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

Taking Submissions: The Cafe Irreal Spring 2025 Issue

Deadline: April 1st, 2025
Payment: One cent U.S. per word ($2 minimum)
Theme: Fantastic Fiction You really NEED to read the description below.

The Cafe Irreal is a quarterly webzine that presents a kind of fantastic fiction infrequently published in English. This fiction, which we would describe as irreal, resembles the work of writers such as Franz Kafka, Kobo Abe, Clarice Lispector and Jorge Luis Borges. As a type of fiction it rejects the tendency to portray people and places realistically and the need for a full resolution to the story; instead, it shows us a reality constantly being undermined. Therefore, we’re interested in stories by writers who write about what they don’t know, take us places we couldn’t possibly go, and don’t try to make us care about the characters. We would also suggest you take a look at the current issue, archives, and theory (especially the essay, “What is irrealism?”) pages on this web site.

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Taking Submissions Eavesdrop Issue 4

Deadline: March 10th, 2025
Payment: $30 per poem, $70 per short fiction, CNF piece, and short play. $70 per visual art piece, $30 per comic
Theme: Stories by Canadian writers with a focus on Echoes

We’re looking for heroes, creatures, dreams, and the extraordinary. Folklore. Urban legends. Whispers. Echoes. Stories from your sleepy hometown that come from your grandma’s grandma’s grandma’s grandma. Traditions and the breaking of them. Especially the breaking of them.
Tell us—what’s your lore?

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Taking Submissions: Untitled Quest-Based Anthology For Oregon And Washington Writers

Deadline: March 16th, 2025
Payment: Contributors copy and $50
Theme: Short story by Oregon or Washington writers, that takes place in one or both of those states, that has the reader go on a ‘quest’

Demagogue Press is OPEN for submissions from Oregon and Washington based writers for a new anthology!

ROLL THE DICE, CHASE THE GOOSE, FACE DEATH, & UNLOCK THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST!

Demagogue Press is thrilled to announce an all-new playable reading experience— let’s call it an anthology+— that will take readers on a journey through Oregon and Washington. Inspired by the Royal Game of the Goose, we are now open to submissions for original works from Oregon and Washington based writers that include a quest or chase element and prominently feature iconic (or soon to be iconic!) locations throughout the urban, wild, and lost places in our backyards. We have an editorial preference for works in a “spooky speculative” vein including fantasy and light horror. See below for more details!

 

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Taking Submissions: Magic Malfunction

Deadline: March 9th, 2025
Payment: Royalties
Theme: What happens when magic goes wrong?

With guest editor Wally Waltner!

Did you stutter over that incantation? Utter the wrong magic words? Do the spirits not understand homonyms? A misread ingredient tossed in the cauldron? “No, I didn’t say thigh of newt!” Did Amazon ship your nemesis a blessing instead of the painful affliction you ordered? What happens when spells, potions, and hexes don’t go as planned? Your homework for this anthology.

Opens: 01/04/25
Closes: 03/09/25
Contracts: 03/23/25
Publication: 04/18/25

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Taking Submissions: Rainy Weather Days Volumes 4 and 5

Deadline: March 20th, 2025
Payment: Prose—$25/published piece, Poetry—$10/published piece
Theme: Joy! For this period, we would like to see more works focusing on joy, particularly POC and/or queer joy. This is also an act of protest. If submitting a work on this theme, please be a part of the community you are representing.

Theme for this submission period—Joy! For this period, we would like to see more works focusing on joy, particularly POC and/or queer joy. This is also an act of protest. If submitting a work on this theme, please be a part of the community you are representing. (Unfortunately, at this time, we are unable to hire guest sensitivity editors. We will still be accepting other works of resistance.)

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Trembling With Fear 2-9-25

Greetings, children of the dark. I’m loaded full of cold and flu right now so will cut to the chase today with just a few parish notices:

  • We are now closed to Valentine’s submissions. Our V-day editor Jane Morecroft will be getting in touch in the coming days – if she hasn’t already – to let you know if you were successful. Make sure you keep an eye out for the Dark Love edition hitting the interwebz on Friday!
  • We are slowly, slowly working our way through the regular ol’ short story submissions from both the October and January window; please bear with us but we’re catching up slowly.
  • We’re also now proofreading the 2023 anthology, which should hopefully be ready soon. Thanks to the legend that is Steph Ellis for helping pull this together, and some of our fresh new residents of TWF Towers who are divvying up the proofreading to help out.
  • Finally, this is your regular reminder that we have an insatiable need for drabbles – like, all the damn time. Get your little darklings of exactly 100 words over to us via the submission form, and make sure they’re a complete story in and of themselves; as much as I love reading extracts from longer works, our drabbles need to work on their own more than anything. 

