Call for Submissions

I am editing the anthology series Best Horror of the Year (Night Shade Books) and am currently reading for the tenth volume, covering material published in 2018.

I am looking for stories and poetry from all branches of horror: traditional-supernatural to the borderline, including high-tech sf horror, supernatural stories, psychological horror, dark crime, or anything else that might qualify. This is reprint, so I’m only reading material published in or about to be published in 2018. Deadline is December 15th 2018. Authors should check that their publishers are sending review copies to me as I only request them once. If a book or magazine is coming out after the deadline, I’ll look at galleys or manuscripts.

I will look at e-versions of anthologies and collections if they are navigable and have running heads. Otherwise, I will not read them. I always prefer print, if your book is available that way.

You can query as to whether I have your collection or an anthology/magazine in which you have a story at datlow@yahoo.com

There is a summation of “the year in horror” in the front of the volume. This includes novels, nonfiction, poetry, art books, and “odds and ends”– material that doesn’t fit elsewhere but that might interest horror readers. But I must be aware of this material in order to mention it.
Ellen Datlow
Best Horror of the Year Volume Eleven
PMB 391
511 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10011-8436

****I regularly read many magazines/webzines that publish horror (Black Static, Dark Discoveries, Cemetery Dance, F&SF, The Dark, Nightmare, and crime digests, etc) and I receive many anthologies and single author collections.

Again, ask your publisher to send me the magazine or book. For online publications, email individual files, mentioning on the ms where the story has been published.

If I choose a story you will be informed. For confirmation that I‘ve received something, enclose a self-addressed-stamped postcard and I will let you know the date it arrived.
thank you
Ellen Datlow
Editor and reviewer
www.datlow.com

For those interested:
What I’ve worked on as an editor in 2017:
I acquired and edited the novellas The Twilight Pariah by Jeffrey Ford and Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones for Tor.com Books.

Edited the anthologies
Black Feathers (avian horror) Pegasus
Haunted Nights (Halloween horror) (with Lisa Morton) for HWA/Blumhouse
The Best Horror of the Year volume 9 (Nightshade)
Mad Hatters and March Hares (Alice in Wonderland inspired stories) Tor

Acquired and edited three short stories for OMNI Magazine
“Sidewalks” by Maureen McHugh
“Every Hour of Light and Dark” by Nancy Kress
“Verweile Doch (But Linger)” by Richard Richard William Larson

Acquired and edited the following stories and novelettes for Tor.com
Novelettes:
A Human Stain by Kelly Robson
Come See the Living Dryad by Theodora Goss
Excerpts from a Film (1942-1987) by A. C. Wise
Sweetlings by Lucy Taylor
Bourbon, Sugar, Grace by Jessica Reisman

Short stories
The Last Novelist (or A Dead Lizard in the Yard) by Matthew Kressel
Dark Warm Heart by Richard William Larson
The Martian Obelisk by Linda Nagata
These Deathless Bones by Cassandra Khaw

Romantic Times was only able to use a very small portion of the responses to two questions about Alice in Wonderland and its influence on me and my contributors. Here is the link to what they published
http://tinyurl.com/yamfg4lf

Here are the rest of the Q&As with Katherine Vaz, RIchard Bowes, C.S.E. Cooney, Stephen Graham Jones, Matthew Kressel, Angela Slatter, Priya Sharma, and Kaaron Warren.
Unused Romantic Times Q&A
Katherine Vaz:
There are so many adaptations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; what was your first piece of Alice media? What significance does it hold for you?
My parents were huge readers–and my dad was a painter–and I was transfixed by the copy with the John Tenniel illustrations. I was so shy, and Alice was fearless and moved magically in a world with strange animals. I wanted her headband. We also had an LP record of the story and I think it made the words, recited, into living things…like listening to songs that I still remember.

-Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a favorite among readers of all ages, both for its prose and its social commentary. What about the original story most influenced your contribution?
The tea party always frightened and haunted me…the Hatter’s madness was one thing, but what they did to the Dormouse was truly awful. They torment it, and they try to stuff it headfirst into the teapot…I know Wonderland is a magical dreamscape, but that’s one patch where cruelty and insanity rule, and Alice runs. My story is about a mother who lost a child in a terrible way suggested by this scene. A reminder of the grim side of fairytales. I do love tea shops, though…they feel like an oasis of pleasure and taste. So I put those elements together, mostly to say how little we know of the histories of each other.
C.S.E. Cooney
There are so many adaptations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; what was your first piece of Alice media? What significance does it hold for you?

My first Alice encounter was either a stage adaption or the Disney cartoon. The Jabberwock came later, separately; I don’t think I knew then that it was part of the Alice mythos. It was so outrageous and delightful: its own entity. The poem might have been framed on someone’s wall, or something we studied in class, or my father might have started spouting it at a gas station, until I cried, “What is that? What is that?” (That was not uncommon in my childhood.) I have an early memory of the roses. Cartoon roses, so it must have been the Disney. I think it was one of my earliest observations of something so beautiful being so cruel. I recall the Cheshire’s slyness; he was never trustworthy, not from the get-go. I remember that the caterpillar made me uneasy, but I didn’t know why—just, there was something unctuous about him. I don’t remember how I first encountered the Walrus and the Carpenter, but I think it was in an illustrated book of poetry, again, separate from the thing I knew as _Alice in Wonderland_. It made me feel a bit sad, a bit sick. I vowed never to eat oysters. (I still don’t like them to this day, but I’m not sure that’s Lewis Carroll’s fault.) I was very young. The stories, it seemed, were everywhere; Alice is something I feel I’ve always known, without knowing it was, as it were, _Alice_.

-Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a favorite among readers of all ages, both for its prose and its social commentary. What about the original story most influenced your contribution?

Once, when I was fretting over something that would not be happening for at least six months—Delia Sherman (another contributor to this anthology, and a long-time friend) looked at me and said, “Oh, you’re White Queening it. I do that too.” I had no idea what she meant, so she reminded me of Alice’s encounter with the White Queen in Through Looking Glass, when the Queen starts screaming that she’s about to prick her finger on her broach, and Alice has no idea what she’s making such a fuss about. But when the
White Queen does prick her finger, she’s very calm about it, even though she’s bleeding, and it’s Alice who’s distressed and frightened. I went home immediately and read Through the Looking Glass. I loved the idea of a character with the ability to “forefeel”—it makes her ideal in a crisis, for she would have already reacted before the bad thing ever happened, and would be able to think clearly and coldly, and to solve problems. It would make her, I thought, an ideal detective.

Priya Sharma
There are so many adaptations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; what was your first piece of Alice media? What significance does it hold for you?
Mine was the Disney version. Anything involving magical, hidden worlds captured my imagination, like Alice’s Wonderland or Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a favorite among readers of all ages, both for its prose and its social commentary. What about the original story most influenced your contribution?
I was interested in the Mad Hatter as he was the most striking character for me as a child. Hatters in that period used mercury to prepare the beaver pelts from which they made the felt for top hats. It was toxic, causing personality changes, emotional instability, timidity, memory and cognition loss, speech problems, tremors, headaches and even delirium.
Stephen Graham Jones

-There are so many adaptations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; what was your first piece of Alice media? What significance does it hold for you?

Children’s board book, I’m pretty sure. So, very abridged, and nothing scary. Mostly I remember the rabbit with the pocketwatch, and how it was both running and waiting at the same time, like it did have somewhere important to be, but it had also been tasked with luring Alice in with it, but at the same time it couldn’t just tell her what it was doing, as if it was bound by rules we don’t know. That’s the way it always is with demons and supernatural entities, isn’t it? I like that white rabbit.

-Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a favorite among readers of all ages, both for its prose and its social commentary. What about the original story most influenced your contribution?
What I always dug about Alice in Wonderland was that you could say she fell asleep, dreamed all this, but at the same time, it’s now in my head, so it’s real, too. The cat and the caterpillar and the Mad Hatter and all them, they’ve gone from being her idle mind, churning with no real intent or direction, to people whispering in my head, with what feels like purpose. That’s the magic of fiction, dramatized. I think it’s why this story’s stuck around so long, and infected so wide.

