Submissions

 

Submissions for Issue 4 will be open May 1-15!

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At Reader Beware, we want to see pulp horror of all kinds – think Friday the Thirteenth, Psycho Goreman, and Glorious. Think Junji Ito, Grady Hendrix, and Eric LaRocca. We want your creepy gorefests!  Don't be afraid to get explicit with it, just don't send us anything too mean-spirited. Gore is great, peril and torment are great–continuing the horror tradition of fetishistically brutalizing women is not. 

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We welcome all topics, but there are a few that we see a lot of and which might be hard sells: 

• Serial Killers: 

  • We get it. Being serial killed is frightening. But there are only so many variations of ‘isn’t this guy SOOOOO SCARY’ that you can make. 

• Supernatural Punishment: 

  • Can be very fun, but we do receive a lot of them, and the worse ones do things like imply drug addictions are worthy of a forever stay in the Torment Nexus.

• Sexual Assault: 

  • Rape for shock value doesn’t automatically make your story scary.

We also have a few topics we’d like to see more of: 

• Body Horror/Transformation Horror

  • Let’s see some people get turned into monstrosities!

  • To earn bonus points with Lark, send in your werewolf stories.

• Fantasy

  • Fucked up fairy tales, magic experiments gone wrong… give us the works. 

• Nautical Horror

  • To earn points with DS specifically, throw in some madness at sea. 

 

We respect any concept done thoughtfully and with nice clean prose, but we ultimately care more about ideas. If it’s creepy, weird, and thought-provoking, the writing doesn’t have to be the most gorgeous thing in the world. 

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