Small Press Interviews: Meet Horrific Scribblings

Tell us a little bit about your press and what inspired you to start it up.

Horrific Scribblings has two taglines/catchphrases: we publish transgressive dark fiction that is provocative, scary, and strange. Dark and disturbing, thought-provoking, outside the mainstream, unconventional, bizarre, disturbing, shocking, inspiring dread at the deepest existential levels… if it gets a hard no somewhere else for being too out there, it might get an enthusiastic yes from us.

I started Horrific Scribblings because I’d self-published a few books, had a new novel called Alex’s Escape that I thought was so extreme and controversial that no one else would publish it, and thought, since I might be able to help out others with works too out there to fit elsewhere, the time might be right to start an idiosyncratic imprint. I filed the paperwork to form a company. I launched phase one in February 2025 when I started publishing my own books along with Horrific Scribes, a web archive of short fiction and some poetry (submissions always open!) that now has well over 100 authors’ works in it. For phase two, this year I started putting together our first pro-paying anthology, Extremely Weird Splatter, which has a dynamite line-up of horror authors and will be out October 13. For phase three—coming soon—I’ll start signing authors for novellas and novels.

What kind of horror do you publish?

For “transgressive dark fiction,” we look for horror and the horror-adjacent. Horrific Scribes includes all kinds of horror from quiet to splatterpunk, grounded to WTF supernatural/weird, as well as related categories such as dark fantasy, dark sci-fi, surreal/experimental, etc., as long as it’s got scary elements (it’s got to be provocative, scary, and strange). Most of our books so far are either anthologies from the Horrific Scribes archive or my novels and novellas, which tend toward extreme/splatterpunk and dark fantasy. The upcoming anthology I mentioned—which is all-new and independent of Horrific Scribes—fuses splatter with weird horror.

We all know the small publisher is a champion for marginalized voices. How does your press help uplift these voices? 

Although not always kindly, horror has long innovated through representations of the marginalized and thus has long been a space for the marginalized, and Horrific Scribblings is about the marginalized within an already marginalized space: horror is already transgressive, but we want the transgressive among the transgressive. Our tagline for Extremely Weird Splatter is “Splatter the Normal.” I think this philosophy accounts for why we not only receive but end up selecting—not by design—so many international submissions. We’ve published work from six continents, and we have nothing against Antarctica, really. I haven’t done the math and couldn’t do so accurately because I don’t have all the data, but my general sense is strong enough to say with confidence that, though they do reflect the demographics of our submissions, our actual pubs skew less cis-het-male than our subs (which isn’t to say we don’t love cis-het-male writers—we do—but more marginalized voices tend to match with relatively greater frequency). I think we do especially well by LGBTQ+ authors, perhaps because I am one but I think because queerness and transgression still often go hand in hand, which informs the writing. We have a small “LGBTQ+” category on our site, but the number of stories contributed by queer-identified writers and/or with queer content is much larger.

What projects do you have coming out soon?

The biggie I’ve mentioned. Extremely Weird Splatter refreshes too-often-grounded splatterpunk with extreme weirdness and turns up the volume on today’s quiet and respectable weird fiction with extreme splatter. We’ve got stories by award-winning legends and favorites including JG Faherty, Christine Morgan, Jason Nickey, Monica J. O’Rourke, and Steve Rasnic Tem as well as others you know and some you’ll be getting to know soon. It’s amazing. Also, I just released the third anthology from the Horrific Scribes archive, Horrific Scribes Presents: Worlds Collide, and I might get the fourth, Horrific Scribes Presents: Distortions and Disproportions, out by the end of the year. As for my own books, I’ll have my surreal thriller Noir Falling: A Bizarre Mystery of Art and the Mind back in print soon, and I’ve got two novellas, Miasma and The Masses, in the pipeline. They’re nasty.

When is your next open call and what are you looking for?

Horrific Scribes is ALWAYS OPEN! We want horror and horror-adjacent short stories (1500-5000 words) and dark poems (send 2 – 5 short / medium poems) and pay $25 for an accepted submission (would love to pay more, but we don’t sell ads or charge readers, so we lose money). Full details and the place to submit are here: https://horrificscribblings.com/submissions/ 

We don’t do issues like magazines, but we have “Exhibits,” and our next Special Exhibit, likely opening to subs September 1, will focus on conspiracy horror. We refer to submissions for our Special Exhibits as “challenge submissions,” and you can keep an eye on challenges here: https://horrificscribblings.com/submissions/submissions-challenge/

Finally, assuming Extremely Weird Splatter is successful, you can look for a call for another pro-paying Horrific Scribblings anthology in 2027…

What advice do you have for authors?

My most common reasons for rejecting stories…

• The author doesn’t know the market. Horrific Scribes is very up front about seeking horror and horror-adjacent stories that are unconventional—provocative, scary, and strange. “Horrific” is in the publication and the company’s name. Yet people send us stories with nothing horrific or scary in them. People send us conventional horror, like clones of Stephen King or Anne Rice (both of whom we love, but we’re not in that business). Those people get rejected.
  
  
• The author doesn’t know short genre fiction. Virtually all stories need a strong hook in the opening lines, but perhaps in longer-form fiction you can get away with some getting-to-know-you time at the beginning. In short fiction, you need to get to conflict, preferably the main one, ASAP. If I get 25% of the way in and am not bracing for a conflict you’ve set up, and nothing provocative, scary, and strange has me glued, I’m most of the way to a rejection. If that’s the situation 50% of the way in, and you’re not doing something experimentally fascinating or otherwise outstanding to make up for the failure, you’re sunk.
  
  
• The author hasn’t done enough editing (and, what, thinks I have time?). Perfect drafts don’t exist, and no reasonable editor expects them. However, even when the pay isn’t great, it’s a buyer’s market, which means I have and take advantage of the luxury of not accepting works that need developmental editing, and I can avoid works that will require a great deal of time to touch up the lines. If on review I see, for example, ineffective structural discontinuity on the one hand or lots of comma errors, misplaced modifiers, agreement errors, etc. on the other, I’ll think the author either doesn’t know the craft or the language well or didn’t take the time to polish the story—and either suspicion damages the story in every scoring category we have, not just the one explicitly for quality of writing.
  
  

One last note: don’t count out a little publication like Horrific Scribes because we can’t pay a high per-word rate. Forging relationships are a good thing. More than a few of the authors we accepted for Extremely Weird Splatter, for example, had already impressed us with publications in Horrific Scribes. And what we do pay counts toward memberships in various organizations and helps build a portfolio. And at this point, you’d be in great company. Give us a try….

Where can authors find you?

​We’re a little bit all over…
https://horrificscribblings.com/
https://www.facebook.com/horrificscribblings/
https://www.instagram.com/horrificscribblings/
https://www.tiktok.com/@horrificscribs
https://bsky.app/profile/horrificscribs.bsky.social
https://www.youtube.com/@HorrificScribblingsVideos