Creatures are stirring.
I
Rabbit Mountain
by Michael Carter
II
Baby
by
III
Night Shift
by Carina Stopenski
IV
Ruination
by JP Relph
V
Home for Christmas
by Jo Withers
VI
Love Among the Kaiju
by Edward Barnfield
VII
Here We Come A-Wassailing
by Terri Potvin
VIII
Black Christmas
by Colin Alexander
IX
Name the Unknown and Kill It
by Meghan Corwin
X
Would You Be Mad if I Got Store Credit Instead
by Christine Aucoin
Flash Monster 2022 is closed.
Results posted Monday, December 19th, 2022
at 9AM PST
Smile!
Procrastinator Special keeps late entries
open until Dec. 12th.
It’s after midnight
somewhere…
Submit to Flash Monster
Well, here’s something different. We’ve been running Halloween contests since 2014, but this year, in true nightmare before Christmas fashion, we’re kicking off our Flash Monster contest mid-October and running it up until the holidays are upon us.
That may change the calculations on your lab-grown abominations a little bit; might be time to make your sins against Nature a touch more festive.
There’s plenty of room for holiday-themed horror here, but we also don’t want to see 50 killer Santa Clauses or dozens of Krampuses (Krampi?). Mix things up. Winter themes work (we do love a good snow beast). So do monsters totally unrelated to winter and the holidays.
If you participated in or read our Folked-Up Flash contest earlier this year, you know we’ve got a wicked hankering for folk horror, and that’s not a bad angle to go here either. Tap into ancient pagan rituals. Subvert traditional holiday tropes. Gifts with sinister implications? Granted wishes with ironic outcomes? The holidays are a good time to mess with classical elements. A little sentimentality with your depravity? Sure, why the hell not. We’re not monsters. Or just write about something gnarly and weird; that’s the whole point, after all.
We like literary approaches, but we also dig genre and pulpy takes as well. Art house or grindhouse. Take a new approach to well-established monster archetypes or create something nobody’s ever seen before.
You can check out some past Flash Monster issues here, here, here, here, here, here.
The top three entries will win cash money.
$300 for Flash Monster 2022 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
and in a future print anthology, with contributor copy included.
Submit to Flash Monster
Follow these guidelines, and your best nightmare before Christmas could come true.
– All submissions must absolutely be under 1,000 words, and we tend to look more kindly on 750 or fewer because… THREE-HEADED SQUIRREL!
– All contest submissions will be read blind, so we won’t be playing favorites.
– Please paste your entry into the corresponding field. Do not list your name anywhere or we’ll assume you won’t be able to accurately recite the words that break the curse.
– Costs $7 to enter during Early-Bird October and $9 to enter after that. (Sorry, no refunds.)
– We reserve the right to extend deadlines if necessary (and you can expect our usual Procrastinator’s Special with corresponding increase in entry fee for you slackers).
– Submissions must be previously unpublished work, and you will retain copyright (duh). By entering this contest, you give us permission to publish your work (if selected for our Top 10) both online and in a future print anthology.
– 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 (PST) Monday, December 5th, 2022. Winners announced on December 19th and we’ll unwrap the Flash Monster 2022 mega-issue before the eggnog turns.
– 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…
or this…
or this…
or this…
or even this…
Bumbles bounce!
Submit to Flash Monster
The Molotov Cocktail 