turns the focus on those wondrous and confounding ties that bind, be it traditional romantic love, the unique bond between siblings, the daily camaraderie of coworkers, or that most special of all relationships: the one between a sex worker and the tangible, carnivorous darkness living in her closet.

So kick back with someone you care about, crack open the Whitman’s sampler, and have a good read. The February Issue is cheaper than dinner, costs less than roses, and is guaranteed to make you swoon.

Read it online here or as a PDF here.

You’re about to discover that it all really does depend on your point of view.

Submitted for your approval: five stories that twist the boundaries and entangle the mind.

Old friend and founder, Eirik Gumeny, gets us started with a story that asks the age old question: who is the real monster – the zombie or the human with the baseball bat?

Next, Josh Denslow channels his inner Salinger and serves up a wonderful slice of American teen life. The boys stare at each other at the end of “Sonny Boy” but what do they really see?

Newcomer James Reinebold presents his own dilemma in “The McElroy Family Hole.” Is tradition the glue that binds a family through the generations or is insanity its own end, means, and accomplice?

We look up at the stars but what do the stars see when they look back? That’s at the heart of “Beta Geminorum” by Brian Niemeier, who’s also making his literary debut.

Finally, the great Graham Tugwell returns to the pages of JDP and asks the same essential question as Eirik: who (or what) is the real monster?

Graham’s story is called, “We Left Him with the Dragging Man.”

It gets a bit dark.

But don’t worry.

The stories on these pages can’t hurt you. They are confined to a dimension of the mind, one you’re free to visit and – unlike its occupants – able to exit at any time.

Issue 26 of Jersey Devil Press is alive. Read it online here or as a PDF here.

If you need me, I’ll be standing outside the window in the bushes, smoking a cigarette.

You know, in a cool kind of way.