Flash Monster the 13th

“You’re doomed.
You’re all doomed!”

– Crazy Ralph

Submit to Flash Monster the 13th

It’s just not Halloween without Flash Monster, so we’re juicing up our 13th annual monster-themed contest.

We want to see your nasties, the dark entities you conjure up and the ghouls you stitch together. Whether you make them brutal, make them tragic, 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-oriented 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
Cannibal Anabelles
Talk Show Ghosts
Slander Man
Soup that slurps you
Druid squids
Attackalopes
Sewn-together Sewer-Dwelling So-and-Sos
Doppelgänger poltergeists
Abominable glowworms
Were-clowns
Banshee librarians
Death-row Wendigo
Shiftless, out-of-shape shapeshifters
Spooky hookahs
Fire Hydra
Succubus drivers
Lemon Possession
Slime Mimes
Scarebros
Zombie sharks from beyond the moon
Carl
Headless Norsemen
Cyborgis Karloff
Changelings that people secretly prefer to your own shitty kids

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).

$400 for Flash Monster the 13th winner

$250 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 get your hands on some extra dough, and some bragging rights as the Flash Monster 2026 winner.

– All submissions must absolutely be no more than 1,000 words, and we tend to look more kindly on 750 or fewer because… TOXIC-WASTE-MUTATED-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 $12 (Sorry, no refunds.)

– All entries must be your own original work. 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 Sunday, October 18th. Winners announced on October 30th, and we’ll unleash the Flash Monster 2026 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…