CLOSED TO SUBMISSIONS AS OF 30 NOVEMBER 2018

“Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not;

and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold.”

— H. P. Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror

Monstrous Outlines will be an anthology of horror and weird fiction with a focus on the theme of camouflage: people, entities, monsters, gods, even concepts, that masquerade as things other than themselves. Predators in plain sight, deities on their down time, sublime extra-dimensional terrors slumming in 4D. We want to see stories of exceptionally well done camouflage, all the more baffling and frightening for its seamless nature. We want to see stories of seeming where the hidden thing is poorly hidden for a number of reasons: perhaps there are layers to its camouflage, or perhaps it doesn’t care how well it hides. Imagine the moment when the perfectly hidden thing reveals itself. When the poorly hidden thing reveals itself. We’re also interested in duplicates, doppelgangers, and shapeshifters. Think John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There? and its cinematic offspring, The Thing, for the latter. The seed story for this anthology will be Algernon Blackwood’s classic tale, The Willows, a story of two worlds touching, of men meeting the unnameable through the medium of the nearest natural analogue, the titular willow trees.

Submission period closes 31 NOVEMBER 2018. The anthology will be released in trade paperback and electronic book formats in early March 2019.

Submitting

Please use Standard Manuscript format when submitting. That’s double spaced, left justified, Times New Roman or Courier or something at least readable, a header on the first page (at least) with your author info and word count and… well, you know the drill. RTF or DOC files preferred, but DOCx and text files also accepted. Obviously, you could send us something that’s not in Standard Manuscript format, but it will lower your chances of it being looked at seriously.

We will look at both original work and REPRINTS.

To submit a story to MONSTROUS OUTLINES send an e-mail (with the story file attached, not in the body of the email) to: submissions@martianmigrainepress.com, with subject line: OUTLINES, title of your story, and your name.

Length

For short fiction, we’d like to see anything from 1,500 to 7,000 words. If your story goes over 7k, please inquire first.

FLASH FICTION: got something under 1500 words? Send it in. However, the following still applies…

NO POETRY.

Payment

All accepted submissions will be paid .03CAD per word, via Paypal, as well as a contributor copy (paperback) of the anthology, and copies in all electronic formats (mobi, EPUB, and PDF). Authors are also entitled to complete access to all titles in the MMP ebook catalogue

Replies and Queries

We will try to acknowledge receipt of your submission within a week of its arrival in our inbox. The submission period itself will close on 31 NOVEMBER 2018 and we should be responding to all submissions, yay or nay, by early January 2019. If you haven’t heard from us by 15 January 2019, please query.