Author: Amanda Headlee

Trembling With Fear Christmas 2022 Edition

While Krampus has been busy taking care of misbehaving children, Saint Nick and his elves have been working hard to collect drabbles and stories for this year’s Trembling with Fear: Christmas Special. For those who made it to the Nice list, we have several holiday haunted holiday tales for you to read. For those who made it to St. Nick’s Naughty list… well, Krampus will be seeing you soon.

I’d also like to announce that I will be stepping down from my role as editor on The Horror Tree’s SpecialsUnholy Trinity, and Serials. It’s been a pleasure meeting new authors and making new writing friends. I’ve quite enjoyed my time working with Stuart, Steph, and Laura. This decision has not come easy but don’t worry, I’ll be back one day!

Wishing you a happy holiday and a prosperous new year!

All the best,

Amanda Headlee

Amanda Headlee

Co-Editor, Trembling With Fear

Happy Howlidays one and all!

Unfortunately, Krampus did come early and is taking Amanda Headlee away from us for the time being. In the coming month, we’ll be announcing who Santa Claws delivered to fill her shoes! Things are already decided and we just want to do a proper introduction.

This Holiday Special is a little lighter than usual as we have more of a focus on drabbles, though just as enjoyable to read and I hope that you enjoy all of the tales within! 

Stuart Conover

Stuart Conover

Co-Editor, Trembling With Fear

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Trembling With Fear – Halloween 2022 Edition!

It’s the most wonderful time of the year.

Happy Halloween! Monsters and slashers and ghosts… oh my. We sure do have a horrific collection this year that doesn’t shy away from the wicked and the macabre. There are stories of dilapidated houses and the evil things that haunt within, tales of people whose true forms are revealed on All Hallow’s eve, and lore of the tricksters who were never able get their treat.

On this Halloween, follow me and let’s immerse ourselves in this realm of fiction where the horror lurks only upon these written pages… or does it?

We at the Horror Tree wish you all a safe and happy Halloween. 

Thanks!

Amanda

Amanda Headlee

Editor, Trembling With Fear

As the chorus to one of my favorite songs of the season states, “This is Halloween, this is Halloween,” At the time we’re posting this, it IS Halloween! 

We’ve got a great mix of stories for you this year, and hope you enjoy reading them as much as we have published them. Fun statistics. We’re printing the same amount of shorts and three less drabbles than last year. However, we received twice as many shorts AND drabbles as we had last year. So, we had to be a bit pickier to give you the quality that we want. I’d like to stress that not all of those rejected were by any means bad stories. Some just didn’t feel “Halloween-centric” enough, some needed edits that there just wasn’t enough time to pull off with how close to the holiday that they were submitted, and a couple were a bit too graphic that, while enjoyable, weren’t ‘right’ for a public-facing website.

I’d like to thank all of those who submitted. I hope you all had a blast and again, I hope you all enjoy reading these as much as we did! 

Stuart Conover

Editor, Horror Tree

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Epeolatry Book Review: Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror ed. Lee Murray and Angela Yuriko Smith

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: Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror
Author: Various, ed. Lee Murray and Angela Yuriko Smith
Publisher: Black Spot Books
Genre: Non-fiction
Release Date: 14th February, 2023

Synopsis: From hungry ghosts, vampiric babies, and shapeshifting fox spirits to the avenging White Lady of urban legend, for generations, Asian women’s roles have been shaped and defined through myth and story. In Unquiet Spirits, Asian writers of horror reflect on the impact of superstition, spirits, and the supernatural in this unique collection of 21 personal essays exploring themes of otherness, identity, expectation, duty, and loss, and leading, ultimately, to understanding and empowerment.

