The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition

. . . For short stories incorporating a supernatural theme or element. Competition was fierce, but in our (admittedly subjective) opinion these four stories rose to the top. For your reading pleasure we now list them here, with helpful links. The honorable mentions are not ranked, and are listed in no particular order.

Winner: “The Barnyard and the Graveyard” by Maureen McEly: A stressed-out woman driving past an expansive cemetery with a car full of kids and a head full of worries picks up an unusual but helpful hitchhiker.

Honorable Mention: “Night Marcher” by Michael Kaukeano Sonray-Kelly: A deadbeat dad long thought dead returns to haunt a young man living rough on the streets of a Hawaiian city.

Honorable Mention: “Ghost Story” by Isobel Oliphant: Is there sex after death? The author imagines an answer.

Honorable Mention: “Beat the Devil” by Mona Susan Power: In this humorous piece, A Native American deity must do battle with Satan after some wayward kids get naked and lure the old devil up through the broken floor of an abandoned gymnasium.

Enjoy.

Screw Turn Winners—Followed By Our Spring Contest Opening

On Valentine’s Day—as always—we’ll be publishing the winner and honorable mentions in the Winter 2023 Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition. This time around, there will be three honorables rather than the usual two. Check back on Tuesday and you can read them all.

Then, as soon as the clock hits the witching hour on Wednesday, February 15, we’ll start accepting submissions to our full-length story competition: The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award. Deadline for the Spring contest is April 30, with an online publication date of June 1. Look here for complete guidelines and access to our electronic submissions system.

We’ve Got A Contest For Every Season

Looking for information on The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition or The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award contest? Here’s all you need to know.

Our New Permanent Four-Season Schedule

There’s a lot going on with The Ghost Story these days, now that we’ve added a summer edition of Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition (for which the deadline recently closed). Not only will we be announcing and publishing the winner and honorable mentions of our new flash contest on July 31—but the very next day, on August 1, we’ll be OPENING submissions to the Fall 2022 Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award competition for full-length short stories (first prize $1,500 plus print and online publication; two honorable mentions each receive $300 plus publication.

Deadline for the Supernatural Fiction Award is September 30—with an October 31 announcement and publication of the winners.

So don’t forget to check back with us on August 1 to read the winners of the summer flash competition, and/or to enter your story in the Supernatural Fiction Award contest.

And if you’d like to see our complete and permanent deadlines and publications schedule . . . keep reading! [Read more…] about DEADLINES & PUBLICATION DATES

A New Summer Flash Fiction Contest

Until now, we’ve run The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition only once a year, in the dead of winter. We’ve accepted submissions from December through January, with the winner and honorable mentions announced and published on Valentine’s Day.

But starting right now, with our new Summer Flash Contest, we’re doing it twice a year. Same guidelines, same word length . . . with a July 15 deadline and winning pieces presented to the world on July 31, just before the August 1 opening of our Fall Supernatural Fiction Award competition for full-length short stories.

The new Flash event now gives us an uncanny-story contest for each season of the year—flash fiction in the winter and summer, and full-length stories in the fall and spring.

If you like flash fiction—and particularly if you like to write flash fiction—the guidelines are only a click away.

Cheers —— The Editor

Now Published!

Treanor Wooten Baring, of Houston, Texas, won the spring 2022 Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award contest for her story, “The Unseen.”

Honorable mentions were awarded to Goldie Goldbloom for “The Hours” and Bradford Gyori for “Docking The Blue Impossible.” Read all three winning pieces here.

Also, be aware—and beware—we begin accepting submissions for our first-ever summer Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition on June 6. Cheers — The Editor

Now Accepting Submissions: The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition

What? Our biannual contest for sudden short stories incorporating a supernatural theme or element.

When? NOW.

Deadline: January 31.

Judge: Tara Lynn Masih, author of the novel, My Real Name Is Hannah, and editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction.

Length Limits: 250-1,000 words.

Cash Awards: $1,000 for the winner, $200 for each of two honorable mentions. Print and online publication for all three.

Recent Media Coverage of our competitions and publications: Here are some links.

Complete Guidelines and link to our electronic submissions system: Right HERE!

Tara Lynn Masih

Our Winter 2022 Screw Turn Flash Fiction competition opens to submissions on December 1—and we’re delighted to have award-winning novelist, flash-fiction crafter, flash-fiction teacher, and anthology editor Tara Lynn Masih on hand to choose our winner and two honorable mentions.

Tara is a National Jewish Book Award Finalist and winner of a Julia Ward Howe Award for her debut novel, My Real Name Is Hanna. Her anthologies include the acclaimed Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction. In addition to other collections, her flash has been anthologized in Flashed: Sudden Stories in Comics and Prose, Flash Fiction Funny, and W. W. Norton’s New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction, and was featured in Fiction Writer’s Review for National Short Story Month.

Awards for her work include the Lou P. Bunce Creative Writing Award, The Ledge Magazine‘s Fiction Award, Wigleaf Top 50 recognition (judged by Roxane Gay), a finalist fiction grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Pushcart Prize nominations. She has taught flash fiction workshops around the country, and is Founding Series Editor of The Best Small Fictions and a Founding Donor to the Harry Ransom Center’s Flash Fiction Library in Texas.

Her second story collection, How We Disappear, is forthcoming from Press 53 and Blackstone Audio in September 2022. www.taramasih.com

Welcome Tara! It’s going to be fun working with you. 

TV, Newspapers, YouTube . . . TGS Has Been Getting Around

You likely have already seen the Boston Globe review of 21st Century Ghost Stories—Volume II, the latest addition to our ongoing print anthology series. The Globe‘s take on the stories that are winners or honorable mentions in our competitions:

“[S]trange and smart and upends ideas of what a ghost story is, and expands, with verve and unsettling bizarrity, what it can be.“

And we’ve recently received some other attention as well.

There’s a television interview

There’s a newspaper feature article about us in the Maine Sunday Telegram.

In  addition, for your listening pleasure, two of our stories have been narrated and uploaded to YouTube from the Classic Ghost Stories Podcast:

The Beast of Blanchland, by Rowan Bowman

and

Snake in the Attic, by Garret Johnson

Both are read—in his natural British accent, no less—by Tony Walker. Enjoy!

Our Short Story Competition Winners Feature The Ghost Of A Notorious Murderer, A Shape-Shifting Grandma, Phone Calls From The Dead, And A Slavic Nightmare

We’ve selected four fine short stories as the winner and three honorable mentions in the Fall 2021 Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award competition. Accompanied by original illustrations from artist Andy Paciorek, all are now available for your reading pleasure right here.

These four pieces will be included in Volume III of our ongoing print anthology series, 21st Century Ghost Stories. Volume III is due out from Wyrd Harvest Press (Durham, U.K.) in 2024. Meanwhile, don’t forget to get yourself a copy of Volume II, which was just published in August. All profits from the sale of our books are donated to the Wildlife Trusts, a British wildlife conservation organization. Cheers.