Announcements
Acquisitions from the 2022 Horror Novella Submissions Call
Featuring works by E.L. Chen, J. Weintraub/Nicola Lombardi, Amanda J. McGee, J.V. Gachs, and Emma Osborne
Interstellar Flight Press is delighted to announce the acquisitions from our 2022 Horror Novellas Submissions call. As the Managing Editor, I would like to thank everyone who submitted to us. This was a particularly complex call, as I came down with Covid in the midst of the submission call.
There are so many fantastic voices in horror right now, and I am delighted to be publishing these terrifying novellas. I would also like to extend my thanks to guest editor Lee Murray for helping us select these titles. Lee Murray is a powerful voice in horror. We absolutely would not be able to do these submission calls without our guest editors. We also thank our starship of volunteers who help with slush reading and keep me on track!
Lastly, we are always grateful for those patrons who support us via Patreon. If you sign up for just $1/month, you get access to early cover reveals, exclusive interviews, and our Discord chat.
First, Some Updates
For this call, I opted not to send a submitter survey. The main reason is that we have not seen enough participation in the past to ensure the data is accurate. For this reason, I will be shifting to including these questions as optional questions on future submission forms.
Secondly, we are in the process of revamping our submission process. Given the current state of publishing with AI as an emerging force, I have chosen to focus in 2023 on catching up on our publishing schedule and researching new modes of ensuring we publish the very best (human!) work.
We like to collect data on our submission process for interested writers. Our average response time was down for this call despite many setbacks, which makes me quite proud of our team and the support they provide.
We are always juggling the desire to send as many personal responses as we can to authors whose work we enjoyed with our response speed.
There are a lot of factors that go into selecting a book. We wanted a group of authors who represent some of the best writers in horror right now. We read each submission carefully, considering whether they are right for us.
All of our submissions are processed blind, i.e., with identifying information (names, bios) removed. Once a manuscript is bumped, it is always read by the managing editor(s) and/or guest editor. Also, if a manuscript is bumped, we send it to a second reader to get a second opinion. If it is bumped a second time, it may go to a third and fourth reader. In the case where we (the editors) know a submitter personally, we will usually get multiple reader opinions.
As always, we’ll be striving to make our submitter statistics more diverse and reflective of the world we live in. We will continue to push for gender parity in submissions. We will continue to solicit work from writers of color, women, writers with disabilities, and LGBTQ writers. I am always interested in feedback from submitters and members of the SFF community as to how we can improve.
If you’d like to support what we do, please consider joining our Patreon. We have a thriving community of writers on our Discord and love meeting new fans.
Submission Data: Acceptances, Rejections, etc.
- We received 190 submissions for this call.
- We selected 10 submissions for our final round (which were read by our guest editor).
- 5 books were selected for publication. We sent 1 revise and resubmit request.
- 10 submissions were withdrawn (This number appears higher than usual, but on average with past calls given the number of submissions.)
- Our average response time for this call was 86 days.
- Our fastest turnaround was 2 days.
- Our longest response was 236 days (These were primarily from the top 10 held submissions). This is about 60 days faster than our previous call.
- 19 submissions were “bumped” from the slush reader pile. (This is an estimate, it is harder to calculate this one because the editors sometimes choose to bump a piece too!)
- 6 submissions were rejected for not following our guidelines (explicitly not horror genre, not being fiction.)
Interstellar Flight Press is an independent small press. If you love what we do, we hope you’ll consider supporting us via Patreon. This helps us to pay our writers more and continue to publish amazing books. Small presses fill the gap by publishing works that wouldn’t get published otherwise.
Our guest editor has kindly provided some feedback on the process and on each submission accepted:
Guest Editor’s Note by Lee Murray
It was an honor to guest edit Interstellar Flight Press’ 2022–2023 novella call, a task which caused me both pleasure and pain — pleasure because of the incredible breadth and depth of dark fiction and horror works assembled, and pain because while I would like to have selected many more of your darkly weird fiction tales, budget and time constraints meant that wasn’t feasible. That said, I’d like to thank everyone who submitted their work to this call. I thoroughly enjoyed reading these chilling tales, comprising horror from across the spectrum, from cozy to unease to macabre body horror, and across the subgenres, including, for example, mystery, science fiction, fantasy, and dystopian. At times, I forgot I was supposed to be assessing the work at all, simply losing myself in the steaming entrails, charming villains, and weird worlds. While Holly and the team gave me no specific criteria to consider, I looked for stories with strong story arcs, complex characters, and deeply resonant themes, choosing tales that hooked me from the get-go and kept me turning the pages.
Congratulations to all the authors whose works were selected. Thank you for sharing your work with me. I can’t wait to see your stories in print. Everyone else, please put these titles on your must-read list now.
Without further ado, here are the horror novellas we accepted!
Club Magritte by Nicola Lombardi, Translated from the Italian by J. Weintraub
Notes on Club Magritte from our Guest Editor, Lee Murray: This can’t-look-away weird tale begins a little like an urban crime-noir, with its naïve grimdark character who cannot pay his debts but quickly devolves into something macabre and twisted. Written in a traditional style perfectly suited to the gothic nature of the narrative and with some truly scary elements, the story features themes of social inequality and betrayal. I love the ‘surreal’ metaphor of Magritte here since things are clearly not all they seem throughout this little page-turner. Not for the squeamish!
