Deadline: February 1st, 2023 (DEADLINE EXTENDED)
Payment: 3 cents per word
Theme: Homebound Horror

Ever felt like you weren’t alone in your own home? Like eyes were watching you through the walls and ceiling vents, or that if you just listened hard enough, you could hear footsteps creaking from the ceiling above you?

Home is where you’re supposed to feel safe. But what happens when that safety is violated? When something malignant – living, dead, or something that never lived at all – enters our most sacred of places and begins twisting it to use that safety against you?

You tell us.

UNDER THE STAIRS wants your most horrific stories about what happens when one’s sense of home is lost. How you interpret that is up to you. We want supernatural stories and stories that deal with strictly human horrors. We want stories about stalkers, psychopaths, ghosts, monsters, urban legends, the mortician who built your home and parked his hearse in the driveway, where he used to let the bodies sit overnight.

But what we want most are the stories that you are scared to tell. The splinters of painful terror from the deepest recesses of your heart. The ones that make you stop short of stepping over that threshold – whatever, or wherever “that threshold” is.

Surprise us.

We’re looking for original stories no more than 3,000 words. This is a hard limit.

Submission Window

Submissions will be accepted from August 1st-October 31st 2022. Any story submitted before or after will be deleted unread.

Response Times

We will try to respond to every submission within 60 days of submissions closing.

Rights

We are setting a 1 year, print and digital submission right to publish for submitted stories.

Payment

Sure, this is a passion project for us, but we wanna do better than a token payment to our authors. We are painfully aware of the love, work, hours and sacrifice it takes to bring a piece of fiction to life. We’re offering three cents a word, not only because we want our anthology to kick ass, but because we respect the process and we respect the craft. We’d pay more, but some of us have a 2007 Ford Focus that desperately needs an oil change.

Simultaneous and Multiple Submissions

Simultaneous submissions are fine. But (big but), please contact us immediately if you sell the story elsewhere. Please do not submit multiple stories.

Reprints

No reprints.

Please send your inquiries using the form below, or email us your submission to [email protected]

(The form mentioned above can be found at the link below.)

Via: Under The Stairs Magazine.