Taking Submissions: Leviathan: An Anthology of Industrial Horror
Deadline: September 30th, 2024
Payment: $125 – $200
Theme: Weird tales set in the Victorian period that explore the human (and inhuman) experience through the lens of horror.
LEVIATHAN: Submission Brief
Sentinel Creatives has opened up for submissions for “LEVIATHAN: An Anthology of Industrial Horror.”
Deadline for Submissions: 30 September 2024
Wordcount: 3,000 – 6,000
Remuneration: $125 – $200
Simultaneous Submissions: Yes
WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR
We’re looking for original weird tales set in the Victorian period that explore the human (and inhuman) experience through the lens of horror.
Some clarifications:
Victorian: There is a tendency to view the Victorian Age as beginning and ending with the reign of British monarch Queen Victoria (1837-1901), but this is so strict as to be crude. Rather, the period will be what is referred to as The Long Nineteenth Century (1789-1914), which begins with the French Revolution and ends just short of World War I. This expanded timeframe serves to foreground the transformations that took place within British society and brings those changes into stark relief.
This period usually takes England as its geographical norm, and often a particular city: London. But for the purposes of this anthology, the region will also include Scotland, Ireland, Wales, as well as India and the furthest reaches of the British Empire. There is considerable scope here, and the period is rich in conflict and upheaval, which any excellent story cannot do without.
Show us primitive science, at once enlightened and profane, the obscure craft of learned mutilators who frighten all, even the dead. Or the Resurrection men, who do their bidding by midnight, and fear more moonlight than the noose. Give us tales of strife and privation, loss and alienation; rural homesteads replaced by hypnotic topographies of stone and glass, cloaked in smog; of choking workhouses and tumbledown tenements. Show us who built this world, mixing mortar with bone, but won’t inherit it. Take us where rail and steam cannot, where clockwork minds are set adrift from empire—from themselves. Give us immigrant tales: ex-lives, diasporic fugitives—what did they leave behind, and what did they bring with them? Give us your silent biographies of the obscure and unseen.