Behind the Grin

To love is to lose. To write fiction is to speak truth.

Fantasy, horror, and historical fiction serials and short stories. Always 100% human-written.

An emotional scrapbook of the Internet.

Hello everybody! This where we discuss the MEAT. Stories, prompts, and anything fiction.

A people's last hope for survival is a nineteen-year-old kid who may be out of his fucking mind.

A forest witch's coven, home to 100% plant-based horror, black magic, Deadwater, and all the delights of Hell.

Sci-fi, horror, fantasy, and personal narratives that focus on the pain, beauty, and awkwardness of being human.

Horror fiction with an abundance of quiet dread and moral ambiguity.

Welcome to Planet Ral, the next gen of cultural architecture. A unified world for creators, commerce, and culture.

Genre-bending mind pits to inspire.

fiction from within the Chonyid bardo

From literary fantasy author, Thaddeus Thomas: discover fiction and improve your prose style. "I've finally found the deep dive, line-level craft essays I've been craving." -- Gemorabilia

A Caribbean woman rewriting the world through (speculative) fiction and opinion pieces. Fiction, food, and ramblings galore.

HORROR MAGIC BOOK REVIEWS NONSENSE

A collection of dark fiction. Horror stories that range from tragic, to terrifying, to absolutely absurd. Let's spiral into the darkness together.

A relentless ride through neon-drenched dreams and liminal spaces doused in diesel—set them ablaze with a read.

Fantasy fiction & discussion

Poetry ; fiction ; personal essays

Fiction is Culture. No gods, just authors. Underground lit. Ritual crit. The gospel of the broken sentence, dissected by the "Official Unofficial Editor" of the Fiction tab.

Scary stories for grown ups.

Multi-resurrected skeleton & maladaptive daydreamer in recovery. My writing: literary fiction that loves you with a knife, horror & dark fantasy stories that embrace you when you least expect it. Creator of the RPG Dewayne Hollow. They/them

Poetry, short fiction, and sound experiments

The official newsletter of horror author Dylan Bosworth, owner of Drek Death and Doom Publishing

Dark speculative fiction and psychological horror. Definitely not a cult. Not legally, anyway.

Quiet Little Journeys combines eerie dark whimsy and playful shenanigans. It's often referred to as "4:44 series". Subscribe to follow shopkeeper Orrin, his moody, sentient shop, and a bratty clay knight called Little Sir Menace on their little adventures

A newsletter providing reviews and commentary on works of literature, as well as essays, and occasional short fiction.

Writer, illustrator and collector of old clothes. I weave folklore, horror and the uncanny into short fiction, personal essays and art.

The circus is here, and you forgot to lock your door: M.P. Fitzgerald writes dark-humored sci-fi for dream criminals.

Horror fiction and random thoughts

A garden of healing and self-discovery. Where each story blooms in its own time, and shadows whisper of the light they once feared.

Horror. The cosmic and Body kind and anything else I want to write about I guess.

A void scream with legs

Stories for when you need to pass the time in the confined space of eternity.

Hello, all! I retrieve writing prompts from far-off lands where men fear to tread. My work has been featured in diverse locales, such as right here, in the substack you are currently looking at.

Wondering, as in, does anybody know what's going on? Fiction, poetry, essays, I am wandering in the dark toward some future hope. I'd like to find you there.

Fiction exploring the strange anatomy of worlds just adjacent to ours (and the human heart beating underneath it all.) Weekly stories from the edge of the possible.

‘There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion.’ -------- Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam

Ferns of Columbo is a short fiction publication experimenting with themes of identity, transformation, power dynamics and survival through a speculative lens.

the sleep that plays at death

Where the stories are dark, the stars are bright, and anything can happen.

Mysterious scribbler

Home of ANTARA, a literary anthology series set in a fictional East Asian city-state + other assorted short stories and flash fiction + REEL STORIES, an essay series on book-to-movie adaptations.

Emotionally distant cappuccino. Tried and true corn dog.

ghosting the purgatory of my own making.

Ether Dreams is a publication where I write stream of consciousness prose with a pugilist minimalist style. It's a multi-genre publication. Somewhere St. Louis.

cathexis.