Kaaron Warren
-There are so many adaptations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; what was your first piece of Alice media? What significance does it hold for you?
My first piece of Alice media was the book. I can’t remember where the copy came from but I know it was the full book, not the picture book version. Its significance to me lies in the content, because even at seven, when I read it first, I wanted to be a writer, and Alice is full of humor, horror, adventure and imagination. I feel as if it helped give me the freedom to write stories that are not constrained by the ordinary.

-Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a favorite among readers of all ages, both for its prose and its social commentary. What about the original story most influenced your contribution?
When I re-read Alice while thinking about my story for this anthology, I was struck again by the humor of it all, and by the sadness. There’s a lot of loneliness in the book, from Alice herself, wandering off alone, to the White Rabbit, living alone in his big house, and the strange separateness of the guests at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. Then there’s the poor old Mock Turtle, whose so-called friend The Gryphon says of him, “It’s all his fancy, that; he hasn’t got no sorrow, you know.” I was struck by the cruelty and the reality of this, the friend who is cruel, unsympathetic, and really no friend at all. I felt sorry for the Mock Turtle and thought of him as a very lonely character. So that’s the mood I tried to capture in my story “Eating the Alice Cake”.
Angela Slatter
There are so many adaptations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; what was your first piece of Alice media? What significance does it hold for you?

I think the first thing would have been the original animated film. I recall the brightness of the colours and the glorious representation of somewhere that was quite distinctly “other” – familiar in places, but so very strange. I think the visuals still stand out in my memory of one of my earliest encounters with the Fantastic – one of the first things to set me on my path into speculative fiction.
-Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a favorite among readers of all ages, both for its prose and its social commentary. What about the original story most influenced your contribution?

Well, as I am a writer of dark fiction and this is an anthology of dark and twisted tales, I guess I was never going to write something warm and fuzzy. I was always going to pick up on the stranger aspects and try to answer the darker questions the story made me ask. Like, what was that weird little rabbit doing luring little girls down holes?

Matthew Kressel
There are so many adaptations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; what was your first piece of Alice media? What significance does it hold for you?
I’d encountered Alice’s echo a thousand times before I read the source material. I’m sure I saw the Disney film when I was young, but my first read of the source text was much later, in my 20s. What shocked me was how much of the story I had already absorbed from other sources. The story is everywhere in popular culture, even in our expressions (e.g. “down the rabbit hole.”)
-Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a favorite among readers of all ages, both for its prose and its social commentary. What about the original story most influenced your contribution?
You hear a lot today about how an author’s behavior can affect our appreciation of their work. So, for example, we are rethinking our appreciation of H.P. Lovecraft when confronted with his racism. I went to an Alice exhibit a short time before I wrote the story “In Memory of a Summer’s Day.” And what struck me was that Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, is this shady, pervy man, and almost none of the thousand and one echoes of his work touch on this subject. I mean, here’s this guy who took lewd photos of Alice Liddell (and other children) when she was just eleven, and Alice’s parents let this happen. That just seemed so wrong and horrible to me. In my story, I imagine how this would have traumatized and scarred the real Alice, and what she might do when given power of her own. Even though most of us think of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as this magical, charming story, it has a truly sinister underbelly.
Richard Bowes
There are so many adaptations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; what was your first piece of Alice media? What significance does it hold for you?

Long ago at the age of four, I first encountered Alice when the book was read to me as bedtime stories. It was my first novel. Hearing the words, being shown the Tenniel illustration, imprinted the story on me.

I was very fortunate. My parents were actors and weren’t afraid to give Alice all the drama she deserved. I saw two of their friends play the White Queen and the Red Queen in a children’s theater version of Alice.

On early 1950’s TV, I saw a movie of Alice with W.C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty and Hollywood stars in lesser rolls.

