September, 2025 Dark Fiction Short Story Markets

HWA L.A.: For September, 2025

New or Reopening Market Listings/ Notes

At Minimum Pro-Paying (5 cents+ per word)

Into the Deep, Dark Woods (anthology, edited by Kevin J. Anderson and Western Colorado University)
https://wordfirewestern.moksha.io/publication/into-the-deep-dark-woods/guidelines
Payment: 6 cents a word
Story Length: up to 5,000 words
Deadline: Open September 1 – October 15, 2025
Reprints?: No
Response: unknown
Description: Any genre, but the setting of “deep, dark woods” must be central to the story: Stories that explore the magic and mystery of the primeval wilderness, where tangled branches create a foreboding canopy… A place of fairy tales, secrets, and monsters.


Utopia SF Magazine
https://www.utopiasciencefiction.com/submit
Payment: 8 cents a word
Story Length: up to 1,000 words for flash fiction issue (normally up to 4,000 words)
Deadline: Regularly Open. See list of THEMES and associated deadlines.
Reprints?: No
Response: Up to four months
Description: See site for quarterly themes! Fiction to be “enthralling stories set in a future we want to believe in”. Mag is also interested in poetry, non-fiction, and art, all science-fiction related.


Book Worms Horror Zine, issue: Folk Horror
https://rsaintclaire.com/2025/08/05/call-for-submissions-for-our-halloween-issue/
Payment: 8 cents a word
Story Length: up to 1,500 words
Deadline: September 10, 2025
Reprints?: No
Response: unknown
Description: Folk horror—that uncanny space where ancient legends, rural isolation, and old-world rituals fester just beneath the surface of pastoral charm. Remember: Folk horror is fluid—so stretch the boundaries. Invent your own cursed villages, pagan rites, or ghost-haunted fields. Just keep it eerie, keep it folkloric, and above all, make it scary.
**Note: This publisher accepts submissions ONLY via postal mail


Tractor Beam
https://www.tractorbeam.earth/about
Payment: $1,000 flat rate
Story Length: up to 6,000 words
Deadline: October 6, 2025
Reprints?: No
Response: unknown
Description: Written and graphic works that have actionable soil-based technologies as their premise: Stories exploring a positive future on Earth with an emphasis on soil and agriculture in the winter, the productive role of ice and snow in the seasons, frost and permafrost, future fashion and style, entertainment and culture, the ocean and soil under water, soil as tech, soil as the origin of life and anti-apocalyptic futures, etc.


Three-Lobed Burning Eye
https://www.3lobedmag.com/submissions.html
Payment: 8 cents a word
Story Length: 1,000–7,500 words
Deadline: Open September 1 – September 1, 2025
Reprints?: No
Response Time: within two months
Description: Non-themed, original speculative fiction: horror, fantasy, and science fiction.


Night Shades (micro-fiction)
https://www.annareser.com/night-shades-mag/
Payment: $65 flat rate
Story Length: up to 500 words
Deadline: Currently open. Closes intermittently.
Reprints?: No
Response: unknown
Description: Non-themed speculative fiction. Sci-Fi, Fantasy, or Horror.


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

Not One of Us (small print digest)
https://legacyliteraryservices.com/not-one-of-us/
Payment: 1/4 cent a word
Story Length: soft cap at 5,000 words (hard cap at 6,000 words)
Deadline: ongoing
Reprints?: No
Response: Usually within two weeks
Description: People (or things) out of place in their surroundings, outsiders, social misfits, aliens in the SF sense—anyone excluded from society for whatever the reason. Open to horror, SF, fantasy, noir, slipstream, Western, mainstream, whatever.


Polymorphic
https://polymorphicmagazine.com/submissions/
Payment: $30 CAD flat rate
Story Length: up to 5,000 words
Deadline: Open September 1 – December 31, 2025
Reprints?: No
Response: unknown
Description: Non-themed short horror stories and art from creators around the world, illustrated and organized by a small team of Canadian visual artists; From the grotesque to the absurd, Polymorphic highlights horrors of all kinds, building a unique experience that’s sure to leave you terrified!