You feel it closing in all around you. It’s down the hallway with the slanted floorboards with their warped bulbs of hardwood. You can feel it as you jiggle the handle of the doors to your daughter’s room and it jiggles in your hand like a loose tooth. There it is, all around her.
“Oppression” by Isabella Quintana October 21, 2014
Your daughter is the picture of innocence, rocking in a tiny chair, hugging her Barbie close. You think of the way she cried when she brought Barbie into the bath and the doll’s hair clumped and pulled off at the scalp when she tried to brush it and how happy she was when you spent the next week switching that Barbie out for other’s with more hair so your daughter thought that Barbie’s hair was growing back. When you looked again, the original’s hair was longer and fuller, and the others bald. You didn’t tell your daughter, but you switched it back.
How could this thing be in her?
But as you get close you feel the air around your daughter and it’s cold, like stepping into a freezer on a summer day.
You rip the Barbie out of her hand. She cries out. You tell her this is for her own good, and see the tears in her eyes. She is too young to understand. You snap the doll over your knee, and for a second you believe your daughter is safe.
There’s a static in the way it comes out of the Barbie into you. It adjusts to its new home, in a way that you never adjusted to yours. It is you now.
###
Ryan C. Bradley has previously published fiction in The Gothic Blue Book V, apt, Pinball, and others. His nonfiction regularly appears in Wicked Horror, Dread Central, and Diabolique. In 2015, he won the 2015 JP Reads Flash Fiction Contest. His first novel, Friday the Furteenth, is being serialized at Channillo.com. You can learn more about him at https://ryancbradleyblog.wordpress.com/.
Screaming voices shattering the inner mirror of love
Clattering to nothingness, searching freedom in space,
Bloody songs tightly warping their blue heaven above
In the thin and chill air disappearing without a trace,
O’er sad whispers wind whipping through the wounds
In the symphony of demons’ dreams as a hot disguise,
Bloody voices needing to build up stomping grounds,
Buried danger sprouting out to keep growing in size,
The salty tears of liquid souls forming watery waves,
Beauties in the road waiting to face with their fear of death,
Still screaming while drowning in the cold watery graves,
Tearing the silence with their groan and bleeding breath.
###
Marieta Maglas
Ardus Publications, Sybaritic Press, Prolific Press, and some others published the poems of Marieta Maglas in anthologies like Tanka Journal, edited by Glenn Lyvers, The Aquillrelle Wall of Poetry, edited by Yossi Faybish, A Divine Madness: An Anthology of Modern Love Poetry, edited by John Patrick Boutilier, Near Kin:A Collection of Words and Art Inspired by Octavia Estelle Butler, edited by Marie Lecrivain, Three Line Poetry #25, edited by Glenn Lyvers, ENCHANTED – Love Poems and Abstract Art, edited by Gabrielle de la Fair, and Intercontinental Anthology of Poetry on Universal Peace and Love, edited by Madan Gandhi
Ardus Publications, Sybaritic Press, Prolific Press, and some others published the poems of Marieta Maglas in anthologies like Tanka Journal, edited by Glenn Lyvers, The Aquillrelle Wall of Poetry, edited by Yossi Faybish, A Divine Madness: An Anthology of Modern Love Poetry, edited by
Marieta Maglas
John Patrick Boutilier, Near Kin:A Collection of Words and Art Inspired by Octavia Estelle Butler, edited by Marie Lecrivain, Three Line Poetry #25, edited by Glenn Lyvers, ENCHANTED – Love Poems and Abstract Art, edited by Gabrielle de la Fair, and Intercontinental Anthology of Poetry on Universal Peace and Love, edited by Madan Gandhi.
Ardus Publications, Sybaritic Press, Prolific Press, and some others published the poems of Marieta Maglas in anthologies like Tanka Journal,
Marieta Maglas
edited by Glenn Lyvers, The Aquillrelle Wall of Poetry, edited by Yossi Faybish, A Divine Madness: An Anthology of Modern Love Poetry, edited by John Patrick Boutilier, Near Kin:A Collection of Words and Art Inspired by Octavia Estelle Butler, edited by Marie Lecrivain, Three Line Poetry #25, edited by Glenn Lyvers, ENCHANTED – Love Poems and Abstract Art, edited by Gabrielle de la Fair, and Intercontinental Anthology of Poetry on Universal Peace and Love, edited by Madan Gandhi.
In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and a faint distant baying as of some gigantic hound. It is not dream – it is not, I fear, even madness – for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts.
St John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and such is my knowledge that I am about to blow out my brains for fear I shall be mangled in the same way. Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldrith phantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation.
H.P. Lovecraft, 1915
May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led us both to so monstrous a fate! Wearied with the commonplaces of a prosaic world; where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St John and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui. The enigmas of the symbolists and the ecstasies of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their time, but each new mood was drained too soon, of its diverting novelty and appeal.
