Flash Monster 2025

Flash Monster 2025 is now closed.

Check back on October 30th
at 9am Pacific for full results!

Slacker special…

Keeps late entries open until October 22nd, 2025.

“There’s a monster
inside each of us.”

– Catriona Ward

Submit to Flash Monster

We want to see your nasties, the dark entities you conjure up and the ghouls you stitch together. Make them brutal, make them sympathetic, make them impossible to define.

You can go as literal or figurative with your monster as you want. We like literary approaches, but we also dig genre and pulpy takes as well. Art house or grindhouse. Subvert the usual monster tropes or create something nobody’s ever seen before.

To get the creative juices flowing, here are some totally serious jumping-off points:

Vampiric garlic
Doppelgänger poltergeists
Soup that slurps you
Druid squids
Attack jackalopes
Abominable glowworms
Were-clowns
Banshee librarians
Boots made for stalking
Shiftless, out-of-shape shapeshifters
Mime slime
Succubus drivers
Lemon demons
Zombie sharks from beyond the moon
Carl
The waltzing dead
Scarebros
Fungus Van Sant
Changelings that people secretly prefer to your own shitty kids
Tornado goblins

You can check out some past Flash Monster issues here, here, here, or here for inspiration or simply for an idea of the kind of stuff we like to publish.

The top three entries will win cold, hard cash (sent electronically).

$300 for Flash Monster 2025 winner

$200 for 2nd place

$100 for 3rd place

We also give mad respect to 4th-10th place,
publishing them in our Flash Monster mega-issue.

Submit to Flash Monster

Follow these guidelines, and you just might have some extra dough in your pocket, and some bragging rights as the Flash Monster 2025 winner.

– All submissions must absolutely be no more than 1,000 words, and we tend to look more kindly on 750 or fewer because… 50-FOOT SQUIRREL!

– All contest submissions will be read with authors’ names concealed, so we won’t be playing favorites.

– Please paste your submission into the corresponding field. Do not list your name anywhere in your submission or we’ll assume that you don’t know how to read.

– Entry fee ~~of $10~~ of $13 during Slacker Special. (Sorry, no refunds.)

– No A.I.-generated content of any kind because who wants to read that.

– We reserve the right to extend deadlines if necessary (and you can expect our usual week-ish Slacker Special—with corresponding increase in submission fee for you procrastinators).

– Submissions must be previously unpublished work, and you will retain copyright. By entering this contest you give us permission to publish your work if it’s selected for our Top 10

– No limit on how many entries you can submit, but you must submit them one at a time. Don’t just mash them all in there.

– Contest ~~soft deadline is end of day (Pacific Time) on~~ ~~Wednesday, October 15th, 2025~~ final deadline is October 22nd, 2025. Winners announced on October 30th, and we’ll unleash the Flash Monster 2025 mega-issue on Halloween! Winners announced on October 30th, and we’ll unleash the Flash Monster 2025 mega-issue on Halloween!

– And, most importantly, this is a FLASH MONSTER contest, so you must include some sort of literal or figurative monster. But again, this can be in any form imaginable.

So that means you can do something like this…