Deadline: October 31st, 2025
Payment: .02¢ per word
Theme: Tiny Terrors is our short fiction program for when a novel just won’t do. Just a short shocking scream to keep you awake at night …
Tiny Terrors is our short fiction program for when a novel just won’t do. Just a short shocking scream to keep you awake at night …
Graveside Press is again looking for submissions for our Tiny Terrors short fiction program.
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Art by Anwen O’Driscoll
Deadline: August 31st, 2025
Payment: $0.08 CAD per word
Theme: Fantasy short stories
OTHER: the 2025 fantasy short story anthology (Book 2 of the Other Anthology series)
We are seeking short stories by international writers. The story can be visually evocative or character/narrative focused as long as it leaves the reader thinking about the story long after closing the book. We don’t want a lesson, we want an experience that makes us come alive.
Deadline: August 31st, 2025
Payment: $15
Theme: Road trip terror
Are you brave enough to take a ride on the Hellbound Highway? HellBound Books is seeking short horror stories for an anthology on the theme of bad trips, which will be curated and edited by the double-trouble partnership of veteran horror writers Jane Nightshade and Ann O’Mara Heyward. We want road trips, sure, but also airplane journeys, ship crossings, railroad passages, heck even cattle drives–as long as it’s a trip and it’s B-A-D.
What if a family like the Griswolds from National Lampoon’s Vacation were zombies? What if a weary business traveler waits for the red-eye in an airport that is literally a portal to hell? What if the night manager of the local Greyhound bus station was a vampire who feeds off of the poor and desperate? What if a crook on the lam checks into a cheap motel and discovers that the usual cockroaches are mutants with deadly powers? What if someone stopped at a cafe in the middle of nowhere, and slowly realized that they were the special on next day’s menu?
These are the types of scenarios we are looking for, so let your creepiest imaginings run wild. Scary horror, psychological horror, or comedy horror are all welcome–it just has to be GOOD.
Deadline: May 31st, 2025
Payment: $0.08 /word
Theme: Fantasy, science-fiction, and horror short stories that embrace punk and queer rage.
edited by
C.L. McCartney, Trip Galey & Robert Berg
We’re seeking fantasy, science-fiction, and horror short stories that embrace punk and queer rage.
There’s a glass ceiling in SFF representation, and we want you to throw a brick through it. Bring us the coven that burned Salem and your roaring bear-serkers. We want gangs of acid-wash werewolves, furious bipyromancers, flesh-eating femmes, and vengeant celestial bois—a cast of the downtrodden who make ruins of their oppressors.
Wrath lies at the heart of queer liberation—it can be a spur to action and the only righteous response to a world that would prefer we didn’t exist. So crash mainframes, collapse empires, and break normativity.
Pride month is over. It’s time for—
Wrath Month
Deadline: June 1st, 2025
Payment: AU 1c/word
Theme: What happens to a person after a major transformation
Submissions open until 1st June 2025
The Morning After is an anthology about what happens after a sudden transformation. This could be an individual person transforming into something new or a mass change that effects humanity as a whole. How does this person or society react to no longer being human?
As an editor, I am keen to see how people react in this unique situation. Focus on struggles and adaptation to new forms are highly encouraged.
Despite the name of the anthology, the story does not need to begin with waking up in this new reality – but it should start shortly after the transformation has taken place.
Deadline: June 30th, 2025
Payment: $5
Theme: Plagues, pandemics, original takes on zombies, outbreaks, and everything related!
The HellBound Books team felt enough time has passed since the COVID-19 pandemic to warrant an appropriately themed anthology. We are looking for horrific tales of diseases ravaging mankind, viruses, bacteria, and fungal spores infecting and threatening to eradicate all of humanity – and, yes, we would love to see your terrifying, unique takes on the zombie trope!
Deadline: May 31st, 2025
Payment: $0.01 per word
Theme: Dark stories with the theme of patterns
PATTERNS
Submission window now open.
Deadline: May 31st 2025
We’re looking for dark stories (2-4k words) on the theme of patterns.
Please interpret this theme however you like. Write us a quiet mood piece or an action-packed powerful, character-driven story. Make it humorous or as dark as the night. Send us your best speculative, horror, dark fantasy or dark sci-fi stories, as long as it’s full of the feels. We are not, however, the market for violent, bloody, racist, homophobic, or masochistic fiction. And no poetry please, just short fiction.
Some ideas: the pattern could be in the narrative technique (fragmentation, mirror writing, foreshadowing, meta-fictional repetition), the thematic composition (think cycles of death and birth, family curses, sin and retribution) for example. Or how about incorporating chants, supernatural rituals, or echoes in your prose? A story with temporal patterns in it might float our boat (although be careful, we don’t want our inbox flooded with time loops and cyclical stories, unless done exceptionally well or with a novel twist). Seasonal patterns, recurring times, patterns in nature, patterns in objects which feature in your tale, geographical patterns, repetitive architecture, patterns in weather, behavioural ticks, recurring nightmares, obsessions…any tenuous link will do, just make it your best work and give it a good edit prior to sending it our way. You get the idea. Surprise us.
Deadline: May 31st, 2025
Payment: 2 cents per word for poetry, $75 for artwork
Theme: Grim, gothic, morbidly funny, terrifying works of poetry and artwork
Calling all poetry authors AND artists!
We’re stepping outside of the box here and trying something new. We’re calling on poets and artists this time to help us craft an illustrated poetry anthology. Give us your limericks, sonnets, haiku, ballads, and free-verse! Have visual poetry? EVEN BETTER. We want grim, gothic, morbidly funny, terrifying works.
I’d like to take this time to give special thanks to our Patreon Sponsors who are at the Level 3 reward level and above!
– Ryan Benson.
– Jane Nightshade.
– Rebecca Rowland.
– James Aitchison.
– Robin Ginther-Venneri.
– Burial Books.
– Craig of Write my paper.
– Celltrackingapps.