Only the somber philosophy of the decadents could help us, and this we found potent only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our penetrations. Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiences and adventures. It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that detestable course which even in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity – that hideous extremity of human outrage, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing.
I cannot reveal the details of our shocking expeditions, or catalogue even partly the worst of the trophies adorning the nameless museum we prepared in the great stone house where we jointly dwelt, alone and servantless. Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had assembled an universe of terror and decay to excite our jaded sensibilities. It was a secret room, far, far, underground; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death the lines of red charnel things hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings. Through these pipes came at will the odors our moods most craved; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the kingly dead, and sometimes – how I shudder to recall it! – the frightful, soul-upheaving stenches of the uncovered-grave.
Around the walls of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the taxidermist’s art, and with headstones snatched from the oldest churchyards of the world. Niches here and there contained skulls of all shapes, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution. There one might find the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and the fresh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children.
Statues and paintings there were, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St John and myself. A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held certain unknown and unnameable drawings which it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge. There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, and wood-wind, on which St John and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodaemoniacal ghastliness; whilst in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity. It is of this loot in particular that I must not speak – thank God I had the courage to destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself!
The predatory excursions on which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events. We were no vulgar ghouls, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and moonlight. These pastimes were to us the most exquisite form of aesthetic expression, and we gave their details a fastidious technical care. An inappropriate hour, a jarring lighting effect, or a clumsy manipulation of the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us that ecstatic titillation which followed the exhumation of some ominous, grinning secret of the earth. Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate – St John was always the leader, and he it was who led the way at last to that mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom.
By what malign fatality were we lured to that terrible Holland churchyard? I think it was the dark rumor and legendry, the tales of one buried for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a mighty sepulchre. I can recall the scene in these final moments – the pale autumnal moon over the graves, casting long horrible shadows; the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the neglected grass and the crumbling slabs; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the moon; the antique ivied church pointing a huge spectral finger at the livid sky; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the yews in a distant corner; the odors of mould, vegetation, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the night-wind from over far swamps and seas; and, worst of all, the faint deep-toned baying of some gigantic hound which we could neither see nor definitely place. As we heard this suggestion of baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of the peasantry; for he whom we sought had centuries before been found in this self same spot, torn and mangled by the claws and teeth of some unspeakable beast.
I remember how we delved in the ghoul’s grave with our spades, and how we thrilled at the picture of ourselves, the grave, the pale watching moon, the horrible shadows, the grotesque trees, the titanic bats, the antique church, the dancing death-fires, the sickening odors, the gently moaning night-wind, and the strange, half-heard directionless baying of whose objective existence we could scarcely be sure.
Then we struck a substance harder than the damp mould, and beheld a rotting oblong box crusted with mineral deposits from the long undisturbed ground. It was incredibly tough and thick, but so old that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on what it held.
Much – amazingly much – was left of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years. The skeleton, though crushed in places by the jaws of the thing that had killed it, held together with surprising firmness, and we gloated over the clean white skull and its long, firm teeth and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a charnel fever like our own. In the coffin lay an amulet of curious and exotic design, which had apparently been worn around the sleeper’s neck. It was the oddly conventionalised figure of a crouching winged hound, or sphinx with a semi-canine face, and was exquisitely carved in antique Oriental fashion from a small piece of green jade. The expression of its features was repellent in the extreme, savoring at once of death, bestiality and malevolence. Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John nor I could identify; and on the bottom, like a maker’s seal, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.
Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the centuried grave. Even had its outlines been unfamiliar we would have desired it, but as we looked more closely we saw that it was not wholly unfamiliar. Alien it indeed was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but we recognized it as the thing hinted of in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the ghastly soul-symbol of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia. All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed at the dead.
Seizing the green jade object, we gave a last glance at the bleached and cavern-eyed face of its owner and closed up the grave as we found it. As we hastened from the abhorrent spot, the stolen amulet in St John’s pocket, we thought we saw the bats descend in a body to the earth we had so lately rifled, as if seeking for some cursed and unholy nourishment. But the autumn moon shone weak and pale, and we could not be sure.
So, too, as we sailed the next day away from Holland to our home, we thought we heard the faint distant baying of some gigantic hound in the background. But the autumn wind moaned sad and wan, and we could not be sure.
Less than a week after our return to England, strange things began to happen. We lived as recluses; devoid of friends, alone, and without servants in a few rooms of an ancient manor-house on a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our doors were seldom disturbed by the knock of the visitor.
Now, however, we were troubled by what seemed to be a frequent fumbling in the night, not only around the doors but around the windows also, upper as well as lower. Once we fancied that a large, opaque body darkened the library window when the moon was shining against it, and another time we thought we heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off. On each occasion investigation revealed nothing, and we began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination which still prolonged in our ears the faint far baying we thought we had heard in the Holland churchyard. The jade amulet now reposed in a niche in our museum, and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle before it. We read much in Alhazred’s Necronomicon about its properties, and about the relation of ghosts’ souls to the objects it symbolized; and were disturbed by what we read.
