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 occasionally 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 also open to domestic noir, family dramas, murder mysteries, and moody romance.1
Period or quasi-period settings (17th century through 1930s) are preferred, but accurate detail is not a priority. We are not a market for “historical fiction” per se.
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.
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 not specially commissioned; and, while linked in theme, mood, or subject to the stories they accompany, they are not illustrations.
Publication and Payment
A new story with accompanying artwork will be posted each Saturday, beginning on January 4th, 2025. There will be four or five posts depending on the number of Saturdays in the month. Stories will be behind a paycut (except for a few teaser paragraphs); artworks will be publicly visible.
The authors and artists featured each month, and the editor, will all receive equal shares of the net subscription revenues from that month. This means you will generally get either 1/9 or 1/11 of the month’s take. If you are not a current subscriber, you will also receive six months’ free access on request.
Payment will be via PayPal only.
How to Submit
All submissions should be sent to sara.L.bickley@gmail.com. The subject line must begin with the letters HLS in all caps. 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. Modern manuscript format is nice, but not obligatory.
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 not required. We will ask for necessary details upon 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 or The Submission Grinder.
Updated 13 November 2024.
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.
The occasional scatological expression is okay.
Including, but no limited to, unsolicited submissions