Malefic Magazine seeks literary horror and speculative fiction — and the visual art that lives in the same shadows — exploring the darker territories of human experience through elegant prose, psychological depth, and images that disturb long after the eye moves on. We invite submissions that illuminate the spaces between what we know and what we fear — stories and art that find terror in life’s embrace.
WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR
We seek work that lingers in the mind long after the final page — or the final glance. Tales and images that disturb through subtlety rather than shock, that find terror in the familiar, and that treat horror as a legitimate means of examining the human condition. Think The Haunting of Hill House, not Friday the 13th. Think “The Fall of the House of Usher,” not Saw. We want fiction that whispers rather than screams — and art that makes the whisper visible.
Horror themes we’re drawn to:
Isolation’s grip — The terrible intimacy of being trapped with others, or utterly alone. Severed communications, unreachable help, the slow erosion of the self when the outside world falls away.
The predatory environment — When landscape itself becomes malevolent. Nature not as backdrop but as antagonist. The wilderness that watches back.
The psychology of darkness — How prolonged darkness reshapes the mind. The slow dissolution of certainty. What lives in the spaces between sleeping and waking.
Buried secrets — What the earth keeps. What surfaces uninvited. What should have stayed hidden and didn’t.
The familiar turned sinister — Horror lurking beneath domestic surfaces, seasonal traditions, family gatherings. The monster you recognize.
Ancient things — Presences that predate human understanding. The weight of history on a place. What the land remembers.
The unreliable self — Identity fracturing under pressure. Memory as betrayer. The horror of not trusting your own perception.
Threshold moments — Grief, loss, madness, obsession as doorways into darkness.
WHAT WE DON’T WANT
Shock over substance — Gore, gratuitous violence, and graphic content deployed for reaction rather than narrative purpose. Every dark element — written or visual — must earn its place through emotional truth and story necessity.
Genre without craft — Slasher fiction, torture narratives, and splatterpunk are legitimate genres — they’re simply not ours. Malefic is a literary publication first.
Lazy supernatural — Ghosts, demons, and monsters that exist only to frighten rather than to illuminate something true about the human condition. We want the creature that means something.
Explained horror — Stories or images that over-describe, over-justify, or resolve their darkness too neatly. What lingers in the peripheral vision is almost always more effective than what stands in full light.
Derivative voices — We love Poe and Jackson as much as anyone. We don’t need more Poe and Jackson. We need the writer — and the artist — who has absorbed those masters and arrived somewhere new.
Horror as backdrop — Dark elements that feel decorative rather than integral. If the horror could be removed without changing the story’s or image’s heart, it isn’t really there.
Nihilism without purpose — Darkness for its own sake, without the redemptive quality of genuine artistic intent.
LITERARY AND VISUAL ANCESTRY
We draw inspiration from the masters of atmospheric dread: Algernon Blackwood’s “The Wendigo,” Jack London’s merciless “To Build a Fire,” Michelle Paver’s haunting Dark Matter. Visually, we are drawn to the unsettling quietude of Edward Hopper, the grotesque tenderness of Francis Bacon, the liminal dread of Zdzisław Beksiński. These works understand that the most lasting horror comes from exquisite craft married to genuine terror.
Every frightening element must earn its place through narrative necessity and emotional truth.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES — WRITTEN WORK
- Fiction: 500–5,000 words
- Poetry: Up to 5 poems per submission
- Creative Nonfiction: 500–3,000 words (horror-adjacent essays, memoir pieces that explore fear, darkness, the psychological weight of the unknown)
- Format: Standard manuscript format, double-spaced, 12pt Times New Roman
- Simultaneous Submissions: Accepted — please notify us immediately upon acceptance elsewhere
- Multiple Submissions: Please limit to one submission per reading period
- Rights: First serial rights, with all rights reverting to the author upon publication
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES — VISUAL ART
Malefic welcomes visual work in all forms — traditional painting and drawing, photography, digital illustration, mixed media, and AI-generated imagery. We are interested in the vision, not the tool.
- All visual formats accepted: JPEG, PNG, TIFF, PDF
- Minimum resolution: 300 DPI, print-ready
- Up to 5 images per submission
- All work must be original
- AI-generated work must be disclosed as such in your cover letter — we welcome it transparently, not anonymously
- Rights: First serial rights, with all rights reverting to the artist upon publication
HOW TO SUBMIT
Send all submissions — written and visual — to: malefic.magazine@gmail.com
Subject Line: SUBMISSION: [Title] by [Author/Artist Name]
Please include:
- Brief cover letter (100 words or less)
- Author or artist bio (50 words or less)
- For written work: manuscript attached as .doc, .docx, or .rtf
- For visual work: image files attached or linked via a cloud service
- For AI-generated work: disclosure and brief description of tools and process used
Malefic Magazine is a quarterly literary horror publication from Sepulchre Press, an imprint of Barking Dog Media USA LLC. We believe horror is one of literature’s most honest and necessary forms. We publish work that proves it.