The Styg, Melbourne (2026)

08/04/2026

Edition #33 ONLINE & IN COLOR PAPERBACK
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Electric Hearts by Nikki Blakely (Fiction)
Don't Feed the Squirrels by Aubrey Boneck (Fiction)
Just Run by Michelle Brett (Fiction)
Nighttime Longings by Barbara Candiotti (Art)
there are no witches by Ken Cathers (Poem)
Cheers to You by Jessica Clem (Fiction)
The Jesus Engine by Lawrence Dagstine (Fiction)
The Bite by A.J. Dalton (Poem)
Postpartum by Arvee Fantilagan (Poem)
Behind the Veil by J. Harris (Fiction)
Lost in the Forest by Andrew Harrowell (Fiction)
Vera by T. Hobbs (Fiction)
Telephone Bugs by Whitney R. Holp (Fiction)
Yolk by Nicholas Kellogg (Fiction)
The Final Wave by Andria Kennedy (Fiction)
Missed Fortune by Ngo Binh Anh Khoa (Fiction)
Juggling Multiple Writing Projects by Paul Lonardo (Article)
It's What's Inside That Counts by Jim Nemeth (Fiction)
Teeth Like Iron by Barend Nieuwstraten-III (Fiction)
Coming of Age by Davis Pratt (Fiction)
Well-preserved by Daniel A. Rabuzzi (Fiction)
Put on the Costume by Mason Ritter (Fiction)
The Arborist by Damir Salkovic (Fiction)
The Joy of Sedation Dentistry by Tony Sapienza (Fiction)
A Little Light in the Darkness by Jake Stein (Fiction)
Room Zero by Dalton Vann (Fiction)
Glitch by Kevin Holochwost and Anna Varlese (Fiction)
The Thing is Not Me by Irina Vérène (Fiction)
Just Like Granny Used to Make by Charles Williams (Fiction)
The Last Watchman's Vigil by D. Wi******er (Fiction)

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14/02/2026

McNulty's by Jacqueline Chou

Digital & print editions available.

One crossed-out date is all it takes to learn that saving a life doesn’t mean saving a future.
McNulty’s Rare Teas & Choice Coffees is the sort of shop people walk past without really seeing—until the day it sees them. When Rafael steps inside, he finds more than the scent of old wood, spices, and history. He finds a book that does not belong to this century, and an offer that feels impossibly simple.

Change one day. Just one.

What follows is not a neat fantasy of second chances, but a quiet, unsettling reckoning with memory, consequence, and love. As Rafael navigates the weight of what was, what might have been, and what now exists alongside it, the story asks a dangerous question: if you could intervene at the precise moment everything went wrong, would you—and could you live with the result?

Rooted in intimate family bonds and small, human decisions rather than spectacle, McNulty’s explores time travel as an emotional burden rather than a miracle cure. Each choice echoes. Each memory lingers. And some outcomes, once altered, reveal truths far darker than the tragedy they were meant to erase.

Subtle, haunting, and deeply human, this is a story about the cost of love—and the terrifying realisation that not all rescues are merciful.

14/02/2026

Home is Where the Heart Is by Gene Gallistel

Digital & print editions available.

Some houses keep secrets. Others keep you.

Leonard and Bonnie have done everything right—new city, new jobs, a fresh start in a house that’s affordable, well-located, and just a little bit strange. The kind of strange you can live with. The kind you tell yourself will fade once the boxes are unpacked.

But houses have memories.

As Leonard struggles with anxiety, unemployment, and a growing sense of dislocation, Bonnie throws herself into control, certainty, and order. Cracks begin to show—not just in their marriage, but in the walls, the floors, and the spaces the house seems reluctant to reveal. A stain appears where it shouldn’t. Smells linger. Flies gather. Dreams bleed into waking hours.

The longer they stay, the harder it becomes to tell where stress ends and something far older begins. The house listens. It responds. And it seems deeply invested in the people who live inside it.

Home Is Where the Heart Is is a slow-burn psychological horror about intimacy, power, and the quiet violence of resentment. It explores what happens when a relationship is already failing—and the place meant to shelter it decides to take sides.