Then terror came.
On the night of September 24, 19–, I heard a knock at my chamber door. Fancying it St John’s, I bade the knocker enter, but was answered only by a shrill laugh. There was no one in the corridor. When I aroused St John from his sleep, he professed entire ignorance of the event, and became as worried as I. It was the night that the faint, distant baying over the moor became to us a certain and dreaded reality.
Four days later, whilst we were both in the hidden museum, there came a low, cautious scratching at the single door which led to the secret library staircase. Our alarm was now divided, for, besides our fear of the unknown, we had always entertained a dread that our grisly collection might be discovered. Extinguishing all lights, we proceeded to the door and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, and heard, as if receding far away, a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and articulate chatter. Whether we were mad, dreaming, or in our senses, we did not try to determine. We only realized, with the blackest of apprehensions, that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the Dutch language.
After that we lived in growing horror and fascination. Mostly we held to the theory that we were jointly going mad from our life of unnatural excitements, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the victims of some creeping and appalling doom. Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count. Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the presence of some malign being whose nature we could not guess, and every night that daemoniac baying rolled over the wind-swept moor, always louder and louder. On October 29 we found in the soft earth underneath the library window a series of footprints utterly impossible to describe. They were as baffling as the hordes of great bats which haunted the old manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers.
The horror reached a culmination on November 18, when St John, walking home after dark from the dismal railway station, was seized by some frightful carnivorous thing and torn to ribbons. His screams had reached the house, and I had hastened to the terrible scene in time to hear a whir of wings and see a vague black cloudy thing silhouetted against the rising moon.
My friend was dying when I spoke to him, and he could not answer coherently. All he could do was to whisper, “The amulet – that damned thing -”
Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh.
I buried him the next midnight in one of our neglected gardens, and mumbled over his body one of the devilish rituals he had loved in life. And as I pronounced the last daemoniac sentence I heard afar on the moor the faint baying of some gigantic hound. The moon was up, but I dared not look at it. And when I saw on the dim-lighted moor a wide-nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I shut my eyes and threw myself face down upon the ground. When I arose, trembling, I know not how much later, I staggered into the house and made shocking obeisances before the enshrined amulet of green jade.
Being now afraid to live alone in the ancient house on the moor, I departed on the following day for London, taking with me the amulet after destroying by fire and burial the rest of the impious collection in the museum. But after three nights I heard the baying again, and before a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was dark. One evening as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some needed air, I saw a black shape obscure one of the reflections of the lamps in the water. A wind, stronger than the night-wind, rushed by, and I knew that what had befallen St John must soon befall me.
The next day I carefully wrapped the green jade amulet and sailed for Holland. What mercy I might gain by returning the thing to its silent, sleeping owner I knew not; but I felt that I must try any step conceivably logical. What the hound was, and why it had pursued me, were questions still vague; but I had first heard the baying in that ancient churchyard, and every subsequent event including St John’s dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the stealing of the amulet. Accordingly I sank into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of this sole means of salvation.
The baying was loud that evening, and in the morning I read of a nameless deed in the vilest quarter of the city. The rabble were in terror, for upon an evil tenement had fallen a red death beyond the foulest previous crime of the neighborhood. In a squalid thieves’ den an entire family had been torn to shreds by an unknown thing which left no trace, and those around had heard all night a faint, deep, insistent note as of a gigantic hound.
So at last I stood again in the unwholesome churchyard where a pale winter moon cast hideous shadows and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet the withered, frosty grass and cracking slabs, and the ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the unfriendly sky, and the night-wind howled maniacally from over frozen swamps and frigid seas. The baying was very faint now, and it ceased altogether as I approached the ancient grave I had once violated, and frightened away an abnormally large horde of bats which had been hovering curiously around it.
I know not why I went thither unless to pray, or gibber out insane pleas and apologies to the calm white thing that lay within; but, whatever my reason, I attacked the half frozen sod with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a dominating will outside myself. Excavation was much easier than I expected, though at one point I encountered a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the grave-earth until I killed him with a blow of my spade. Finally I reached the rotting oblong box and removed the damp nitrous cover. This is the last rational act I ever performed.
For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a closepacked nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping bats, was the bony thing my friend and I had robbed; not clean and placid as we had seen it then, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my inevitable doom. And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, sardonic bay as of some gigantic hound, and I saw that it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of green jade, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter.
Madness rides the star-wind… claws and teeth sharpened on centuries of corpses… dripping death astride a bacchanale of bats from nigh-black ruins of buried temples of Belial… Now, as the baying of that dead fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder, and the stealthy whirring and flapping of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my only refuge from the unnamed and unnameable.
a thirsty tick just out of reach, drawing my energies
almost too slowly to notice. Slowly, like the many
voices growing in the veins of ancient trees.