And so onto this week’s edition, where P.A. Cornell (a Nebula finalist, no less!) has a neighbour who takes a bit too much and faces the consequences. That’s followed by the short, sharp speculations of:

  • Nico Martinez Nocito’s glimmer in the dark,
  • Kelley Tai’s star-crossed lovers, and
  • Nissa Harlow’s woodland wanderings.

Over to you, Stuart.

Oh, PS: for those who have been following my creative burnout journey, guess what? I only bloody well finished and submitted an almost-10,000 word short story this week! I know, I can’t believe it either. It’s probably why I’m sick now…

Lauren McMenemy

Editor, Trembling With Fear

Hi all.

This week, I took some ‘me’ time to work on a novella that I’m hoping to submit before an upcoming deadline. I’ve got two to possibly three that I’m hoping to send to publishers this year. We’ll see if that happens! 

For Horror Tree, I did work on reading a LOT of fiction for our Valentine’s Day special and some drabbles. However, I still have a ton of shorts to read and to get our physical copy moving forward again. I also worked a ‘little’ on the website, waiting for a bit more internal feedback before the next set of updates. Hopefully, we’ll get that truly going soon! 

Now, for the standards:

  • Thank you so much to everyone who has become a Patreon for Horror Tree. We honestly couldn’t make it without you all!
  • Be sure to order a copy of Shadowed Realms on Amazon, we’d love for you to check it out and leave a review!

Offhand, if you’ve ordered Trembling With Fear Volume 6, we’d appreciate a review!

For those who are looking to connect with Horror Tree as we’re not really active on Twitter anymore, we’re also in BlueSky and Threads. *I* am also now on BlueSky and Threads.

Stuart Conover

Editor, Horror Tree

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Serial Saturday: Where the Yellow Rose Blooms by Sarah Townend, Chapter Four

  1. Serial Saturday: Where the Yellow Rose Blooms by Sarah Townend, Chapter One
  2. Serial Saturday: Where the Yellow Rose Blooms by Sarah Townend, Chapter Two
  3. Serial Saturday: Where the Yellow Rose Blooms by Sarah Townend, Chapter Three
  4. Serial Saturday: Where the Yellow Rose Blooms by Sarah Townend, Chapter Four

Chapter Four: Sharp as a Razor Clam

                                                          

I lie in bed, exhausted, but a discomfort stops me from drifting off. The moonlit outline of my hand-fasting dress with its patchwork skirt and laced bustier hangs on the wall by my window as if watching over me, ghost of my future. The house rests in darkness, silent other than the rattle of Father’s snores. I close my eyes and see the slash of my betrothed’s insidious grin,  obsidian pits for eyes. I feel unwell. Could be nerves, could be bad meat. Restless, I get up, take my lantern and, avoiding the creaking slabs, head to Alora’s room to ask if she feels sick too. 

I tiptoe through the living room where I left my betrothed. The horizontal mound of him suddenly shifts position. I freeze and wait, becoming a petrified shadow, until certain he’s fast asleep. 

By the front door, the hump of my workbag on its hook. Something within me, an idea, prompts me to lift it down and carry it. I reach Alora’s room and push her door open. Two eyes are on me. Alora sits up in her crib. 

“I’m scared.” She reaches up. I want to lift her out and comfort her but pain overwhelms me. I drop my bag. A punch from inside. I buckle, hug my core. 

“What’s wrong?” Alora’s voice. 

“I don’t kn— ”A sharper pain comes. “Look away, Alora.” My sister covers her eyes. Clutching my side, I stagger and grip Alora’s crib. My fingernails dig into the wood, drown in grain, as my stomach pulses again. Again. Agony. 

I yank up my blouse and down the waistband of my skirt. Where the grip of my betrothed left a bruise earlier in the centre of my stomach, a dark ball appears under the skin. The ball swells until the skin above it is translucent. Ball, sharp tip, sharp tip bursts through. My fifth thorn jags and rams through skin until it comes out and away completely. I await the instant relief shedding brings. It does not come.

The girth of this overripe, skewer-tipped thorn fills both my hands. The exit wound doesn’t seal over immediately, leaving fresh pink-orange swirls like the times before. Instead, my skin continues to shift and unfurl. Out bursts a flesh-bud. Golden yellow petals. The folds spiral out with the symmetry and ratios of a whorled seashell. Soft tissues ripple, beat, then come to rest, setting into a small shape: an ear.

