JournalStone

10/16/2025

https://journalstone.com/bookstore/dead-neon-blues/

In the seventy-first millennium, civilization as we know it is gone. Left to sift through the rubble of what once was? A lone Pilgrim. You, in search of answers. With your clan long dead, you find yourself cursed with immortality, leaving you to ponder gnawing questions all on your own. What happened? Why did everything collapse? Why couldn’t we stop it? And, most importantly, who were we before it all collapsed around us?

When you stumble upon an old Library from the American Preservation Society, a building archiving the memories of the people before the end, you believe you might finally have the answers you’ve sought for so, so long.

Twelve stories from the dystopian Earth, all sure to culminate in what was surely the end of the world. Or, perhaps, the end of what we knew to be the world.

“Cyborgs, a computer compiled with datadiscs recording all of humanity’s history, and Arthur Pendragon all in the same book? I think I just discovered a new drug and I’m addicted. This book was crazy good and I’ve never read anything like it before.” —Nora B. Peevy, author of For the Sake of Brigid

Cover art by Don Noble, introduction by Mer Whinery.

09/29/2025

Friendly reminder that if I send you a contract to look at, don’t return it with the royalty rates changed and a “clause” added to give you an advance we haven’t agreed to. (There was no agent in this process.)

Your offer will be rescinded and you will be blacklisted. I’m female, not stupid.

I swear, it’s something every year.

09/22/2025

Submission responses have begun to go out, including a few contract offers.

I’m going to be out until Thursday, resting my eyes and hands, so if you have questions, hold on to them a *little* longer.

Thank you for your patience.

09/20/2025

OUT NOW: SONGS OF SHADOW, WORDS OF WOE

“A f**king beauty of a book, every story brilliant.” —Kaaron Warren, award-winning author of The Underhistory

The beach where his teenage sister disappeared / Time and dream melt in the mouth of deep weird—
An open mic night bears witness to a fury / A life-changing performance before a dread jury—
A truck stop photo by a touring punk bassist / A chase across the country and her most personal places—
Seven friends mourn a beloved q***r icon / A final bequest unleashes the deepest dark of an eidolon…

Songs of shadow, words of woe!

A lonely film student attends a free indie screening / Will this obscure flick bring the end he’s dreaming?
Two wilful women climb a hill to watch a storm / And learn their town’s history of racism and scorn—
Grotesque gangsters in a burlesque club dive / Trouble erupts when a new player arrives—
Invited to experience true terror, not a relic / A horror film fan runs through a theatre derelict…

Songs of shadow, words of woe!

Thirteen morbidly melodic deep cuts from Matthew R. Davis, including the Australasian Shadows Award-winning “Steadfast Shadowsong” and the Shirley Jackson Award-nominated novelette “Heritage Hill.”

“Elegant, frightening, and so delightfully strange, this isn’t just a collection—it’s a cabal.” —Aaron Dries, author of Dirty Heads and A Place for Sinners

“A powerhouse collection filled with rock and roll, the uncanny, the unsettling and the all-out terrifying. A few stories had me looking over my shoulder to see what was lurking in the dark corners of my room.” —Jo Kaplan, Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of When the Night Bells Ring

https://journalstone.com/bookstore/songs-of-shadow-words-of-woe/

Cover by Don Noble.

09/13/2025

OUT NOW:

“Loaded with Egyptian lore and s*x magick, with horrific imagery and curses (and plagues) that will haunt your nightmares, W.D. Gagliani and David Benton’s Acolytes of the Dead is an erotic feast that will take you places you’ve never been, and show you things you’ve never seen. Couched in classic heart-pounding horror, this is an intelligent, erotic, and terrifying Gothic tale—its unrelenting climactic fireworks will leave you gasping!” —Tamara Thorne, author of the Old Wives’ Tales series

From the combined twisted mind of David Benton and W.D. Gagliani––authors of Splatterpunk Award nominee Killer Lake––comes this enticing new novel of magick and terror.

S*x scandal-ridden, washed-up Egyptologist James Blackstone takes a lucrative live-in job writing eccentric billionaire Alton Chambers’ autobiography and––of much more importance to his employer––translating hieroglyphs from a secret Egyptian tomb.

But Blackstone soon discovers that there is nothing normal about the Chambers family or their mysterious, phantasmagorical mansion. His very sanity will be tested by the bizarre members of the family and their s*x magick practices. Will their unholy desires be their undoing… or will they be his? The strange goings-on in and under the mansion, a lust for both death and immortality, and the awakening of ancient evil, will cause Blackstone to question everything he knows, or thinks he knows.

Full of extreme hedonism, hidden agendas, and timeless manipulation… Acolytes of the Dead is a novel of intense erotic terror––a surrealistic, transgressive Egyptian gothic riff on Dracula.

Cover art by Mikio Murakami.

https://journalstone.com/bookstore/acolytes-of-the-dead/

08/27/2025

Submission responses will start going out in mid-September for JournalStone and Trepidatio.

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.