I hear you, yes. Oh, by the gods I hear you…
###
Larry D. Thacker is a writer and artist from Tennessee (US). His stories can be found in past issues of The Still Journal, Fried Chicken and Coffee, Dime Show Review and The Emancipator. His poetry can be found in journals and magazines such as The Still Journal, The Southern Poetry Anthology: Tennessee, Mojave River Review, Broad River Review, Harpoon Review, Rappahannock Review, and Appalachian Heritage.He is the author of Mountain Mysteries: The Mystic Traditions of Appalachia, the poetry chapbooks, Voice Hunting and Memory Train and the forthcoming full collection Drifting in Awe. He is presently taking his MFA in poetry and fiction at West Virginia Wesleyan College. More stuff at:www.larrydthacker.com
I am bound to only the portions of books you’re paging through, a forced patience as you deliberate over the aged leather bindings and titles, of chapter and verse, of gradual plot developments and story arcs, the lovingly slow conflicts unraveling over black on beige onion skin thinness, so hauntingly unrushed even for me with the bottomless well of time in this shaded condition. Long uninterested in my own company.
I hear your steady breath mouthing words as you read and it still aggravates hell from me. I would gladly hover here, over your shoulder for years, as this slightest presence, a forever company in poetry and story, word, letter, and pen, if I could but accomplish something more than some slightest benign breeze on the curtain. An afterthought after a boring day. An aftertaste after a sip of tepid wine.
But sometimes, when you have finally given in to sleep’s call in the early morning dark and startle suddenly awake to find that book turned to a different page than you remember, it is then I have just barely mustered enough of a whisper to turn the page, yet you have missed it and I am exhausted in this lost state. Again, undetected. Again, left to my own retched company.
###
Larry D. Thacker is a writer and artist from Tennessee (US). His stories can be found in past issues of The Still Journal, Fried Chicken and Coffee, Dime Show Review and The Emancipator. His poetry can be found in journals and magazines such as The Still Journal, The Southern Poetry Anthology: Tennessee, Mojave River Review, Broad River Review, Harpoon Review, Rappahannock Review, and Appalachian Heritage.He is the author of Mountain Mysteries: The Mystic Traditions of Appalachia, the poetry chapbooks, Voice Hunting and Memory Train and the forthcoming full collection Drifting in Awe. He is presently taking his MFA in poetry and fiction at West Virginia Wesleyan College. More stuff at:www.larrydthacker.com
Something compelled the little brown sparrow to drop from the sky and enter the glade. It swooped down and down and down to light onto the gnarled branch lying in the grass. Another bird, a blue jay, was already resting further along its twisted length and turned its head at the new arrival.
“Oh, good morning,” it said.
“Hello,” said the sparrow. “It’s going to be a beautiful day – The sun is so bright.”
The blue jay sounded solemn as it nodded its blue head and said, “We’re lucky to be here to feel its touch.”
The sparrow watched the blue bird, admiring its brilliant feathers. A moment later it turned and began grooming its own feathered stomach with its little beak in order to make itself more beautiful too.
After a while they turned their attention to watch the sun singing the tops of the apple trees in the east, and then crawl its way slowly into the sky overhead.
The blue jay began to sing a song and the sparrow, listening and admiring its melancholy beauty, joined in.
Their voices filled the glade like the sunlight.
“The flies will be here soon,” observed the blue jay. “Here’s one now.”
The sparrow followed where the jay looked. Indeed, just beside them, a fat bluebell had landed on the human lying crumpled in the grass and flowers, rubbing its legs together earnestly where it perched along the edge of the immense raw crater where the animal’s face had once been. The fly’s buzzing was very excited in the quiet glade as it stayed a moment in the red meat there, feasting its fill before moving with a flash to a place on the opposite side of the gaping hole where the blue skin looked cold even in the warm morning sun.
“Yes,” said the sparrow, feeling a sudden sorrow in its heart. “Yes, I see him.” A subtly rancid smell had entered the glade and diluted the vibrant green smell of the apples and flowers, and seemed to grow more pungent every moment passing.
“Let’s leave this place,” advised the blue jay. “Let’s put ourselves in the sky where nothing can touch us.”
The sparrow had never before been invited to fly with a blue jay, and the invitation filled it with pride. It felt beautiful, and welcomed, and safe.
Together they lifted from the branch, away from the quiet dell, and up and up and up into the clear clean sky.
###
Alexander Zelenyj is the author of the short story collections Songs For The Lost (Eibonvale Press, 2014; digital edition: Independent Legions Publishing, 2016) and Experiments At 3 Billion A.M. (Eibonvale Press, 2009); the poetry and essay collection, Ballads To The Burning Twins: The Complete Song Lyrics Of The Deathray Bradburys (Eibonvale Press, 2014); and the novel, Black Sunshine(Fourth Horseman Press, 2005). His fiction has appeared in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies – for a more comprehensive bibliography please feel free to visit his website at alexanderzelenyj.com.