14/02/2026

Edition #32 ONLINE & IN COLOR PAPERBACK
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Soul Usurper by Maggie D. Brace
McNulty's - Part Two by Jacqueline Chou
Home is Where the Heart Is - Part Two by Gene Gallistel
I, Nightmare by C.M. Gilbert
Fitzy's Coming by J. Edward Gregal
Makija by Bob Johnston
I Buried My Heart in the Garden by N. Kostecka
The Monster Next Door by Paul Lonardo
Marzanna's Lament by Philip Madden
Mile Marker 13 by Jacob Ransom
The Third Way by Tamara Kaye Sellman
Briar Rose by Julie Shiel
The Diet by Rebecca J. Sloop
The Man from Turkey Creek Canyon by Lee Clark Zumpe

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17/01/2026

Darkspring Hollow by Geoffrey Marsh

Digital & print editions available.

In a hollow where the light should not shine, love, family, and mercy are the first things to rot.

Everyone who grows up near Darkspring Hollow knows the stories. The strange blue light. The grinding sound that cuts through the night. The metal monolith hidden deep in the woods—older than memory, unreadable, and wrong.

For Evan, the hollow is not just a local legend. It has touched his family, reshaped his life, and forced him into a terrible, unspoken duty. In an isolated house at the end of a gravel road, Evan and those closest to him cling to fragile routines, secrecy, and love, hoping it will be enough to keep something ancient and predatory at bay.

But the hollow is stirring again.

As outsiders draw closer and the nights grow louder, the boundaries between protection and complicity begin to blur. Loyalty is tested. Mercy becomes a liability. And the question Evan has avoided for years can no longer be ignored: when corruption wears the face of someone you love, what does survival demand?

Darkspring Hollow is a bleak, visceral tale of cosmic horror and moral collapse, where family bonds are twisted by forces that do not recognise good or evil—only hunger, entropy, and the slow, inevitable unraveling of humanity.

17/01/2026

Appopolis Now by Jim Mountfield

Digital & print editions available.

In a city where everything connects, the last thing you’re allowed to disconnect is yourself.

When Philip Sheridan arrives in a meticulously ordered city-state at the height of a global pandemic, he expects efficiency, safety, and a brief quarantine before reuniting with the woman he loves. What he finds instead is a place that runs too smoothly—where technology anticipates needs before they’re spoken, and compliance is effortless, automatic… unquestioned.

Philip is an outsider in more ways than one. He distrusts devices, resists digital dependence, and clings to physical reality in a society that has quietly moved beyond it. As his body recovers from the strains of travel and illness, subtle changes begin to surface—sensations he can’t explain, coincidences that feel rehearsed, and a growing sense that privacy, choice, and even identity operate by unfamiliar rules.

Reassured by calm voices, impeccable systems, and the promise of collective safety, Philip is drawn deeper into the city’s logic—where progress is seamless, convenience absolute, and resistance increasingly unthinkable.

Appopolis Now is a chilling work of near-future science fiction that explores surveillance, bodily autonomy, and the seductive comfort of surrendering control. Stylish, unsettling, and sharply contemporary, it asks a terrifying question: when technology becomes heaven, what must humanity give up to enter?

17/01/2026

Edition #31 ONLINE & IN COLOR PAPERBACK
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08:08. by Paul Catalanotto
McNulty's - Part One by Jacqueline Chou
Scars by Bradley J. Collins
Recurring Dreams by Ely José Couto
Fidget Tunnel by Bobby Diabolus
A Contest in Dark Things by M. Frost
Home is Where the Heart Is - Part One by Gene Gallistel
Do You Want to Proceed by Ngo Binh Anh Khoa
Escape Tunnel by Sean MacKendrick
Darkspring Hollow - Part Two by Geoffrey Marsh
All Hallows’ Eve by Joan McNerney
Appopolis Now - Part Two by Jim Mountfield
With You Forever by C. W. Stevenson
In Death by Jennifer Weigel
Devour / Wither by Allison Whittenberg
Things That Don't Seem to Fit by Lee Clark Zumpe

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11/12/2025

Edition #30 ONLINE & IN COLOR PAPERBACK
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The Feast of Stephen by Diane Arrelle
The Harvest Moon by Oliver Broom
Survival by Dan Crawford
Nights Are Worst by Daniel Foley
Shooting Gallery by Andrew Kurtz
Those Damned Balls of Thorn by Tim Law
Tunnel of Love by Peter Mangiaracina
Darkspring Hollow - Part One by Geoffrey Marsh
Marooned by Steven Mathes
Gilded Hands by Augustine Miller
Appopolis Now - Part One by Jim Mountfield
The Court of Fools by Anthony D Redden
Time Lapse by Damir Salkovic
The Yule Lord by C. W. Stevenson

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23/11/2025

PAST PERFECT by PAUL HODGINS

Digital & print editions available.