About the Author and Translator
Nicola Lombardi is an active participant in the Horror Writers Association. He has published in Italy the novels The Gypsy Spiders, Black Mother, Night Calls, The Red Bed, The Tank, and Strigarium, as well as seven collections of stories since 1989. In addition, he has published novelizations from the films of Dario Argento (Profondo Rosso and Suspiria) and translated works by Jack Ketchum, Seabury Quinn, Charlee Jacob, F.B. Long, and many others for the Italian market. Several of his stories have appeared in English, including in the anthologies The Beauty of Death: I & II. In 2021 Tartarus Press published his collection The Gypsy Spiders and Other Tales of Italian Horror. (“Lovers of postwar narratives and surrealist horror won’t want to miss this.” — Publishers Weekly). Full bibliography at www.nicolalombardi.com.
J. Weintraub has published fiction, essays, and poetry in all sorts of literary places, from The Massachusetts Review to New Criterion. A member of the Dramatists Guild, he has had short plays, radio dramas, and podcasts produced throughout the world. As a translator, he has introduced the Italian horror writer Nicola Lombardi to English-speaking readers, and his edition of Lombardi’s The Gypsy Spiders and Other Tales of Italian Horror was published by UK’s Tartarus Press in late 2021. In 2018, his annotated translation of Eugène Briffault’s Paris à table: 1846 was published by Oxford UP. More at https://jweintraub.weebly.com/
A River Wide by Amanda J. McGee
Notes on A River Wide from our Guest Editor, Lee Murray: A beautifully dark tale of society’s demonization of women through the lens of witch mythology and set under the Appalachian Mountains, I devoured this gorgeous novella. An understated horror narrative with important themes of trauma and otherness and ‘enchanting’ prose, which put me in mind of Lauren Elise Daniels’ Serpent’s Wake, this one was an easy pick for me. Featuring small-town insularity with all its simmering undercurrents, the story is populated with pop-off-the-page characters who resonate for their fallibility and their authenticity.
About the Author
Amanda J. McGee is a planner by day and a writer by night. She has degrees from Hollins University and Virginia Tech, where she studied languages, identity politics, policy, and infrastructure. She is the author of the dark epic fantasy series The Creation Saga and is an Art Matters Grant recipient, a program of the City of Roanoke and the National Endowment of the Arts. Her novella “Viridian” was published in the anthology A SINISTER QUARTET, which made the 2020 Locus Recommended Reading List.
When not writing, Amanda can be found reading books or hiking mountains, depending on the season. She lives in Southwest Virginia with the love of her life, two fluffy cats, and a plethora of plants. You can find out more on her website at http://amandajmcgee.com.
The Beast You’ve Made of Me by Emma Osborne.
Notes on The Beast You’ve Made of Me from our Guest Editor, Lee Murray. Who doesn’t love a zombie tale? Not your typical zombie narrative, The Beast You’ve Made of Me revolves around the protagonist’s slow ‘undead’ degeneration into something less than human and in some ways, is reminiscent of Mike Carey’s The Girl With All the Gifts. I loved the first-person approach and the deep character insights on themes of abuse, neglect, and, ultimately, self-awareness and self-actualization in the face of society’s breakdown. The importance of memories as being an essential part of our make-up also contributed to the magic of this gruesome little tale.
About the Author
Emma Osborne is a queer fiction writer and poet from Melbourne, Australia. Their writing has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Shock Totem: Tales of the Macabre and Twisted, Apex Magazine, Queers Destroy Science Fiction, Pseudopod, the Review of Australian Fiction, the Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror, GlitterShip, HOMETOWN HAUNTS, edited by Poppy Nwosu and WASTELANDS 3, edited by John Joseph Adams.
Emma is a graduate of the 2016 Clarion West Writers Workshop (Team Arsenic forever!). They are an Aurealis Award and Australian Shadows award finalist.
Emma lives in Naarm Melbourne with their girlfriend and many cats. You can find them on Twitter at @redscribe.
I Could Be Your Family Too by E.L. Chen
Notes on I Could Be Your Family Too from our Guest Editor, Lee Murray: This hotel/house on the edge of the woods story has a distinctly Psycho feel to it, but it also has a little of a Hallmark Christmas tale, offering creeping dread and unease, sprinkled with blue eyes and early morning coffee. Such a strange blend, this mix of nice and not-so-nice, the reader is never quite sure who to be most scared of here. With its underlying anti-Asian sentiment and the small-town approach to the pandemic, this story felt frighteningly plausible to me.
About the Author
E. L. Chen is the author of The Good Brother and Summerwood/Winterwood, the latter of which was longlisted for the Sunburst and recommended as a Best Book for Kids and Teens by the Canadian Children’s Book Centre. Her short fiction has been published in venues such as Strange Horizons, On Spec, Lackington’s, and The Dark. She lives in Toronto, Canada, with her son.
Spooky Lovers by J.V. Gachs
Notes on Spooky Lovers from our Guest Editor, Lee Murray: If there is such a thing as cozy horror, then this is it. A mix of intrigue and humor, this contemporary serial killer tale, with its themes of revenge and redemption, was an easy read and highly entertaining. An empowering and uplifting twist on the traditional final girl trope, Spooky Lovers gives new meaning to the notion of being ghosted on a dating app.
J.V. Gachs is a Spanish classicist, and writer, currently working as a Latin teacher. Writing in English and Spanish her work has been featured in anthologies like Scott J. Moses’ What One Wouldn’t Do and Chelsea Pumpkins’ AHH! That’s What I Call Horror! Her first novel, Epiphany, will be released by Off Limits Press in December 2023. Obsessed with sudden death, ghosts, and female villains, she always writes with a cat (or two) in her lap.
Interstellar Flight Magazine publishes essays on what’s new in the world of speculative genres. In the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, we need “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.” Visit our Patreon to join our fan community on Discord. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