Francene Kilgore (l) and I on the set with Alrenzo Black (r) and 2tk (center) of Darksomnia Productions, August 6, 2016
My fiancée (Francene Kilgore) and I are teaming with Darksomnia Productions of Farmington, NM to produce a documentary/dramatization of a haunting that occurred in south Texas from about 2006-2010. Filming is taking place. Parts of the documentary will be dramatized by actors while my fiancee and I appear discussing the events. The video should be completed within 1-2 months. More details to come.
Darksomnia Productions
Alrenzo Black (l) and 2tk (r) of CEO’s and co-founders of Darksomnia Productions.
Last week I received my hardcopy of Creepy Campfire Quarterly #3 containing my short story “Sorcerer”. My sincere thanks to Jennifer Word and her staff for publishing this story, which is one of my favorite works, but which has been long in finding a home. “Sorcerer” is the story of a former sorcerer, who has given up his wizard’s life for the love of a woman, but who comes out of retirement to wreak a novel but horrific vengeance on the callous, young womanizer he holds responsible for the death of his daughter and his infant grandson during childbirth. I am currently seeking a publisher for its sequel entitled “Under the Willow”. Run out today and buy a copy wherever you can find Creepy Campfire Quarterly or visit their website at http://www.emppublishing.com/creepy-campfire-quarterly.html. You can also find them at Amazon and Kindle and they have a Facebook page as well.
If you would like to submit a short horror story (flash fiction of less than 1,000 words preferred), an article or book/movie review on the art of writing horror fiction, or just on the art of writing, please send it to horror@philslattery.com. Everything must be submitted by e-mail either in the body of the e-mail or a Word document (.doc or .docx). There is no pay for any submission at this time (maybe after I win the Pulitzer or Nobel, but probably not before then).
I am seeking:
Articles under 1,000 words on the art of writing horror (fiction of any length, poetry, screenplays, etc.) or on writing in general, but material along the lines of horror is preferred. Articles on foreign horror are encouraged.
Book and movie reviews, the more recently published or distributed the better, but I will consider reviews of classics works such as those of Poe, Lovecraft, Blackwood, etc. all the way back to Walpole (and before if sufficiently interesting). These must be under 1,000 words also.
Articles on horror in other countries are encouraged. These must also be under 1,000 words.
Translations of articles, stories, or poems from French, German, or Spanish are considered, but the original article/story/poem and its translation must not exceed 2,000 words.
Horror poetry (under 32 lines) or articles on horror in poetry.
Flash horror fiction (i.e. under 1,000 words) preferred, although longer stories may be accepted if really good.
Horror screenplays (under 1,000 words), horror haiku, horror sonnets, basically anything innovative that can be considered horror will have a shot here. I will even consider short videos, but I have not even experimented with them yet and do not know how to write the guidelines for them. The first consideration, however, will have to be that they conform to WordPress’s guidelines for videos, so I’ll start with that. If you want to submit a video, please do, but be aware that I may have to decline it, if it turns out that I do not have the technical expertise to post it and do it justice. Drop me a note first about other formats however, so that I can determine if they are feasible within the limits of my blog and skill set.
Guidelines
Be professional.
Use standard manuscript format. The easier it is for me to simply copy and paste into the website, the more likely you are to be published.
With submissions include your website, twitter handle, or any other social media identification you like. A short bio of 100 words or less (including a list of previous publications) is nice, but not required. Knowing your publication history won’t influence whether or not you are accepted, but it might be nice for the readership to know. If you don’t want to include any social media contact info, don’t include it. Pseudonyms are fine, but please state them as the byline and include your actual name and contact info in the top left of the first page of the submission per standard manuscript format.
In the subject line of your e-mail state whether this is an article or review or poetry of fiction submission, your name, and the work’s title. For example: Article by Phil Slattery “Poe’s Raven: an Analysis”
No hardcopy submissions. Everything must be submitted by e-mail either in the body of the e-mail or attached as a Word document (.doc or .docx).
I would like to reach as large an audience as possible, so please keep profanity to an absolute minimum.
I will try to respond to submissions as quickly as possible, but please allow at least a couple of weeks before querying about your article/story.
There is no pay other than the honor of being published on this website.
I am not taking multiple submissions or simultaneous submissions. Once you have submitted one article/story, please wait about a week before submitting another.
You may submit on piece of artwork or a photo to accompany your article/story. I will edit it (mainly re-sizing) as needed to fit the space available. I will not publish any form of what I deem pornography or in bad taste. If you do not submit artwork or a photo, I may select something appropriate. JPEGs, TIFs and other formats accepted by WordPress are okay, but keep the number of bytes to a minimum. I have only a limited amount of space available.
