Submission Call: The Whispering Gallery
Ghost Willow Press is a new indie publisher run by me, Mathew Gostelow. We’ll be launching with a collection of my own short stories in Spring/Summer 2025, followed by a charity anthology entitled The Whispering Gallery in the Autumn.
The Whispering Gallery will feature ‘quiet horror’ short stories and flash fictions, collected in ebook and paperback editions, with all proceeds donated to Mind, a mental health charity in the UK.
We want to fill this anthology with your incredible stories — your slow burners, your creeping dread, your atmospheric hauntings, unexplained events, and unsettling characters.
Mood over gore. Chills over spatter.
Give us existential angst, psychology laid bare, emotional resonance, and grief. Give us trauma manifested as a weird presence in the woods, troubled narrators descending into mania, and Gothic locations with tragedy chiselled into every stone.
We want glimpses of terror, shadows of ungodly things lurking in the fog. We want uncanny animals, unreliable narrators and unwelcome visitors.
Introduce us to seances and spirits, dwellers on the threshold, monsters half-imagined in the fuzzy dim of twilight. Show us the invisible things that chased you up the stairs when you were young.
How to submit:
Send us flash fiction and short stories. Aim for 500-2,500 words. We’ll accept 450-2,750 — but those outliers better be good!
Submissions will open on January 1st, 2025, and close on February 28th, 2025.
Decisions will be made by the end of March, 2025 and we will aim to get the book out before Halloween, 2025.
Submit your story by email to ghostwillowpress@gmail.com
In the subject line, please state: SUBMISSION: AUTHOR NAME - TITLE (for example: SUBMISSION: Stephen King - The Jaunt).
In the body of your email, please include a short author bio, written in the 3rd person, running to no more than 100 words.
Attach your submission as a Word document (.doc or .docx). Please name the file AUTHOR NAME - TITLE (for example Stephen King - The Jaunt).
Reprints accepted, as long as you own the rights to the story.
[NB: Please state in the body of your email if the story is a reprint, including details of the original publication.]
Multiple submissions are fine. But think it through before bombarding us. We’re a small team. Send your very best — the work that fits our quiet horror theme most closely.
Simultaneous submissions are encouraged, but please inform us by email at the earliest opportunity if you need to withdraw your story.
As this is a charity project, contributors will not be paid, but will receive a digital/PDF copy of the anthology.
What we’re looking for:
The best quiet horror deals in understatement. Restraint. Suggestion. Steady pacing. We want to be scared and freaked out, but we want you to do it without resorting to schlock and gore.
That’s not to say your story should be strictly PG-13. Or that you can’t include zombies, violence, and vampires. But, if you are deploying those horror tropes, we want you to use them in unexpected ways. Catch us unawares. Chill us, rather than grossing us out.
Oh, and quiet horror doesn’t mean non-scary horror. We want to be terrified. Unsettle us with mood, psychology, atmosphere, the sheer weirdness of your story.
On the other hand, quiet horror can absolutely mean non-scary horror. Take those horror elements and hit our feels in new, unexpected ways. Make us sad at the plight of your monsters. Make us care about the demented scientist’s self-destructive research. Make us fall in love with the eldritch creatures lurking in your basement.
Examples of quiet horror:
We wanted to give you a “mood board” of stories and videos that hit the kind of notes we’re looking for. Obviously this list is far from exhaustive, but hopefully these examples demonstrate the breadth and scope of quiet horror as a genre. We can’t wait to see where you take us.
The Hospice, by Robert Aickman. (Read here, by Gideon Coe.) This incredible, dreamlike story is an object lesson in creeping dread. Every detail is just slightly “off”. Like a room with a subtly-slanted floor, it keeps the reader off balance throughout, without the need for spiky monsters or axe-murderers.
The Winkie’s Diner Scene from Mulholland Drive. (Watch it here.) This scene is a self-contained masterpiece. It’s just two people talking and walking for a few minutes, in broad daylight, in the most innocuous setting, and yet the cumulative effect is utterly terrifying. “I hope that I never see that face, ever outside of a dream.”
The Summer People by Shirley Jackson. (Read it online, here.) A beautiful slow burn of unsettling understatement — Jackson’s story does so much with so little. Tiny details build and build towards the final chilling image of a couple huddled in the dark, resigned to their fate.
The Beach Scene from Under The Skin. (Watch it here.) Steadily-paced, almost mundane, playing out to an utterly chilling conclusion, this scene is a masterclass. All the elements are familiar, yet shot through with tension and strangeness. True horror and not a jump scare in sight.
The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe. (Read it online, here.) A sumptuous, head-swimming cocktail of poetic prose, paranoia and premature burial — proof that supernatural elements absolutely have a place in quiet horror. This story is a classic for a reason — with the oppressive mood of the house and the mania of Roderick Usher creating an air of unbearably jangly anticipation, leading to a profoundly weird conclusion.
Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad by M R James. (Watch it here.) Almost anything M R James wrote could be held up as a prime example of quiet horror, but this tale of academic pride is pitch-perfect. And Jonathan Miller’s dreamlike adaptation uses sound and image to create such a jarring, terrifying experience, that you’ll be left changed, just like the tale’s protagonist.
Seas of Static Between Stations by Mathew Gostelow. (Read it online, here.) Okay, this is one of my own and I’m not saying it stands up next to the classics on this list, but I am proud of how this story turned out, and I think it demonstrates how elements of horror can be retooled to unsettle in different ways. Here we have a story of death and spirit voices, but it’s a tale that hits those notes on the off-beats, moving us to feel something other than fear.
👀 interesting!
So excited about this!