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Trembling With Fear – Summer Special 2022 Deadline Extended

Horror Tree Logo

Deadline: August 31st, 2022
Payment: Trembling With Fear was designed as a way to give back to Horror Tree. Since it’s inception we now offer an optional $5 payment on short stories to be paid by the time our yearly anthology which contains the story will be released. At this time, drabble are still considered donations to the site. Moving forward, as our Patreon levels grow, this will change for the better in both areas.
Theme: Summer-themed horror

Who wants summer to last longer? We do at the Horror Tree! This year, we’ve extended our Summer Specials submission period by an extra month so that we can collect even more hellishly hot and campfire creepy stories. Send us your tales of horror about backpacking, road trips, glamping, beach adventures, summer camp… anything summer-related goes! You may even want to write a drabble as a summer vacation postcard as a “wish you were here” [insert evil grin].

The submission window is open until August 31st to submit drabbles of 100 words and short stories up to 2500 words.

Themed Calls

Please note in your submission if it is for a specific theme and not a standard Trembling With Fear call. As a side note, going forward these will likely be collected in a secondary collection each year.

Summer Holiday Special (to be published in August). Submit from February to end of July. Horror on the beach, at a B&B, on a cruise, backpacking, road trips, glamping, end of the pier. Why not even write a drabble as a holiday postcard: Wish you weren’t here?

For special editions, we also do take longer work and Unholy Trinities.

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Trembling With Fear – Halloween 2021 Edition!

It’s the most wonderful time of the year.

I always envision Andy Williams crooning away when October 1st rolls around. Though I prefer to believe he is singing about Halloween as opposed to Christmas (even if the lyrics don’t match the festivities). The entire month of October is magical: Pumpkin Spice, Corn Mazes, Haunted Houses, Candy, Costumes, Trick or Treat, and the veil between here and the Spirit world shrinking to its thinnest on All Hallow’s Eve. The oppressive summer heat subsides to a cool autumn breeze, stirring the beautifully colored leaves as they wilt and fall from the tree branches. The smell of death, must, and decay is in the air. A horror writer’s dream. Tis the season of when things die.

For our October special, we are bringing to you a plethora of story treats that are sure to trick you into a false sense of comfort. You will be impressed by the masks that the monsters and serial killers wear in this collection to conceal their identities and true agenda. Be prepared to take a journey into a realm of dark fiction and horror that is inspired by the most wonderful time of the year.

Thanks!

Amanda

Amanda Headlee

Editor, Trembling With Fear

What a difference a year makes. Halloween is back baby as more of the world becomes vaccinated and more getting their shots daily.
What does that mean for Horror Tree? Not much! We’re continuing our regularly scheduled Halloween Trembling With Fear as usual!
Once again, this year we’ve got some great stories for you to enjoy and you’ll love reading through what has been sent in this year!

Stuart Conover

Editor, Horror Tree

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The Witch King’s Cocktails of Fiction

The Witch King’s Cocktails of Fiction

By Amanda Headlee

Something intoxicating this way comes in the guise of storytelling and rum liqueur. When Witch Kings Rum was founded in 2020 by Maxi Tin-Bradbury and Brandon Bizzle, they had a dream to meld their vegan, gluten-free rum with fantastical worlds of fiction. 

This year Witch Kings Rum teamed up with author Jamie Ryder, who is celebrating his debut novella At the Dead of Dusk, to concoct ready-to-drink cocktails that are based on characters from Ryder’s Tales of the Frontier universe. 

Hammer of The Witches is inspired by the protagonist of At The Dead Of Dusk, Clay McNab. He’s an infamous witch hunter who is tasked with transporting a young woman across a land of darkness in the novella.

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Epeolatry Book Review: Tortured Willows by Lee Murray, Geneve Flynn, Christina Sng, & Angela Yuriko Smith

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: Tortured Willows: Bent, Bowed, Unbroken
Author: Lee Murray, Angela Yuriko Smith, Christina Sng and Geneve Flynn
Genre: Horror Poetry
Publisher: Yuriko Publishing
Release Date: 7th October, 2021

Synopsis: The willow is femininity, desire, death. Rebirth. With its ability to grow from a single broken branch, it is the living embodiment of immortality. It is the yin that wards off malevolent spirits. It is both revered and shunned.