Just out of college in the 1960’s I was in a now lost underground movie version of Alice. I was the Caterpillar complete with hookah.
-Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a favorite among readers of all ages, both for its prose and its social commentary. What about the original story most influenced your contribution?
For my story, “Some Kind Of Wonderland” I created a narrator who comes to Alice in a much different way than I did. He is a Greenwich Village street kid, a runaway who knows his way around but has never read a book. He meets a young guy who is obsessed with making a film version of Alice set in the current 1960’s Village.

To see how they do this, read my story! Read all the stories!

It’s available as a hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audio:
http://tinyurl.com/y863gqrh

Raab, Jonathan “The Secret Goatman Spookshow,” The Lovecraft ezine #38.

Rath, Tina “Barefoot Withouten Shoon,” A Midwinter Entertainment.

Reed, Nathaniel “The Serpent Borne of Helios,” (poem) Spectral Realms #5.

Reed, Nicasio Andres “Painted Grassy Mire,” Shimmer #32, July.

Reid, Forrest “Furnished Apartments,” The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories.

Renino, Danielle “I’m Better Now,” Black Candies: Gross and Unlikeable.

Reppion, John “The Black Abbess,” Black Wings V.

Reppion, John “The Faerie Ring,” Uncertainties Volume 1.

Rhoads, Loren “Sakura Time,” Fright Mare.

Rivera, David “Unreeled,” Asimov’s Science Fiction June.

Rogers, Ian “Eyes Like Poisoned Wells,” Cemetery Dance #74/75.

Rosson, Keith “Yes, We Are Duly Concerned with Calamitous Events,” Phantom Drift 6.

Royle, Nicholas “London,” Dead Letters.

Rucker, Lynda E. “Testimony XVI,” Tomorrow’s Cthulhu.

Rucker, Lynda E. “The Old Roads,” Burrow Month of Horror.

Rucker, Lynda E. “The Séance,” Uncertainties Volume 1.

Runge, Karen “My Son, My Son,” Seven Sins.

Russell, R. B. The Might Mr. Godbolt,” Uncertainties Volume II.

Russo, Patricia “A Drizzle Still Counts as Rain,” Not One of Us #55.

Salaam, Kiini Ibura “Volcano Woman,” When the World Wounds.

Salomon, Peter “The Dress,” Borderlands 6.

Sanchez-Izenman, Jeanette “She’ll Only Come Out at Night,” Black Candies.

Sandoval, Kelly “The Right Sort of Monsters,” Strange Horizons April 4.

Savile, Steven “I Need Somewhere to Hide,” Something Remains.

Schaller, Eric “Love Signs,” Meet Me in the Middle of the Air.

Schow, David J. “The Chili Hunters,” Djsturbia.

Schow, David J. “Three Missing Footnotes From the Bad Time,” Djsturbia.

Schow, David J. “Two Scoops,” Djsturbia.

Schwaeble, Hank “American Nocturne,” American Nocturne.

Schwaeble, Hank “Cold Service,” American Nocturne.

Schweitzer, Darrell “The Hutchison Boy,” The Dragons of the Night.

Schweitzer, Darrell “The Red Witch of Chorazin,” Black Wings V.

Schweitzer, Darrell “We Who Have Encountered Monsters (poem) Spectral Realms #4.

Sharma, Priya “Inheritance, or the Ruby Tear,” Black Static #53, July/August.

Shearman, Robert “The Best Story I Can Manage…” Five Stories High.

Shi, Eve “Blood Like Water,” Asian Monsters.

Shirley, John “Just Beyond the Trailer Park,” The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu.

Shirley, John “The Rime of the Cosmic Mariner,” Gothic Lovecraft.

Simon, Marge “Reflections Through the Raven’s Eye,” (poem) Chiral Mad 3.

Sims, Laura “Walking Dead Love Songs,” (poem) Conjunctions 67: Other Aliens.

Slatter, Angela “Change Management,” Dead Letters.

Slatter, Angela “Finnegan’s Field,” Tor.com January 13.

Slatter, Angela “Pale Tree House,” Winter Children and Other Chilling Tales.

Slatter, Angela “The Red Forest,” Winter Children.

Slatter, Angela “The Tallow Wife,” (novella) A Feast of Sorrows.

