That’s a wrap…

Flash Monster 2024 results announced 

at noon Pacific time on Friday, December 20th. 

Slacker Special!

Soft deadline has passed but late entries
remain open until December 15th!

It’s happening again.

Submit to Flash Monster

Since 2014, our Flash Monster contests usually coincide with Halloween. Two years ago, we switched things up and unleashed our monstrous flash fiction issue in December. We’re going that route again this year, running our Flash Monster contest all the way through October and beyond, right 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. 

Then again, we 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). But we also want to see monsters that are totally unrelated to winter and the holidays. 

If you participated in or read our Folked-Up Flash contest in 2022, 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 to unveil your monsters. 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, and here.

The top three entries will win cash money.

$300 for Flash Monster 2024 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 make the night anything but silent:

– 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 $8 to enter during Early-Bird period and $10 to enter after that. $13 to enter during Slackers’ Special. (Sorry, no refunds.)

– We’ll extend deadlines if necessary, though that’s never happened (but you can expect our usual Slackers’ Special with corresponding increase in entry fee).

– 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).

– 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.

– Early-bird period runs until October 15th.  Contest soft deadline is end of day (PST) Monday, December 9th, 2024. Contest final deadline is end of day (Pacific time) on Sunday, December 15th. Winners announced on December 20th and we’ll unwrap the Flash Monster 2024 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 even this…

Submit to Flash Monster