When time runs backward through a haunted window, one man’s curiosity becomes a descent through history itself.
In the perfectly planned suburbs of Irvana, California, nothing should be out of place—until Trevor Langley’s dog refuses to pass one particular house.

At first, the property at 21 Rivendell looks like every other beige dream of middle-class order. Then Trevor sees himself through the window—moving backward. What begins as a curiosity quickly unravels into a terrifying discovery: the glass does not reflect, it remembers.

Each visit peels away another layer of time—decades, centuries, millennia—revealing the land’s buried past and Trevor’s own unraveling sense of reality. Suburban lawns give way to cattle plains, then oceans; ghosts of progress dissolve into primeval silence. As his obsession deepens, the professor who dismissed superstition must confront the unthinkable: that time itself may be haunting him.

Past Perfect is a sharply intelligent and deeply unsettling tale about our craving to see what lies beyond the veil of the present—an eerie meditation on history, hubris, and the cost of curiosity.

22/11/2025

THE POET LAUREATE OF DAGUS MINES by DENNIS MCFADDEN

Digital & print editions available.

When poetry meets vengeance in the heart of coal country, justice bleeds in verse.

In the coal-scarred hills of Pennsylvania, a deputy named Darling faces a murder that tears open old wounds and buried grudges. When a local woman is found dead in her small-town store, the clues lead back to a name the county hoped it had buried—Smathers, a family synonymous with violence, madness, and myth.

As Darling digs deeper into the case, he discovers that history in these hills doesn’t stay buried—it festers. The further he follows the trail, the closer he comes to a man who reads poetry between acts of brutality and believes himself the keeper of a twisted legacy.

The Poet Laureate of Dagus Mines weaves crime, folklore, and noir-grit into a chilling Appalachian elegy. McFadden’s prose—lean, lyrical, and darkly funny—captures the uneasy beauty of rural America, where the ghosts of the past still hold the living in their grip.

A haunting story of retribution, myth, and the fine line between justice and obsession.

22/11/2025

THE SURROGATE by AMI ADDAX

Digital & print editions available.

What if healing your grief meant giving your memories—and your child—to someone else?

When Ella loses her young son, she’s consumed by a grief so total it feels inescapable. Enter The Lifeboat, a clinic that promises to relieve unbearable suffering through revolutionary neural technology. Their method is simple—transfer your pain to a trained “surrogate,” who will process it for you, then return your mind healed and whole.

Sceptical but desperate, Ella signs away her agony. Her surrogate, Farah, is a professional, drilled in absorbing trauma without breaking. Yet some wounds cut deeper than science can measure. As Ella begins to feel peace, Farah starts to unravel—and both women find themselves tethered by something neither understands.

Set in a chillingly plausible near future, The Surrogate explores the cost of erasing pain, the ethics of empathy, and the dark places grief will drive us when love refuses to die. Ami Addax delivers a haunting, human story of loss, memory, and the fragile boundary between salvation and damnation.

22/11/2025

Edition #29 ONLINE & IN COLOR PAPERBACK
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This issue is dedicated to Dennis McFadden - August 21, 1943 – August 8, 2025 - A storyteller whose words linger
long after the final line.

Arrangement in Gray and Yellow by Exeter Stevens
Bunnies of the Apocalypse by Gregg Chamberlain
Crow Bait by Eric J. Juneau
Dusty Rose by Shawn D. Brink
Evening Resurrection by Nemo Arator
Lump by William Kitcher
My Great-Grandmother's Eyes by Kay Hanifen
Past Perfect - Part Three by Paul Hodgins
Selfie by Mike Murphy
Thank You for Calling by Jennifer Andrews
The Accursed Conscience by Max Bindi
The Gospel of Malachi Slim by Cleve Lamison
The One Single Drawback by Natalia Plos
The Poet Laureate of Dagus Mines - Part Three by Dennis McFadden
The Scrapbook by Bryce Thayne
The Surrogate - Part Two by Ami Addax
The Weaver's Tale by Stephen McQuiggan
When Birds Bring Bricks by Tom Busillo

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The Styg

08/04/2026

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17/01/2026

17/01/2026

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11/12/2025

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