Slatter, Angela “Tin Soldier,” Dark Discoveries #35, summer.

Slatter, Angela “What Shines Brightest Burns Most Fiercely,” A Feast of Sorrows.

Smales, Rob “Death of the Boy,” Echoes of Darkness.

Smales, Rob “In Full Measure,” Echoes of Darkness.

Smith, Angela Yuriko “I Witnessed a Murder,” (poem) In Favor of Pain.

Smith, Angela Yuriko “In Favor of Pain,” (poem) In Favor of Pain.

Smith, Angela Yuriko “This Day,” (poem) In Favor of Pain.

Smith, John Claude “The Land Lord,” The Wrath of Concrete and Steel.

Smith, John Claude “The Wrath of Concrete and Steel,”The Wrath of Concrete and Steel.

Sparks, Cat “No Fat Chicks,” In Your Face.

Steele, Brian Fatah “Bleak Mathematics,” Cthulhu Lies Dreaming.

Stevens, David “Crop Rotation,” At the Edge.

Stevens, Kathy “The Ghost on the Hill,” Supernatural Tales 32.

Surface, David “Last Ride of the Night,” Ghost Highways.

Sutton, David A. “Bone Matter,” The Ghosts & Scholars Book of Shadows Vol. 3.

Taaffe, Sonya “The Trinitite Golem,” Clockwork Phoenix 5.

Tallerman, David “The Great Black Wave,” Nightmare #54 March.

Tanquary, Nicole “In a Room,” Not One of Us 56.

Taylor, Lucy “Dead Messengers,” Fright Mare.

Taylor, Lucy “He Who Whispers the Dead Back to Life,” Into Painfreak.

Taylor, Lucy “Moth Frenzy,” Peel Back the Skin.

Taylor, Terence “The Catch,” What the #@&% is That?

Tem, Steve Rasnic “Breathing,” Black Static #53, July/August.

Tem, Steve Rasnic “Cannondale at the Beach,” Out of the Dark.

Tem, Steve Rasnic “Photograph,” Out of the Dark.

Tem, Steve Rasnic “The Man in the Rose Bushes,”The Ghosts&ScholarsBkofShadows3

Tem, Steve Rasnic “Your Daughter is Here,” Out of the Dark.

Templet, J. M. “Lazarus Girl,” Dystopia Utopia.

Thomas, Jeffrey “Sacred Meat,” Into Painfreak.

Thomas, Richard “Repent,” Gutted.

Thomas, Richard “The Offering on the Hill,” Chiral Mad 3.

Thomas, Scott “”The Girl with Pennies on Her Eyes,” (poem) Spectral Realms #4.

Thomas, Scott “The Night is a Sea,” Autumn Cthulhu.

Thompson, Tade “Gnaw,” (novella) Five Stories High.

Tobler, E. Catherine “Andromeda of the Skies,” Interzone #263 March-April.

Tomaras, Joseph “Caribou: Documentary Fragments,” F&SF May/June.

Totton, Sarah “Coxley’s Black Divine,” The Worlds of SF, Fantasy, and Horror vol 1.

Tremblay, Paul “Further Questions for the Somnambulist,” The Madness of Dr. Caligari.

Tuttle, Lisa “ Home in the Sky,” Black Static #55 Nov-Dec.

Tuttle, Lisa “The Hungry Hotel,” Dead Letters.

Tyson, Donald “The Organ of Chaos,” Black Wings V.

Unsworth, Simon Kurt“Mr Denning Sings,”GreatBritish Horror1,Green&PleasantLand.

Valdes, Valerie “A Diet of Worms,” Nightmare #49, People of Color Destroy Horror.

Valente, Catherynne, M. “Snow Day,” Uncanny 11.

Valentine, Mark “The Fig Garden,” Pagan Triptych.

Valentine, Mark “The Mask of the Dead Mamilius,”TheGhosts&ScholarsBkofShadows 3.

Van Dyk, Amber “And the Woods Are Silent,” The Dark #11 February.

Vincent-Abnett, Nik “The Twa Corbies,” Out of Tune Book 2.

