General Submission Requirements

(these apply in pretty much every category)

Do:

• Follow Shunn manuscript format — except don’t indent new paragraphs at all. (Exception: Nonfiction Monographs use Chicago Manual of Style instead.)
• Review your work carefully before submitting — spellcheck, and a find-and-replace check for double spaces and stray punctuation.
• Prepare an author bio (under 100 words) — see our example — and a one-to-two-sentence cover note / logline.
• Consider fit via our Featured Stories and our anthologies before submitting.
• Center your protagonist’s personal mundane terror — what’s mundane to one person may not be mundane to another.

Don’t:

• Don’t send us anything where the dog (or cat, or whatever) dies. We expect you to be able to show a thing is evil and move the plot forward without this bullshit.
• Don’t send us anything depicting sexual violence.
• Don’t send us anything in the mail unless specifically arranged in advance.
• No AI anywhere in the creative process.
  • Read our AI-use policy—you’re asked to agree to it as part of submitting and to share a link to your working draft (in the file-share service of your choice, set to allow-editing) so its version history is visible if we ever need to check it. We won’t open it unless your piece is being seriously considered.
• Don’t send us previously published work—small sites (like this one) and your own medium, substack, or personal website all count as “it’s published.”
• Frequency caps:
  • 180 days between submissions across Anthology, Featured Stories, Movie Reviews, and It Came From the Crypt.
  • 180 days between submissions for Nonfiction Monograph pitches.
  • 365 days between Novel or Novella pitches.
  • None of this applies if we’ve already published you — come on back any time. (We’ll leave the light on for ya.)