JournalStone

06/28/2025

OUT NOW—ORDER FROM JS BECAUSE AMAZON IS CURRENTLY BROKEN! https://journalstone.com/bookstore/show-me-where-it-hurts/

With his debut collection, Show Me Where It Hurts, Robert E. Stahl lures us into his dark world with examinations of loss, trauma, and transformation. In the thirty works of prose and poetry presented here, broken characters confront their inner darkness when unexpected events further upset their worlds—often with horrifying results.

In “The Weeds and the Wildness Yet,” a widower discovers a strange plant growing in his garden that bears an eerie resemblance to his recently departed wife. In “Ghosts on Drugs,” a down on his luck salesman is haunted by some very unusual ghosts. A boy’s first trick-or-treating experience takes a dangerous turn when a mysterious stranger tags along in “In the Night, A Whisper.” In “Evil Inc. (or How to Succeed at Business without Really Dying),” a businessman is harassed by malevolent new bosses when the company goes under new management. “A Woman’s Place” pits housewives against each other as contestants on a cruel game show in an apocalyptical future. In “The Aftermath,” an outcast schoolgirl gains a deadly new superpower after being cruelly taunted by her peers. And a directionless young barback is seduced by dark forces when the bar he works at hires an enigmatic new bartender in “The Last Night at the Black Boar Tavern.”

Ranging in genre from supernatural to psychological, the pieces collected in Show Me Where It Hurts all share fundamental qualities—somber themes, an emphasis on voice, misfit characters, and occasional bursts of optimism.

Sweet, sweet cover by Don Noble.

06/25/2025

Submissions: July 1-15. This is a lot to read so look over it carefully.

Please read the following guidelines carefully: Submissions are open from July 1st to July 15th, 2025. Submissions outside this window will be deleted unread. We want horror in all its forms—from literary to weird, Gothic to psychological, and (almost) everything in between. We’re looking for am...

06/20/2025

Gregory Frost talks the craft over at Nuts & Bolts!

https://horror.org/nuts-bolts-gregory-frost-on-writing-historically-based-fiction/

https://journalstone.com/bookstore/the-secret-house/

06/13/2025

OUT TODAY: https://journalstone.com/bookstore/the-secret-house/

“With THE SECRET HOUSE the ghost story is reborn! Gregory Frost weaves real magic in this twisted and compelling horror tale! Highly recommended.” —Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of NECROTEK and DEEP SILENCE

This is not the White House you think you know…

In 1841, less than a month after taking office, President William Henry Harrison dies, and his Vice President, John Tyler, taunted as “His Accidency,” steps into the breach before Congress can circumvent him and put someone of their choosing in his place. In retribution, Congress withholds the money for upkeep and staffing. John Tyler then populates the White House with his own Virginia house slaves, led by James Hambleton Christian, the half-brother of Tyler’s wife, Letitia.

The President’s House, the supposed “Beacon of Light,” has deteriorated into a shabby, rundown place full of broken furniture, with cracked walls, and ceilings dark with oil and coal smoke, infested with spiders. Infested also with something far more sinister.

James Christian soon learns that Harrison’s death was unnatural and that the unseen entity responsible—a product of ancient magic—is still with them in the house. It can manifest as a clotted shadow and lure people to their deaths. It wants to destroy Tyler and his entire family, beginning with his children. While Tyler deals with threats and direct existential assaults that cause him to create the first iteration of the Secret Service, James and his staff of slaves confront the monster in their midst, risking everything in a battle between ancient magics with the potential to destroy the entire nation.

Cover art by Mikio Murakami.

05/27/2025

October, November, December, January.

02/14/2025

https://journalstone.com/bookstore/haunted-ecologies/

In these fifteen stories of ecological horror and dark fantasy, Farrenkopf delves into the depths of environmental decay and cursed ecosystems, searching ancient forests for elder gods and swimming the oceans with nameless things that live in the deep.

In “Mother’s Wolves” an academic searches for her disappeared mother under the guise of a gray wolf rehabilitation study in the backwoods of Maine. In “We’ve Been in Enough Places to Know” and “Waterlogged,” an underemployed property manager on Cape Cod traverses the crumbling halls of a seaside luxury condominium as something aquatic sings to him from the flooded basement. “To Tend a Grove” is the story of an eccentric millionaire’s desire to rewild a golf course in the name of an ancient forest deity and the landscaper trapped in his verdant machinations. In “Translations for a Dead Sea” a down on her luck graphic designer retreats to her deceased father’s bayside cabin in order to translate a long-lost poem that will either save the world from environmental collapse or speed up the apocalypse. In “The Tap, Tap, Tap of a Beak” a heartbroken ornithologist must make a pilgrimage to the mountain of bones that is the final resting place for endangered species, but a shady bone collector has other plans for the deceased woodpecker she carries with her.