Artwork and photos may be submitted on their own and you must own the copyright to them. There is no pay for these either. If I do not use these right away, I may keep them until a use arises, but please let me know if this is okay. If you no longer wish me to use them, please let me know as soon as possible.
Do not send advertising (no matter how cleverly veiled it is). It won’t be published.
Gratuitous sex, extreme violence, violence to children, rape and anything else that offends my personal sensibilities will not be published. Anything that seems to reflect an actual crime (past, present, or future) will be immediately turned over to the proper authorities.
If I like your submission, I will publish it as soon as possible, probably within a week. This will depend on the backlog of submissions and other factors. Don’t ask for a timeframe.
Reprints are okay, but you must tell me when and where the article/story/poem was first published.
I do not want fan fiction.
Always re-check the guidelines before submitting. I may change them at any moment without prior notice.
I will update these guidelines as time allows and events warrant. This page was last updated on July 23, 2016.
Please contact me via horror@philslattery.com with any questions.
The Farmington Writers Circle will meet next on August 11, 2016, at 7:00 p.m. at Hastings Hardback Café in Farmington, NM. The topic for the night will be how to generate reviews for your work.
The July meeting was attended by Gloria, Yvonne, Vicki, myself, and by author Delsheree Gladden (delshereegladden.com), whose website describes her as “USA Today Bestselling Young Adult and Romance Author”. Delsheree provided some valuable insights into the world of publishing.
The Farmington Writers Circle is nascent organization of Farmington-area writers who are interested in finding or developing innovative ways of publicizing and marketing their works. Meetings are usually round-table discussions, although occasionally a member will lead the discussion when it deals with an area of the member’s expertise. The public is invited to attend. There are no fees or requirements to attend meetings, which are usually held on the second Thursday of each month at 7:00 p.m. at the Hardback Café. Writers of any and all genres or non-writers with an interest in the art are welcome. For more information, contact me via this website.
Today, my short horror story “Sorcerer” is slated to appear in Creepy Campfire Quarterly. Many thanks to the CCQ staff for publishing this story, its first time in print.
“Sorcerer” is about a modern-day wizard who comes out of retirement to take a unique vengeance on the boy he holds responsible for abandoning and killing his daughter when she was most vulnerable.
Watch for Creepy Campfire Quarterly at your local newsstand or bookstore.
Phil Slattery hiking in the Bisti Wilderness near Farmington, NM, circa 2013
Drop by, check it out, and give me a “like” to get things rolling.
My Facebook Art of Horror address (https://www.facebook.com/slatterysartofhorror) remains the same, but the title is now “Phil Slattery, Author of Horror and Dark Fiction”. I intend to give it a more personal focus rather than have it serve as a facebook-formatted version of this blog. Please ask your friends and acquaintances to “like” and “friend” me as well.
From Southwater, where he left the train, the road led due west. That he knew; for the rest he trusted to luck, being one of those born walkers who dislike asking the way. He had that instinct, and as a rule it served him well. “A mile or so due west along the sandy road till you come to a stile on the right; then across the fields. You’ll see the red house straight before you.” He glanced at the post-card’s instructions once again, and once again he tried to decipher the scratched-out sentence—without success. It had been so elaborately inked over that no word was legible. Inked-out sentences in a letter were always enticing. He wondered what it was that had to be so very carefully obliterated.
The afternoon was boisterous, with a tearing, shouting wind that blew from the sea, across the Sussex weald. Massive clouds with
Algernon Blackwood 1869-1951
rounded, piled-up edges, cannoned across gaping spaces of blue sky. Far away the line of Downs swept the horizon, like an arriving wave. Chanctonbury Ring rode their crest—a scudding ship, hull down before the wind. He took his hat off and walked rapidly, breathing great draughts of air with delight and exhilaration. The road was deserted; no horsemen, bicycles, or motors; not even a tradesman’s cart; no single walker. But anyhow he would never have asked the way. Keeping a sharp eye for the stile, he pounded along, while the wind tossed the cloak against his face, and made waves across the blue puddles in the yellow road. The trees showed their under leaves of white. The bracken and the high new grass bent all one way. Great life was in the day, high spirits and dancing everywhere. And for a Croydon surveyor’s clerk just out of an office this was like a holiday at the sea.
It was a day for high adventure, and his heart rose up to meet the mood of Nature. His umbrella with the silver ring ought to have been a sword, and his brown shoes should have been top-boots with spurs upon the heels. Where hid the enchanted Castle and the princess with the hair of sunny gold? His horse…
The stile came suddenly into view and nipped adventure in the bud. Everyday clothes took him prisoner again. He was a surveyor’s clerk, middle-aged, earning three pounds a week, coming from Croydon to see about a client’s proposed alterations in a wood—something to ensure a better view from the dining-room window. Across the fields, perhaps a mile away, he saw the red house gleaming in the sunshine; and resting on the stile a moment to get his breath he noticed a copse of oak and hornbeam on the right. “Aha,” he told himself “so that must be the wood he wants to cut down to improve the view? I’ll ’ave a look at it.” There were boards up, of course, but there was an inviting little path as well. “I’m not a trespasser,” he said; “it’s part of my business, this is.” He scrambled awkwardly over the gate and entered the copse. A little round would bring him to the field again.