Volk, Stephen “The Three Hunchbacks,” Supporting Roles.

Waggoner, Tim “Fathomless Tides,” The Beauty of Death.

Wallace, Kali “Caroline at Dusk,” The Dark #12 May.

Walters, Damien Angelica “A Pathway for the Broken,” Tomorrow’s Cthulhu.

Walters, Damien Angelica “Deep Within the Marrow,” Black Static #52.

Walters, Damien Angelica “In the Spaces Where You Once Lived,” Autumn Cthulhu.

Walters, Damien Angelica “Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice,”Eternal Frankenstein.

Walters, Damien Angelica “Take a Walk in the Night, My Love,” The Madness of Dr. C.

Wang, Si “Always,” Aurealis #93

Wanglund, Colleen “Aikiko’s Blade, Into Painfreak.

Ward, C.E. “Squire Thorneycroft,” Malevolent Visitants.

Ward, Marlee Jane “The Beasts and the Birthday, “ Aurealis #90.

Warren, Kaaron “68 Days,” Tomorrow’s Cthulhu.

Warren, Kaaron “All Roll Over,” In Your Face.

Warren, Kaaron “The Doll Beautician,” Review of Australian Fiction Volume 17 Issue 3.

Watt, D.P. “Archontes Ascendant,” Almost Insentient, Almost Divine.

Watt, D.P. “Mors Janua Vitae,” Almost Insentient, Almost Divine.

Wehunt, Michael “Dancers,” Greener Pastures.

Wehunt, Michael “Deducted from Your Share of Paradise,” Greener Pastures.

Wehunt, Michael “I Do Not Count the Hours,” The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu.

Wehunt, Michael “October Film Haunt: Under the House,” Greener Pastures.

Weighell, Ron “The Letter Killeth,” (novella) Pagan Triptych.

Wellington, David “Lacey,” The 3^rd Spectral Book of Horror Stories.

Welsh, Durand Sheng “Life, or Whatever Passes for It,” Peel Back the Skin.

White, Gordon “As Summer’s Masks Slips,” Nightscript II.

Wild, Dean H. “Corpses Removed, No Questions Asked,”Murder Mayhem Short Stories.

Wilkinson, Charles “In the Frame,” Black Static #53, July/August.

Wilkinson, Charles “The White Kisses,” Nightscript II.

Williams Tim L. “Now That Sarah’s Gone,” Not One of Us 56.

Williams, Erik “The Long Bright Descent,” Peel Back the Skin.

Williamson, Chet “That Still, Bleeding Object of Desire,” Cemetery Riots.

Wilson, EG “12-36,” At the Edge.

Wilson, Mary Krawczak “A Lone Figure,” Spectral Realms # 4.

Wise, A. C. “A Guide to Birds by Song (After Death), Clockwork Phoenix 5.

Wise, A. C. “I Dress My Lover in Yellow,” The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu.

Wise, A. C. “Tekeli-Li, They Cry,” Tomorrow’s Cthulhu.

Wise, A. C. “When the Stitches Come Undone” Children of Lovecraft. 8500

Wise, A.C. “The Last Sailing of the Henry Charles Morgan…” The Dark 14, July.

Wong, Alyssa “Natural Skin,” Lightspeed, November.

Wong, Alyssa “You’ll Surely Drown Here If You Stay,” Uncanny 10.

Wooldridge, Trisha J. “Witch,” (poem) Wicked Witches.

Wyckoff, Jason A. “Tanoroar,” The Hidden Back Room.

Wyckoff, Jason A. “The Hidden Back Room,” The Hidden Back Room.

Wyckoff, Jason A. “Understairs,” Nightscript II.

Wytovich, Stephanie M. “Queen of Hearts, (poem) Brothel.

Yang, JY “The Blood that Pulses in the Vein of One,” Uncanny 10.

Yap, Isabel “Only Unclench Your Hand,” What the #@&% is That?

Yap, Isabel “The Taming of the Tongue,” #49, POC Destroy Horror.

Yu, E. Lily “The Witch of Orion Waste and the Boy Knight,” Uncanny 12.