August’s Awesome Open Calls

Submission Hints

Show us primitive science, at once enlightened and profane, the obscure craft of learned mutilators who frighten all, even the dead. Or the Resurrection men, who do their bidding by midnight, and fear more moonlight than the noose.

Give us tales of strife and privation, loss and alienation; rural homesteads replaced by hypnotic topographies of stone and glass, cloaked in smog; of choking workhouses and tumbledown tenements. Show us who built this world, mixing mortar with bone, but won’t inherit it. Takeo us where rail and steam cannot, where clockwork minds are setadrift from empire—from themselves.

Transport us to the endless plains and ragged mountains of Kabul, where leviathans clash for the soul of Central Asia. Give us immigrant tales: ex-lives, diasporic fugitives—what did they leave behind, and what did they bring with them? Give us your silent biographies of the obscure and unseen.

The Menagerie:

What makes this period particularly special for us is that, without it, contemporary horror would simply not exist—at least, not as we know it. Here, the canon of horror prose fiction was born, not least its blighted offspring: weird fiction. Its menagerie of monsters has endured, too.

I speak here of pale bloodsucker, vengeful spirit, and shambling undead, to name a few. Each one hints at the myriad anxieties peculiar to the Victorian mind: disease, death, immigration, poverty, science, the brute pace and condition of life, and in the background, the steady decline of religious faith.

These beloved critters have been written about endlessly, such that even the classics have an already-read quality. They’ve also been filmed for modern audiences millions of times, and in ways that bear ever less resemblance to the novels. When something becomes familiar, it loses its ability to shock and unsettle. In other words, we’re not looking for stories that rewrite the classics, specifically vampire stories.

Horror: It now feels trite to say, but good horror is about trespass and transgression more so than it is about transcendence. It confronts themes, images, and ideas that people would rather avoid than confront but elicits in the reader a sense that they cannot look away.

Weird: The term “weird” should be understood to mean a certain sense of breathless and unexplainable dread, of outer, unknown forces present, a suggestion of the defeat or suspension of the laws of nature which have hitherto served to protect our minds and bodies (and souls) from the assault of chaos. By its very nature, weird fiction should invoke in the reader a sense of profound uneasiness and dread, it should hint at the inability of the human mind to comprehend the true nature of existence, and it should cause us to question the stability of our faith in the established laws of nature.