Special Halloween Edition

We have deliberately chosen a broad theme to give you the freedom to flex your writing muscles and surprise us with something original, unsettling, and unforgettable—stories laced with horror, steeped in dread, and lingering long after the final line.

So, what do we want, if not the usual pumpkins, costumes, tricks, and treats?

We are drawn to the strange undercurrents of history, belief, architecture, memory, landscape, and the human mind. We seek stories that understand the Gothic is not something imported or artificially embellished to create atmosphere, but something deeply rooted in place, culture, and lived experience.

Bring us folklore, hauntings, transformations, monsters, forgotten gods, restless spirits, and creatures from any realm. Give us inherited fears, family curses, local superstitions, and the ghosts that linger in communities as much as they haunt old houses. Show us how terror is shaped by the cultures we inherit and the histories we cannot escape, which turn us into demons.

And then again…we're always happy to meet a few proper ghosts—stubborn as hell and utterly unwilling to die!