This one goes to 11.
I
Dead Man from the Ocean Floor
by Neil Clark
II
Happy Is He
by Christina Harrington
III
Our Dream Town
by Laila Amado
IV
There Was a Curse upon Them
by Benjamin Woodard
V
It Wasn’t a Black Dog, It Was Never a Black Dog
by Anika Carpenter
VI
What Happened to John
by Najla Brown
VII
Inheritance
by Joanne Withers
VIII
Naught but Shadows Walking
by Levi Krain
IX
The Farmhand
by Gareth Durasow
X.a
Climate Change
by Jan Kaneen
X.b
Ice Window
by Jonathan Duckworth
Flash Monster 2019 is closed.
Check back at noon (PST)
on October 30th for results!
Slackers rejoice!
Procrastinator Special keeps late entries
open until Oct. 25th!
Submit to Flash Monster
“What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark?
It would be like sleep without dreams.”
– Werner Herzog
Submit to Flash Monster
Time to head back to the lab and cook us up something sinister. The Flash Monster contest is the theme that started it all back in 2014, and we’re anticipating that this year’s crop of abominations against god and nature will really make our skin crawl.
Now the theme for this one is pretty self-explanatory. But we’d also like to point out that 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.
You can check out some past Flash Monster issues 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.
$250 for Flash Monster 2019 winner
$125 for 2nd place
$75 for 3rd place
We also give mad props 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 2019
Follow these guidelines, and you could have some extra coin in your pocket, and some bragging rights as the Flash Monster 2019 winner.
– All submissions must absolutely be under 1,000 words, and we tend to look more kindly on 750 or fewer because…FIRE-BREATHING SQUIRREL!
– All contest submissions will be read blind, so we won’t be playing favorites. Sorry, Mother!
– 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.
– Costs $7 to enter (Sorry, no refunds.)
– We reserve the right to extend deadlines if necessary (and you can expect our usual week-ish Procrastinator’s Special—with corresponding increase in submission 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 deadline is end of day (PST) Sunday, October 20th, 2019. Winners announced on October 30th, and we’ll unleash the Flash Monster 2019 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 go all…
or all…
or all…
or all…
or even all…
No, Johnny. No!
Submit to Flash Monster
The Molotov Cocktail 