Small Press Interviews: Meet The Laughing Man House

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

We are The Laughing Man House, we focus mainly on horror subgenres like religious horror, southern gothic, southwestern, and dark fantasy—but we do not limit ourselves to those and publish a broad spectrum. We are queer-owned and so we put a lot of our time and attention into queer stories. Part of why we began was because we love weird regional horror and religious horror, which are two niches that we had trouble finding in the wild for a long time. More recently, there have been some explosions in these subgenres, such as Appalachian horror, and we think that’s awesome. As we continue to evolve, a lot of what keeps us going is our mission to give a voice to more queer authors during a time when those voices are being dropped or dismissed by large trad publishers.
 
Indie publishers have a distinct personality. How would you define the personality of your publishing house, as well as the core brand/vibe?

Our whole brand has become sort of this parody of a modern Pentecostal-style church. We know that sounds weird and it is, sometimes we worry it’s too off-putting, but it’s very closely bonded to our roots. For me, the founder, I grew up extremely Christian in the fairly-rural South, bouncing between denominations that all held some form of mild to extreme fundamentalist ideas. And that really shaped who I am as a person, so now, even though I’ve deconstructed, I have found a way to take that part of my past and graft it onto my passion. That’s been extremely cathartic, rather than just letting my religious trauma sit in a box in a closet, I get to play around with it and let others play around with theirs, too. Sometimes I’m jokingly called Rev because my brand persona is a sleazy televangelist, and everything else has exploded around that. We run The Horror Church Bookshop (a mini indie horror bookshop), and The Horror Church discord server (for queer horror writers), and everything down to how I package the books we send out follows this theme. Our literary magazine is Smitten Land (derived from Exodus 12:13). Our mascot, Xerxes, is a grim reaper who wears a crown of thorns. There are a lot of publishers who have no interest in religious-flavored horror because they think evil preachers and the devil are overplayed, but if you’re a writer who loves that kind of stuff, then you have a home here.
 
The horror landscape is constantly changing. What do you look for in a book you want to publish?

We don’t really look for books that are ‘on trend’ right now (because that trend will pass by before the book even has a chance to breathe). Our checklist is usually things like, does it fit our niche? Is the writing rich, fun, developed? Does it challenge us to expand our reach, will it resonate with our current audience and new readers? We like to think that we have a fairly diverse taste—we love creature features, family dramas, isolation stories, comedies, erotica, experimental pieces, cosmic horror, haunted houses, ghost stories, etc.
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I feel like every small press gets its share of submissions that are wildly out of its asking zone (and we are always honored when an author gives us a shot even if it’s just for the ‘hell of it’ / sake of trying), so a big deciding factor is often the ‘does it fit our niche’. If we have two excellent horror books in front of us and we have to choose between them, we’re going to pick the religious horror, or the Florida horror, over the midwestern ghost story.
 
We all know the small publisher is a champion for marginalized voices. How does your press help uplift these voices?

We really try to make an effort to uplift as many marginalized voices as we can, although we always want to do more and better. We want all the own voices representation we can get—from queer people, people of color, disabled voices, mentally ill voices—etc. We tend to be extremely picky especially in our Southwestern acquisitions for this reason.
 
What are some common things that will get a quick rejection from your press? On the flip side, what are some things that make a submission stand out?

A general lack of understanding what we’re looking for is a quick rejection—along with emails that have no body, books that are drastically below or way beyond our preferred word counts, anything that reduces women to sex objects with no agency, manuscripts that do not adhere to our specified preferred format—and we do not really like it when someone lands in our inbox with a condescending attitude. I don’t take people talking down to me very well. If an author comes in and there’s a sense of mutual respect and you have clearly read our guidelines, then that’s a green flag. The stories that tend to stand out the most are stories that feel genuine (not written to pander to a call, but a story you had burning in your gut from its inception). Even if it’s the campiest, silliest story you have ever wanted to tell, if it’s something you genuinely love and it makes us grin, chance are we’ll love it.
 
When is your next open call and what are you looking for?

Right now, we have an open call for our Smitten Land anthology, Behold the Behemoth. Smitten Land is our quarterly religious horror magazine, and BTB is celebrating two years. Beyond that, our next open call for novels and novellas will likely be at the tail-end of 2027 or the beginning of 2028. We will definitely announce it on our socials when it’s open. But, what are we looking for? I would love some more evangelical flavored horror. I would love some Southwestern horror, and I’d be hard-pressed to say ‘no’ to some more rural Southern gothic horror (especially with some botanical horror mixed in). If you’re a queer author of color and you’re shopping around in these subgenres, please feel free to tap into my DM’s even if we’re not in our open call season and we’ll be happy to talk.
 
Where can authors find you?

We have a newsletter, we are on Instagram and TikTok, we have a BlueSky (for now), and we are on Threads. I’ll drop a bunch of links. Thank you so much for having us!

Website: https://www.lmhpub.com/
Newsletter: https://lmhpub.beehiiv.com/
LMH Pub Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thelaughingmanhousepub
Horror Church Bookshop: https://www.instagram.com/horrorchurchbookshop
Sirius: https://www.instagram.com/palestarsirius