Alora, wide-eyed, grabs at her own small thorn nubs. “This…will happen to me?” I cup my hand over my new protrusion. Her quiet night voice sounds so loud.

“Yes…no…not like that.” I struggle to speak. “That one came too fast. Didn’t think I had a fifth.” The hidden whisper behind Emmanuelle’s eyes I could not quite hear—I hear it now, resonating throughout my solar plexus, a fresh subtext in every sound. The secrets of adulthood unlock. 

I feel woozy, crazed, but as I look at my sister, the fear on her face, I recall the plan I formulated as I crept to her room.

“Want to hold my horn?” I ask. She nods.

“Well…you can. You can keep it, if you let me take yours.”

“My nubs?”

“And your quills.” I force a smile, explain I don’t want to pull them out, just give them a trim. Her brow furrows. I hold my fresh thorn out. Bribery. She admires its serrated ridge, the root of it, barbed ligaments still attached, yet to whither. Then I pull it back. She looks at her own quills on her upper arms. “They just get in the way, don’t they?” I say. 

She puffs her cheeks. “Okay. Trim me. But if it hurts, you stop. Straight away.”

“It’s like clipping fingernails,” I say.

From my rucksack, I draw my diamond-tipped chisel.

I take hold of the brush of quills projecting from her nearest shoulder. She whimpers, tears collect in her eyes. “Squeeze here,” I say and point to the firm beam of wood which forms the lip of her crib. “The smoothness will be temporary. Trimmed quills grow back, I expect. I won’t dig out the roots.” 

I rest my chisel on the floor, retrieve Thalia from my pocket, and make her teddy do a silly dance. She wipes her eyes, half-smiles. “I love you, Alora. I do this to keep you safe. Close your eyes. Hum your favourite song.”

I tug, hack, and slash. She moans gently.  Her timorous sounds echo somewhere new within me but I refuse to let her wails set their hooks in my heart as I carefully sever all her quills and thorns. She doesn’t understand the why of it all. Can not. And I will not let her. 

 “There, don’t you look grown up,” I say, although she does not realise what I’ve done is to help her retain childhood. No girl should change their appearance to avoid the male gaze, but there’s a monster in our midst. 

 “Feel cold,” she says, “my arms don’t look like yours.” 

“I know, I’m sorry.” I push up my sleeve and let her trace my swirls. “But one day your skin will be this soft…and you’ll choose who you let touch it. May I?” I point to the largest of her jarred beach collections, lift it down, unlatch the lid. Inside, tens of smooth pieces of sea glass in oceanic shades sting cold my fingers as I scoop out a handful. “I need to smash them.”

“Okay,” she says.

 “You must try to sleep.” 

As I bend to place a kiss on her forehead, I hear the subtlest of sounds. I freeze stock-still. “What is it?” she asks. It stops. 

“Father snoring,” I say and mime an impression then pass the promised reward. “Take this, you’ve earned it.” She leans back in her crib and runs her finger over the edges of my thorn. “Be careful, sharp as a razorclam.”

I place the handful of seaglass pebbles in a pillowcase and jab at them with my chisel until the battered-smooth hazed chunks split apart to reveal their shiny teeth. Tiny knives. Small enough to be lost, yet so sharp they’ll murder by a thousand internal cuts. 

I think, erratically, as I hack glassy pebbles into an inconspicuous weapon, how sad it is for something so beautifully smooth and elegantly polished by time, to be shattered in an instant to razor-shards, to be forced to evolve into something dangerous, vengeful. But I must do this to protect her. 

Tipping my sister’s shaved loosenings into the sack of cutting mess, I shake them together, then place the sack in the corner of Alora’s room.

Tomorrow, I’ll return to Marmos and give him the rest of my loosenings, seasoned with invisible blades. 

*

The noise again. My new ear throbs, a sentient pain.

A dragging sound, the cadence of a hobbling monster. As it grows louder, closer, the whirr of heavy breath punctuates each step. Alora shrugs, her face full of confusion. She does not hear it. I gesture at her to lie down, make herself small. “Do not move,” I mouth, then yank her blanket over her face. I move to stand to one side of her closed bedroom door with my back pressed flat against the wall.

In my hand, the bone-handle of my chisel sits hard, warm in my palm, its sharp blade slick with purpose. This powerful tool is now an extension of my arm, my rage. My heart has never lashed so fast. Tonight, I have felt great pain, and I, now woman, will soon feel bliss. 

A third sound. I hear its truth throughout my frame. It is far from a tune of love. 

Quiet, yet screeching, knife-on-plate, like a diamond-tipped blade plunging through, cracking open a sternum: the sound of my sister’s bedroom door knob turning.