You Can Check Out Any Time You Like—But You Can Never Leave

Just a little over two weeks until we begin accepting submissions for the Fall 2020 Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award competition. Meanwhile, on a dark desert highway, “The Mission Bell”—Lara Tupper’s summer 2019 honorable mention story—offers a literary riff on the Eagles tune, “Hotel California.” Any time of year . . . you can read it here.

Sun Of Brass, Moon Of Tin

BY LEONARD ONIONHOUSE

This Leonard Onionhouse story won an honorable mention in last summer’s competition. It was ahead of it’s time—but not by much. We begin accepting submissions for our Fall contest on August 1.

There were four lights in those days; four lamps that lit the farm country of my youth:

The greater light of the Sun,
The lesser light of the Moon,
The pearl glow of Kerosene, and
The dim flicker of Candles, vague and shadow-wrought.

Electricity was a mere curiosity that we read about in the papers. The cities blazed with arc lights and incandescent bulbs. But on the prairie we had few barriers to the dark. And when night came, it settled in with the immensity of an ancient flood.

I was thirteen that summer. A thin and silent, black-haired boy. Yet, a strangeness gathered in me. An odd quickening in the blood that I felt and that I feared. Mother noted it soberly, as she scrubbed me in the galvanized metal tub. That black mop of hair, so wild and resistant to combing, was no longer confined to my head. Manhood had begun to creep into my flesh. [continue reading…]

The Full-Length Fiction Contest Runs Spring & Fall

A month from today—August 1—we begin accepting submissions for The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award. Halloween publication, $1k first prize. Magic realism and supernatural short stories. Can’t wait to start reading again!