But the moment he passed among the trees the wind ceased shouting and a stillness dropped upon the world. So dense was the growth that the sunshine only came through in isolated patches. The air was close. He mopped his forehead and put his green felt hat on, but a low branch knocked it off again at once, and as he stooped an elastic twig swung back and stung his face. There were flowers along both edges of the little path; glades opened on either side; ferns curved about in damper corners, and the smell of earth and foliage was rich and sweet. It was cooler here. What an enchanting little wood, he thought, turning down a small green glade where the sunshine flickered like silver wings. How it danced and fluttered and moved about! He put a dark blue flower in his buttonhole. Again his hat, caught by an oak branch as he rose, was knocked from his head, falling across his eyes. And this time he did not put it on again. Swinging his umbrella, he walked on with uncovered head, whistling rather loudly as he went. But the thickness of the trees hardly encouraged whistling, and something of his gaiety and high spirits seemed to leave him. He suddenly found himself treading circumspectly and with caution. The stillness in the wood was so peculiar.
There was a rustle among the ferns and leaves and something shot across the path ten yards ahead, stopped abruptly an instant with head cocked sideways to stare, then dived again beneath the underbrush with the speed of a shadow. He started like a frightened child, laughing the next second that a mere pheasant could have made him jump. In the distance he heard wheels upon the road, and wondered why the sound was pleasant. “Good old butcher’s cart,” he said to himself—then realised that he was going in the wrong direction and had somehow got turned round. For the road should be behind him, not in front.
And he hurriedly took another narrow glade that lost itself in greenness to the right. “That’s my direction, of course,” he said; “the trees has mixed me up a bit, it seems”—then found himself abruptly by the gate he had first climbed over. He had merely made a circle. Surprise became almost discomfiture then. And a man, dressed like a gamekeeper in browny green, leaned against the gate, hitting his legs with a switch. “I’m making for Mr. Lumley’s farm,” explained the walker. “This is his wood, I believe—” then stopped dead, because it was no man at all, but merely an effect of light and shade and foliage. He stepped back to reconstruct the singular illusion, but the wind shook the branches roughly here on the edge of the wood and the foliage refused to reconstruct the figure. The leaves all rustled strangely. And just then the sun went behind a cloud, making the whole wood look otherwise. Yet how the mind could be thus doubly deceived was indeed remarkable, for it almost seemed to him the man had answered, spoken—or was this the shuffling noise the branches made ?—and had pointed with his switch to the notice-board upon the nearest tree. The words rang on in his head, but of course he had imagined them: “No, it’s not his wood. It’s ours.” And some village wit, moreover, had changed the lettering on the weather-beaten board, for it read quite plainly, “Trespassers will be persecuted.”
And while the astonished clerk read the words and chuckled, he said to himself, thinking what a tale he’d have to tell his wife and children later—“The blooming wood has tried to chuck me out. But I’ll go in again. Why, it’s only a matter of a square acre at most. I’m bound to reach the fields on the other side if I keep straight on.” He remembered his position in the office. He had a certain dignity to maintain.
The cloud passed from below the sun, and light splashed suddenly in all manner of unlikely places. The man went straight on. He felt a touch of puzzling confusion somewhere; this way the copse had of shifting from sunshine into shadow doubtless troubled sight a little. To his relief at last, a new glade opened through the trees and disclosed the fields with a glimpse of the red house in the distance at the far end. But a little wicket gate that stood across the path had first to be climbed, and as he scrambled heavily over—for it would not open—he got the astonishing feeling that it slid off sideways beneath his weight, and towards the wood. Like the moving staircases at Harrod’s and Earl’s Court, it began to glide off with him. It was quite horrible. He made a violent effort to get down before it carried him into the trees, but his feet became entangled with the bars and umbrella, so that he fell heavily upon the farther side, arms spread across the grass and nettles, boots clutched between the first and second bars. He lay there a moment like a man crucified upside down, and while he struggled to get disentangled—feet, bars, and umbrella formed a regular net—he saw the little man in browny green go past him with extreme rapidity through the wood. The man was laughing. He passed across the glade some fifty yards away, and he was not alone this time. A companion like himself went with him. The clerk, now upon his feet again, watched them disappear into the gloom of green beyond. “They’re tramps, not gamekeepers,” he said to himself, half mortified, half angry. But his heart was thumping dreadfully, and he dared not utter all his thought.
