Submission Guidelines
What We Want
Trad Gothic. You know it when you see it: graveyards, decrepit mansions, ghosts, curses, doomed love, family secrets, ineffable wickedness, and occasional mad science.
Horror is the most famously Gothic genre (and our number one aesthetic touchstone is horror cinema in the Corman–Hammer vein), but we’re interested in a variety of genres including domestic noir, dark literary fiction, murder mysteries, and moody romance.1 Mood and imagery are more important to us than genre distinctions.
We’re open to contemporary, historical, and secondary-world settings. Future-set science fiction is unlikely to be accepted.
Length and Content
There are no firm length restrictions, but anything shorter than 2,000 words or longer than 10,000 is likely to be a hard sell.
We may occasionally have use for flash fiction or narrative (not lyric) poetry.
Don’t bother sending work that includes the following:
explicit sexual content
obscene or profane language2
blasphemy or racial slurs uttered by non-villainous characters
We do not require authors or artists to disclose their use of AI tools.
Artwork
We will present one work of visual art along with each story. These works are selected from various sources.3 They are, for the most part, not specially commissioned; and, while linked in theme, mood, or subject to the stories they accompany, they are not illustrations.
We’re always in need of art! If your style seems even tangentially relevant to our aesthetic, we strongly encourage you to share your work. We’re open to any medium and a variety of styles.
Letters
In addition to the comments section, we welcome letters to the editor commenting on previously published stories, expressing preferences for future stories, recommending works of interest to our readers, or discussing the general state of Gothic fiction.
Please direct letters to the submissions address, sara.L.bickley@gmail.com; include HLS in the subject line. Selected letters may be reproduced in future issues of House of Long Shadows and/or forwarded to authors for a potential response. No payment is offered to letter-writers.
Publication and Payment
A new story with accompanying artwork is posted every Saturday. There will be four or five posts each month depending on the number of Saturdays. Stories will generally be behind a paywall (except for a few teaser paragraphs); artworks will be publicly visible.
Published stories remain available in the archive indefinitely. Reasonable requests for removal will be honored.
The net subscription revenues from each month will be shared equally among everyone who contributed to that month’s publication—including authors, artists whose submitted work was chosen,4 and the editor. This means you’ll always get at least 1/11 of the month’s take. You’ll also receive a complimentary six-month subscription.
Payment will be sent the month after your work appears, and will be via PayPal only.
How to Submit
All submissions should be sent to sara.L.bickley@gmail.com. The subject line must include the letters HLS. Submissions that fail to follow this guideline might not be seen or responded to.
Fiction may be submitted as an attachment in any common file format, or pasted into the body of the email. Shunn Modern format is nice, but not obligatory.5
Previously published works are considered for publication if the original publication was at least ten years before the date of submission and the story is not available for free online.
Please, no multiple or simultaneous submissions of fiction.
Artwork may be submitted as an attachment in any common file format. The submitted file should be at least 500 pixels wide. Be prepared to provide a higher-resolution file if your artwork is accepted.
For artwork only, previously published/posted submissions are considered without restrictions, and we do not ask for exclusivity.
Cover letters are welcome but not required. We will ask for necessary details after acceptance.
If we fail to send an acknowledgement with 36 hours, or if we do not respond with a decision within two weeks, please query.
We encourage you to report submissions and responses to Duotrope, The Submission Grinder, or Chill Subs.
Updated 10 April 2025.
And affectionate parodies of any of the above. Remember that the best parodies recreate the pleasures of the original and join them to the additional pleasure of laughter.
Scatology is a-okay.
Including, but no limited to, unsolicited submissions
Some artworks are selected from public domain or Creative Commons sources; the creators of these artworks, even if living, are not compensated.
Some other helpful presentation practices:
“Curly quotes”
Em dashes—without spaces on either side
Italics for emphasis
Americanized spelling
That said, we have no stylebook, and we sometimes make exceptions to these conventions in our published issues, so don’t worry about it too much.