JournalStone

12/05/2025

https://journalstone.com/bookstore/snow-black/

“SNOW BLACK is a classic horror thriller about a small, isolated town, a fierce blizzard, and a monster. It calls to mind stories like DARK WAS THE NIGHT, PHANTOMS, and 30 DAYS OF NIGHT. It has all the creepy shocks and fun you’d ever want! Thom Erb sticks the landing on this spooky tale!” —Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of NECROTEK: COLD WAR and RED EMPIRE

WHEN THE STORM CAME… IT DIDN’T COME ALONE.

Sterling Point presents a deceptive calm. Beneath its quaint Western New York exterior lurks ancient malice, recently disturbed by hunters who didn’t know what they were awakening. Now it hungers, and the town will pay the price.

For Mitchell Roberts, a writer gaining recognition, his mother’s death forces an unwelcome homecoming. The brutal nor’easter trapping him in Sterling Point seems fitting—nature’s fury mirroring his emotional turmoil. But the storm brings something worse than snow.

As the entity’s influence spreads, residents vanish. Survival becomes uncertain. Mitchell finds himself uniquely positioned to confront this threat, though he barely understands his connection to it.

The body count climbs with each passing hour. Mitchell must navigate both personal ghosts and literal monsters, piecing together fragments of local lore while staying alive.

This is Sterling Point’s darkest hour—where everyday reality tears open to reveal supernatural horrors. Mitchell’s journey becomes a desperate race against an ancient evil that has waited centuries for this moment. The question remains: will anything remain of Sterling Point when the darkness finally lifts?

Cover by Drew Brayshaw and Thom Erb.

11/14/2025

https://journalstone.com/bookstore/dark-roots/

“Sheldon Higdon takes us down some shadowy roads with Dark Roots! This creepy thriller takes weird, wild, and shocking twists and turns. Grab this!” —Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of Red Empire and Ghosts of the Void

“This is a nasty coiled-up snake of a novel with plenty of venom in its bite.” —Four-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author Tim Waggoner

When Benjamin Cole’s 83-yr-old father commits su***de, he’s thrust into a dark family secret that had been hiding in plain sight. With the task of selling the old family farm, repressed memories and chilling discoveries force him to confront the horrors that lie inside it.

But when his girlfriend’s son is kidnapped, Benjamin must figure out what is reality and who is family. Because in order to save the child, Benjamin will have to learn the truth of his father—and who Benjamin himself is.

Cover art by Mikio Murakami.

10/24/2025

OUT TODAY:

(Editor’s note: if you like stories about the monstrousness of humanity, boy, is this collection for you!)

“Authentically unnerving. An uneasy pleasure to read” —Ramsey Campbell, author of The Influence and The Doll Who Ate His Mother

John S. McFarland’s new horror collection, Burned Man at Night, continues the cursed history of the forgotten village of Ste. Odile. Damned from its very inception on the banks of the Mississippi in 1699, the town’s demons, ghosts and lost misfits are the collateral damage of the intrusion of the dark forces enslaving and terrorizing its inhabitants for generations. In the tale “Oriax of Hell,” a seriously injured man is rebuilt as a horrific experiment and chooses a path of evil after saving a child. In “The Origin of the World,” a psychopath is made supervisor of an orphanage. In “Burned Man at Night,” a folk demon known to central European villagers is summoned to avenge immigrant families against some murderous natives of Ste. Odile.

With cover art by RF Pangborn and interior artwork by John S. McFarland.

https://journalstone.com/bookstore/burned-man-at-night/

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/