He examined the wicket gate, convinced it was a trick gate somehow—then went hurriedly on again, disturbed beyond belief to see that the glade no longer opened into fields, but curved away to the right. What in the world had happened to him? His sight was so utterly at fault. Again the sun flamed out abruptly and lit the floor of the wood with pools of silver, and at the same moment a violent gust of wind passed shouting overhead. Drops fell clattering everywhere upon the leaves, making a sharp pattering as of many footsteps. The whole copse shuddered and went moving.
“Rain, by George,” thought the clerk, and feeling for his umbrella, discovered he had lost it. He turned back to the gate and found it lying on the farther side. To his amazement he saw the fields at the far end of the glade, the red house, too, ashine in the sunset. He laughed then, for, of course, in his struggle with the gate, he had somehow got turned round—had fallen back instead of forwards. Climbing over, this time quite easily, he retraced his steps. The silver band, he saw, had been torn from the umbrella. No doubt his foot, a nail, or something had caught in it and ripped it off. The clerk began to run; he felt extraordinarily dismayed.
But, while he ran, the entire wood ran with him, round him, to and fro, trees shifting like living things, leaves folding and unfolding, trunks darting backwards and forwards, and branches disclosing enormous empty spaces, then closing up again before he could look into them. There were footsteps everywhere, and laughing, crying voices, and crowds of figures gathering just behind his back till the glade, he knew, was thick with moving life. The wind in his ears, of course, produced the voices and the laughter, while sun and clouds, plunging the copse alternately in shadow and bright dazzling light, created the figures. But he did not like it, and went as fast as ever his sturdy legs could take him. He was frightened now. This was no story for his wife and children. He ran like the wind. But his feet made no sound upon the soft mossy turf.
Then, to his horror, he saw that the glade grew narrow, nettles and weeds stood thick across it, it dwindled down into a tiny path, and twenty yards ahead it stopped finally and melted off among the trees. What the trick gate had failed to achieve, this twisting glade accomplished easily—carried him in bodily among the dense and crowding trees.
There was only one thing to do—turn sharply and dash back again, run headlong into the life that followed at his back, followed so closely too that now it almost touched him, pushing him in. And with reckless courage this was what he did. It seemed a fearful thing to do. He turned with a sort of violent spring, head down and shoulders forward, hands stretched before his face. He made the plunge; like a hunted creature he charged full tilt the other way, meeting the wind now in his face.
Good Lord! The glade behind him had closed up as well; there was no longer any path at all. Turning round and round, like an animal at bay, he searched for an opening, a way of escape, searched frantically, breathlessly, terrified now in his bones. But foliage surrounded him, branches blocked the way; the trees stood close and still, unshaken by a breath of wind; and the sun dipped that moment behind a great black cloud. The entire wood turned dark and silent. It watched him.
Perhaps it was this final touch of sudden blackness that made him act so foolishly, as though he had really lost his head. At any rate, without pausing to think, he dashed headlong in among the trees again. There was a sensation of being stiflingly surrounded and entangled, and that he must break out at all costs—out and away into the open of the blessed fields and air. He did this ill-considered thing, and apparently charged straight into an oak that deliberately moved into his path to stop him. He saw it shift across a good full yard, and being a measuring man, accustomed to theodolite and chain, he ought to know. He fell, saw stars, and felt a thousand tiny fingers tugging and pulling at his hands and neck and ankles. The stinging nettles, no doubt, were responsible for this. He thought of it later. At the moment it felt diabolically calculated.
But another remarkable illusion was not so easily explained. For all in a moment, it seemed, the entire wood went sliding past him with a thick deep rustling of leaves and laughter, myriad footsteps, and tiny little active, energetic shapes; two men in browny green gave him a mighty hoist—and he opened his eyes to find himself lying in the meadow beside the stile where first his incredible adventure had begun. The wood stood in its usual place and stared down upon him in the sunlight. There was the red house in the distance as before. Above him grinned the weather-beaten notice-board: “Trespassers will be prosecuted.”
Dishevelled in mind and body, and a good deal shaken in his official soul, the clerk walked slowly across the fields. But on the way he glanced once more at the postcard of instructions, and saw with dull amazement that the inked-out sentence was quite legible after all beneath the scratches made across it: “There is a short cut through the wood—the wood I want cut down—if you care to take it.” Only “care” was so badly written, it looked more like another word; the “c” was uncommonly like “d.”
“That’s the copse that spoils my view of the Downs, you see,” his client explained to him later, pointing across the fields, and referring to the ordnance map beside him. “I want it cut down and a path made so and so.” His finger indicated direction on the map. “The Fairy Wood—it’s still called, and it’s far older than this house. Come now, if you’re ready, Mr. Thomas, we might go out and have a look at it. . .”
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Today, my short horror story “Sorcerer” is slated to appear in 
Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher 