The Horror Tree Recent Markets, Articles, Interviews, and Fiction!

Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Online / Pro

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Taking Submissions: 100-Foot Crow Spring 2025 Window

Submission Window: May 15th – June 15th, 2025
Payment: $8.00 ($0.08 per word)
Theme: Scifi and/or Fantasy 100-word stories (can include horror but must have a SF or F element) that focus on the theme of ‘Train” – any meaning of the word Train is valid.

We’ll be opening again for submissions May 15 to June 15 for the theme TRAIN. We will allow one themed and one un-themed submission per writer. All submissions must be submitted via our Google form, which will be available here when we are open.

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Articles / For Readers

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Indie Bookshelf Releases 04/25/2025

Got a book to launch, an event to promote, a kickstarter or seeking extra work/support as a result of being hit economically by life in general?

Get in touch and we’ll promote you here. The post is prepared each Tuesday for publication on Friday. Contact us via Horror Tree’s contact address or connect via Twitter or Facebook.

Click on the book covers for more information. Remember to scroll down to the bottom of the page – there’s all sorts lurking in the deep.

 

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Articles / Reviews

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Epeolatry Book Review: Black Out the Stars by Christopher Bond

Disclosure:

Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

Title: Black Out the Stars
Author: Christopher Bond
Genre: Crime horror
Publisher: Aquino Loayza
Publication date: 25th March, 2025

Synopsis: Marcus, a man estranged from his family, returns to his roots amid a backdrop of generational trauma in rural, poverty-stricken Ohio, only to find that not all family secrets die given time. As Marcus helps his uncle drain a pond on their ancestral property, he uncovers the dark secrets of his family and the land they’ve called home.

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Trembling With Fear

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Unholy Trinity: Murder She (W)Rote by Nic Tusa

Our church worships at the altar of the Unholy Trinity. Its gospels are delivered as a trio of dark drabbles, linked so that Three become One. All hail the power of the Three.

 

Murder, She (W)Rote. Season 1, Episode 1: Honey, It’s Considered Manslaughter if It Isn’t Planned (And No One Knows I Sharpened the Knife)

 

He hadn’t hidden it well; always shit with details. 

Hell, he still thought her eyes were brown.

 

Men are more likely to be stabbed on weekends.

Because they’re home annoying their wives.

 

Veronica toed off her shoes, crossing the dark house to their bedroom.

 

Fun fact: men usually stab underhanded into the stomach, but because women are more tricep-dominant, they tend to stab downward.

 

Her fingertips ached— manicured nails extending into imperfect talons.

 

Plenty of muscle mommies out there will prove you wrong!

More like muscle monsters!

 

Ten precise four-inch substernal wounds were the fastest way to a man’s heart.

 

 

Murder, She (W)Rote. Season 1, Episode 2: I’ve Got the Arsenic for That Tea (Sipping on Secrets, Choking on Confidences)

 

Trapped between the wall and his arms, Christina’s skin crawled like a thousand writhing snakes. 

 

Women kill differently from men.

I expected nothing less.

 

Her fangs had dropped during puberty. Clandestine bumps on the roof of her mouth. If she opened her mouth wide, they mobilized, sharp and deadly as a viper’s.

 

We are more subtle and patient.

Out here, dosing hubby’s morning coffee with a little poison, like “today’s the day!”

 

He leaned into her neck so she did the same, sinking her teeth into his vulnerable skin.

Two pinpricks of blood against her tongue as the venom sang.

 

 

Murder, She (W)Rote. Season 1, Episode 3: Darling, This Embrace is a Chokehold for Your Neck (And I’m Waiting For Your Final Breath)

 

A lot of women will try to make it look like an accident. 

When Shelby capsized their kayak two klicks from shore, Miranda laughed. Shelby was a strong swimmer but Miranda was the water. It would have been easier to break up.

 

So like…

Asphyxiation and strangulation.

 

Bobbing in the sea, small waves caressed her gills. Her legs had fused; scales sprouted to protect her from the cold.

 

You mean like drowning their kids in the bathtub?

Or smothering them with pillows.

That’s awful.

 

In one powerful kick, Miranda closed the distance, wrapping webbed fingers around Shelby’s ankle. 

She dove.

 

Nic Tusa

Nic Tusa spent almost a decade as a NYC paramedic and writes speculative fiction that blends the gritty chaos of reality with the strict rules of magic. She enjoys a good slice of pizza, running, and the emo music of the early aughts. Her short story An Animal Within? was recently included in BDA Publishing’s Your Body, My Rage anthology.

