We accept submissions on a rolling deadline… which is to say, no deadline. Chaos reigns!
The Other Folk publishes short, horrific prose—by which we mean flash fiction, essays, and prose poems dealing with horror tropes, themes, and subjects—for our Fables for the Dying series. (Also, we mean sentences and paragraphs, not lines and stanzas. Submissions of lineated poetry will be deleted unread. Sorry, not to be rude. It’s just… read our submission guidelines.)
We enjoy pulpy horror, but what we really want is horror that means something--a moral, a lesson, a life-shattering realization, a meditation on something frightening or dreadful. In other words, we want thoughtful horror, especially when crafted with attention to language, character, and imagery.
FftD is open to horror-themed flash and short fiction and nonfiction, prose poetry, and hybrid works. Not that those terms matter much to us. We just want horrific short prose that makes us think or feel differently about the world.
We have a 1,500-word hard upper limit, but go as short as you want. Our magical ideal length (that doesn’t actually matter) is somewhere between 500-1,000 words for fiction and nonfiction and up to around 500 words for prose poetry.
Prose submissions only, please. Maybe for another series, some other time, we’ll publish lineated poetry, stage plays, and other non-prose things. For this series, though, please send only writing with sentences arranged in paragraphs.
We’re interested in a wide range of horror subgenres, including but not limited to psychological horror, ghost stories, surrealist and cosmic horror, horror-comedy, broody gothy stuff, body horror, and eco-horror. Really though, our tastes contain multitudes.
Here’s the thing though: we have no interest at all in “extreme horror,” work with gratuitous physical or sexual violence, excessive gore-for-the-sake-of-gore, or anything that celebrates or glorifies abuse, sadism, or hate—especially toward vulnerable groups of people. We also acknowledge that terms like “extreme,” “gratuitous,” and “excessive” are subjective and open to interpretation and blah blah blah … Whatever. Don’t send us torture porn or hate speech. You get it.
We welcome submissions from all walks of life, especially if you identify as part of a marginalized group or community. By that, we basically mean, if you don’t see yourself represented in horror media, we want to see you in it. If you do see yourself represented in horror media, we want to continue to see you in it. Send us your work, all of you.
Simultaneous submissions are fine. Just notify us if someone else takes your work before we get to it so we can congratulate you and remove it from our reading list.
Every Fable we publish will receive custom artwork. We can’t offer monetary payment yet, but we’re actively working on it and plan to provide backpay our authors if and when we secure funding.
Finally, we ask for first electronic rights (text and audio) and non-exclusive archival and anthology rights. Rights revert back to the author upon publication. We just ask that you acknowledge it was published here first.
