. . . . And A (Glowing) Boston Globe Review For 21st Century Ghost Stories
It’s October 1, which means that we’ve stopped taking submissions for the fall 2021 Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award Competition. Everyone who submitted a story will be hearing from us over the coming weeks, and the winner, along with two honorable mention pieces, will be announced and published on Halloween—complete, of course, with a custom Andy Paciorek illustration for each.
Our next supernatural story contest, the winter 2022 Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition, opens to submissions on December 1. By flash fiction we mean 1,000 words or fewer—and for further information, have a look at our guidelines.
Further news: A few hours ago, our just-published anthology of competition winners and honorable mentions from the last three years, 21st Century Ghost Stories: Volume II, received its first big review in a major newspaper, the Boston Globe. Here’s what they said:
October now, and so begins the haunted season of the year. A new anthology of ghost stories, edited by Midcoast Maine writer and editor Paul Guernsey, and including a selection of stories by authors from all over the world, traffics in the uncanny, the strange, the inexplicable. “21st Century Ghost Stories: Volume II” (Wyrd Harvest) is striking for its variety of approaches to the supernatural.
“Corpse Walks into a Bar” by Somerville-based author and Halloween scholar Lesley Bannatyne hints at the grateful dead folktale motif, and is set in Dorchester; it mixes a distinctly Boston humor and atmosphere with the haunting questions of what we could’ve done differently. In “The Mission Bell,” Maine author and musician Lara Tupper offers Lynchian surreality in her twist-up of the Eagles’ “Hotel California. “Fairies, vampires, demons, The Devil Himself, snakes . . . mystery animals, ancient curses, contemporary curses . . . and a number of haunted objects, including . . . a stuffed rabbit with a bad attitude” make up these stories, as Guernsey writes. The collection is strange and smart and upends ideas of what a ghost story is, and expands, with verve and unsettling bizarrity, what it can be.