Anthology / Events / Flat Amount

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Taking Submissions: Neurodiversity and the More-Than-Human

Deadline: August 31st, 2025
Payment: $50 AUD
Theme: Neurodiversity and the More-Than-Human

Our second anthology will gather a wide range of creative responses on the theme of Neurodiversity and the More-Than-Human.

We want to foster neurodivergent situated knowledge that is not limited to the traditional academic essay: engage in autotheory, autoethnography, creative essay, poetry, short story, speculative sci-fi, visual art, and more.

While the close bond between neurodivergent humans and other living beings are often put forward, little thematic focus has been placed on the intersection of neurodiversity and the more-than-human in academic and creative writing. This anthology seeks to fill this gap and foster a more-than-human turn in neurodiversity with an emphasis on creative responses.

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Anthology / Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Poetry

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Taking Submissions: It Takes a Village

Deadline: June 1st, 2025
Payment: $5 for poetry sets (up to 5 pages), $10 for flash fiction (up to 1000 words), $25 for fiction stories up to 5000 words, +$2/1000 words for over 5000 for fictions stories up to 10,000 words
Theme: Canadian authors telling stories about community: finding it, building it, maintaining it, being expelled from it. SF and F are called out as acceptable, no word on H so probably a hard sell

This anthology’s theme is “It Takes a Village” – I’m looking for stories about community: finding it, building it, maintaining it, being expelled from it. How do we build our villages as adults? How do we grow connections with those around us? What do we do when we’ve lost them? We’ve heard the phrase “It takes a village to raise a child” but also “The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.” How do we tackle these emotions as adults?

As this is a bit trickier of an anthology theme than the last one, the reading period is going to be much longer, and the final evolution of the anthology’s theme will come from what the overarching theme and tone from the submitted and accepted pieces create.
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Articles

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Weathering the Maddening Winds in the Alps

Weathering the Maddening Winds in the Alps

 

Location: Balzers, Liechtenstein and various villages at the foot of the Alps

For fans of: Ecological horror and psychological thrillers

To read: “The Wind” by Ray Bradbury (1943)

 

On various days from the middle of March to the end of April, the Foehn wind roars down the lee side of the Alps at up to 130 km (80 miles) per hour, bringing all manners of malady upon the northern border of Italy, some southern parts of France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and Slovenia, and the entirety of Liechtenstein – from headaches and breathlessness to suicides and hauntings. This month, I will highlight the darker forces that some believe to be at work through the Foehn, or, the Snow Eater, as the locals call it, and encourage you to read Ray Bradbury’s classic short horror story “The Wind” as you tour the Alpine villages of Liechtenstein for yourself. Bradbury’s work tells the story of a stormchaser in 1940s America who believes the winds he has encountered over the years have, finally, come together on his doorstep seeking revenge. I would have recommended something longer (such as JG Ballard’s sci-fi novel The Wind From Nowhere, for example); however, given that dizziness, fatigue, and complete psychosis are common symptoms of the Snow Eater, anything novel-length may admittedly be hard to get through out here. 

The Snow Eater and its kin winds, in fact, appear often in classic literature from all over Europe. Voltaire wrote about the Foehn’s effects in France. Edmund Spenser and Shakespeare both refer to England’s similarly-behaved Helm Wind; the former describing it as “bitter, black, and blustering” and the latter accusing it of causing “gout, the falling evil, the itch, and the ague.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez describes the Tramontana winds of Italy as “harsh, tenacious land wind that carries in it the seeds of madness” which “blows without pause, without relief, with an intensity and cruelty that seemed supernatural.”  

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Events / Flat Amount / Online

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Taking Submissions: Carnage House Issue 7

Deadline: May 1st, 2025
Payment: $5 usd
Theme: Splatter Friendly Horror

How the Sausage is Made!

Submissions:

We want solid entertaining writing. That has to be clearly stated because we are open to gore, extreme horror, splatterpunk, and horror with sexual elements to it.

Sounds great?

Like anything too good to be true, there is a catch. We have some hard “Nos.” Before you go off about the freedom of expression, remember, this is a web ‘zine, not a government. We donate our time to it and if we’re not getting joy from reading your story we’re not going to publish it.

This website runs on our love of horror. We offer a token payment of $5 USD to support your drug habit, paid upon publication. However, you keep your rights –we don’t want them.

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