April, 2024 Dark Fiction Short Story Markets

HWA L.A.: For April, 2024
New or Reopening Market Listings/ Notes
At Minimum Pro-Paying (5 cents+ per word)

Solarpunk Magazine
https://solarpunkmagazine.com/submissions/
Payment: 8 cents a word
Story Length: 500–7,500 words (a preference between 1,500–3,000)
Open From: April 1, 2024–April 14, 2024
Reprints?: No
Response: Generally within 60 days
Description: Stories that strive for a utopian ideal, that are set in futures where communities are optimistically struggling to solve or adapt to climate change, to create or maintain a world in which humanity, technology, and nature coexist in harmony rather than in conflict, etc. Also open to poetry and non-fiction.


Cursed Cooking: A Horror Community Cookbook and Food Horror Anthology
https://www.cateyepress.com/submissions
Payment: 5 cents a word (1 cent/word for reprints)
Story Length: up to 4,000 words
Deadline: April 30, 2024
Reprints?: Yes
Response: unknown
Description: cookbook and food horror anthology, featuring both real-world recipes and food horror fiction; tales of haunted hamburgers, killer chocolate chip cookies, monstrous manicotti, world-ending wontons, and everything in between. Cook up a story filled with genetically modified grossness, fast-food freakiness, or homemade horrors. Get creative. Get hungry. Think outside the pizza box. But also, send us the recipes that you love, recipes that make your mouth water and have people screaming for seconds (and thirds and fourths).


Offshoots: Humanity Twigged (Third Flatiron)
https://thirdflatiron.com/
Payment: 8 cents a word
Story Length: 1,500–3,000 words
Open From: April 1, 2024–April 21, 2024
Reprints?: No
Response: by June 15, 2024
Description: SF, fantasy, positive futures: The dictionary defines “twig” as a shoot branching off a tree, the result or descendant of something, or a style of fashion. How will humanity cultivate the strongest branches from among myriad potential futures? Please give us your science fictional and fantasy speculations. Possible subjects might include: bioengineering, space exploration, future societies, magical futurism, and extrapolation of trends (think Asimov’s Foundation or Loki’s Sacred Timeline). Stories about effects of AI and virtual reality are fine, but they must be written by people. Flash humor is welcome.


Reckoning Vol. 9
https://reckoning.press/reckoning-9-submission-call/
Payment: 10 cents a word
Story Length: up to 20,000 words
Deadline: September 22, 2024
Reprints?: Query first
Response: 1 to 6 months
Description: Creative writing about environmental justice and social activism; any aspect of environmental justice, from food sovereignty to ocean plastics to industrial cleanup to Indigenous rights, we want to see it. Diverse fiction stories (and poetry) including a speculative element: Searingly personal, visceral, idiosyncratic understanding of the world and the people in it as it has been, as it is, as it will be, as it could be.


Dracula Beyond Stoker: Issue 5: Lucy’s Suitors - Quincey, Jack, and/or Arthur
https://www.dbspress.com/submissions
Payment: 5 cents a word
Story Length: 1,500–5,000 words
Open From: May 1, 2024–June 15, 2024
Reprints?: Yes (if older than 10 years) (and paid flat rate of $55)
Response: Unknown, but reported as generally between 30 and 60 days.
Description: The best new fiction based on Stoker’s characters, locations, and themes. This issue: Let’s read some stories of these men - together, individually, in combination - before, during, and after the events of the novel?


Flash Fiction Online
https://ffo.submittable.com/submit
Payment: $100 flat
Story Length: 500 to 1,000 words
Deadline: Open from the 1st to 21st of each month (or until reaching the cap of 1,000 submissions) (only)
Reprints?: Yes (payment at 2 cents/ word)
Response: Within eight weeks
Description: A very short but complete story of flash fiction. Strong, interesting characters: APRIL’s SUBMISSION IS FOR SPECIAL ISSUE OF WEIRD HORROR. Stories that engage with the unexplained and the unexpected, often through an esoteric lens of mysticism and metaphysics.



***Non-PRO-Paying Market, but Eric J. Guignard’s “Pick of the Month”

Costs of Living (published by Whisper House Press)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N0nLj70ZKbZLiucLZyvC5ojpjhnE3JC43fip_nNZhSg/edit
Payment: $25 flat
Story Length: 500–4,000 words
Deadline: unclear (until full)
Reprints?: No
Response: 45 days
Description: carefully constructed Horror stories with a focus on the oft-unclear distinction between a scary-enough reality and our less-or-more-frightening imagination, both in personal and social realms.


Children of the Blind Owl (Sentinel Creatives)
https://mailchi.mp/2ece83d25ded/children-of-the-blind-owl-submissions-page
Payment: $150 - $250 flat
Story Length: 3,000–6,000 words
Deadline: August 31, 2024
Reprints?: No
Response: unknown
Description: Original weird tales and essays set in the Middle East that explore the human (and inhuman) experience through the lens of weird fiction and horror.