In Tortured Willows, four Southeast Asian women writers of horror expand on the exploration of otherness begun with the Bram Stoker Award-winning anthology Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women.

Like the willow, women have bent and bowed under the expectations and duty heaped upon them. Like the willow, they endure and refuse to break.

With exquisite poetry, Christina Sng, Angela Yuriko Smith, Lee Murray, and Geneve Flynn invite you to sit beneath the tortured willow’s gravid branches and listen to the uneasy shiver of its leaves.

Before cracking open Tortured Willows: Bent, Bowed, Unbroken, I knew this poetry collection would be honest and raw.  However, I was not prepared for the collection’s level of horror and heartbreak. Throughout this work, it’s evident that the authors opened their veins and bled themselves onto the pages. 

Lee Murray, Geneve Flynn, Christina Sng, and Angela Yukiro Smith weave poetic tales of mental, emotional, and physical abuse against Asian women. The tales end with either the ultimate sacrifice or a rising from the flames. 

News and media talk about prejudices against Asian women. Documentaries delve into the racism and sexism that is sometimes associated with Asian diaspora. Tortured Willows takes us onto a deeper, personal level through poetry regaled to us by Asian women authors who allegorically write about experiences of cruelty from prejudice, tradition, and the patriarchy. Tortured Willows is a haunting outcry that mistreatment of women will no longer be tolerated. The representation of the willow tree symbolizes strength and tenacity. The willow bends against hard blows but never breaks—it continues to bounce back and carry on. 

Tortured Willows is a perfect accompaniment to the award-winning short story collection Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women (edited by Geneve Flynn and Lee Murray) to showcase the need to move beyond antiquated roles of tradition and injustices. 

Lee Murray’s poetry is a quiet, but raw and macabre fury that unrelentingly exposes several hundreds of years of suffering and misery placed upon Asian women. Through this literary form, Murray depicts self-sacrifice as a surrender for expectations, love, and the ideal of acceptance. Her poem “Exquisite” left me in tears.

Pay attention. You think it will not matter, but it will. -Geneve Flynn

Geneve Flynn takes several poetry forms and morphs them into her own. In “Her Gradual Hero”, Flynn uses the sonnet, typically used to express love, to convey gaslighting. “Abridge” is blackout poetry executed in a spectacular fashion, and she exposes us to the pantoum (a Malay poetic form) in “When the Girls Began to Fall”. The creativity breathed into Flynn’s poetry exemplifies her writing strength and talent all the while bringing focus to inequity. Pay special attention to “Mouth, and Feet, and Hands, and Eyes” and “Inheritance”. 

Christina Sng lyrically scripts revenge for mistreatment and murder in her poetry. She is quite gifted with paranormal fiction, and through this collection she shows us that her poetry is as strong as her fiction. Sng’s work is full of sorrow and anger as her female ghosts seek revenge against those who have wronged them through racial and sexist discriminations. 

And finally, Angela Yukiro Smith poetry is a historic and cultural journey through time. Her work shines a light on matriarch celebration and casts shadows over the oppressive patriarchy. Smith’s poetry properly rounds out this full collection to show the unbendable nature of the willow and women. 

Tortured Willows: Bent, Bowed, Unbroken is an eye-opening, soul exposing journey, and a solid continuation of Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women. Both collections demonstrate that women will not go quietly into the night.

out of 5 ravens.

Available from Amazon.

What’s in a name? DocSketch is now SignWell


What’s in a name? DocSketch is now SignWell

By Amanda Headlee 

There is one thing that is always certain about life, and that is change. For authors who have submitted to The Horror Tree and received publishing contracts, you may have noticed that the contracts were sent through a paperless documentation signing product called DocSketch. We at The Horror Tree love this product as it is easy to use and intuitive. 
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