Greetings, children of the dark. Two bits of (I hope!) good news for you all for this final day of June.
First of all, the team has now made its way through allllll the spring short story submissions, and you should’ve heard back by now. If you haven’t, check your spam before you chase us! Thanks to everyone who submitted to the spring window; we had about 6 times as many submissions as we had spaces to fill, so please don’t be disheartened if you didn’t get good news from us. We had to make some difficult decisions.
Related to that good news (and the flipside for us, kinda!): the summer submissions window opens tomorrow, 1 July. You’ve got two weeks to get your darkly speculative short stories to us for consideration. Please, please make sure you check our submissions guidelines first; we can tell when you don’t, and it doesn’t put us in a good mood. Also note that, as has been the case for at least the last 18 months, we are veering very much towards the speculative side of fiction. That means real-world horror like torture p*rn, serial killers, crime, etc etc, will need to find a different home (and there are plenty out there for this stuff). Instead, send us your supernatural and paranormal tales, your grimdark, your space horror, your dark fantasy/folklore/fairytales, your eco-horror—basically, anything that falls under “speculative”, or stories set in something other than the real world as we know it in our day-to-day.
Finally, thanks to everyone who responded to our call a few weeks ago for more hands on deck to help steer the good ship Horror Tree. The boss has been chatting to lots of great people, and I myself am excited to say we’re expanding the TWF Towers team—even getting a new admin helper, which will hopefully mean you don’t have to wait so long for responses from us. It’s going to be a game-changer. I’ll introduce you to them all once we’ve had a chance to do a proper kick-off amongst ourselves, but as a little teaser: Horror Tree representation on this side of the pond is about to get a major boost!
For now, though, let’s tuck into this week’s menu of dark speculative fiction. Our centrepiece, from Simon Kewin, contemplates whether that image in the mirror can truly be trusted. That’s followed by the short, sharp speculations of:
- Weird Wilkins’ universal contemplation,
- Jacek Wilkos’ fairytale flip, and
- Jameson Grey’s quiet warning.
Over to you, Stuart.