In these stories, three published here for the first time, we encounter ethical werewolf rearing, murderous tree cults, Weird insectile evolutions, seaside folk horror, corrupt environmental tourism, gothic forest wanderings, eternal plastic pollution, sea-bound cosmic horror, hostile swamp creatures, and the ever creeping threat of climate change. Crack the spine. Step into the trees. Wade into the water. You will always be welcome in these haunted ecologies.

“Haunted Ecologies is a collection written in a classic and melancholic voice, filled with a blend of cli-fi and academia that follows enduring families, illuminating collapsing economics and ecosystems, presenting readers with nature metaphors that symbolize the change, turbulence, and turmoil in human lives. At the core theme of these interconnected short stories is the criticism of corporate corruption, wasting landscapes that offer daunting and prophetic futures, continuing memories, things lost and changed through translation, yet it also offers hope, even with the looming end of the world.” —Ai Jiang, Bram Stoker and Nebula award-winning author of Linghun

Cover art by Mikio Murakami.

02/03/2025

FORTHCOMING:

Blade Runner's smog-choked skies meet the grimy, crime-ridden streets of Strange Days and the inhuman horror of Videodrome in twelve neon-bathed tales of destruction, terror, and human nature.

DEAD NEON BLUES by Kam Whinery, October 2025.

01/24/2025

OUT TODAY and y’all, it’s a banger.

“God?”

“Not in the Biblical sense. An older sense.” Cat steadied her voice with another mouthful of gin. “The Wild Hunt is more akin to the Neolithic Death Mother of Malta. Aganju, who cultivated cities in the Nigerian desert. Leshy, who lived in Slavic forests.”

Cat’s fingers tapped nervously on the leatherbound tome. “It’s here in New York. It cannot be reasoned with—”

“I’m supposed to believe this?” Jordan said.

“It doesn’t matter what you believe. Once marked, no one escapes the Wild Hunt.” Cat’s laugh was hollow. “You can only placate it. Give it what it wants and avert your eyes.”

“And what’s that?” Jordan asked. “Worship?”

“Yes, and from the little we know, what is its ritual?”

“The Hunt.”
___________________

Imbued with European myth, All the Teeth in the World uses horror to explore the binding power of adult friendships in the face of implacable evil. Leslie Ward entered the woods with a noose in hand, intending to end it all, only to emerge a week later with no memory of what happened. Now terrified of the wilderness, he flees to New York City with his close friend Percy…but the mythical Wild Hunt is following, and it wants another taste of Leslie.

https://journalstone.com/bookstore/all-the-teeth-in-the-world/

Cover art by Nicholas Day with Don Noble.

11/04/2024

Where it all started 😅📚

09/27/2024

OUT TODAY: https://journalstone.com/bookstore/bitter-breed/

“Bitter Breed showcases Dino Parenti’s unique talent of writing smart horror with nuanced characters. He unearths the secrets of this cinematic story with amazing skill.” —Mercedes M. Yardley, two-time Bram Stoker Award winner of Little Dead Red and “Fracture.”

An elderly couple who’ve fled tragedy in the city for solitude in the Canadian Rockies…

Two violent ex-cons on a mission to bust out one of their crew from a prison bus…

Three scientists fleeing a clandestine military laboratory where dozens of their monstrous, aggressive creations have escaped…

These lives are about to collide in a remote mountain diner in Last Chance, Yukon.

Trapped inside the Last Chance Grill and cut off by a looming snowstorm, seven strangers find themselves surrounded by deadly, radically enhanced humanoid creatures designed to thrive in extreme climates, and who have tracked down their creators. Chief of these is the stoic but anguished Dr. Amos Huber, hired by a government splinter group to employ his genius in militarized experiments involving climate change. Crushed by the death of his only child, Amos struggles to reconcile his secretive past while also trying to band together the disparate, clashing group of scientists, diners, and determined ex-cons holding everyone hostage. If they can survive the night when the creatures are their strongest, most cunning, and hungriest, they might be able to summon help and prevent their excursion into more populated areas.

BITTER BREED is not just a last-stand eco-horror survival thriller, but also an examination of regret, grief, and future anxieties.

(Cover art by Don Noble)