TL;DR Press presents horror lineup for Autumn Quarterly

Greetings, Pumpkin spiced children of the night!

We challenged you to offer up your darkest, most disturbing, spine-tingling horror submissions to the sacrificial altar of TL;DR Press for our delectation, and boy, did you deliver! Below, we present the disturbing lineup for the upcoming spooktacular Horror collection.

How we got here

We began in July with a call for submissions to writers to help us create a collection of horror stories to benefit the Pilcrow Foundation for our inaugural Autumn Quarterly.

Our editorial team consisted of two curators and eight additional editors, all of whom were integral to the success of this project thus far. The curators include Joe Butler and Camden M Collins. The additional editors include Callum Colback, David Clark, Sarah Linders, Alex Hareland, Casey Reinhardt, and Dan Alvarez.  

We have a few goals with this project: To support the Pilcrow Foundation with a fantastic story collection, to give every writer who submitted a piece the opportunity to receive feedback and improve their submission before judging, and to scare the pants off of our readers in new and interesting ways.

From July to September, we worked with the authors (and each other) to mentor, edit, and judge. As with our previous collections, we paired every interested writer with a first editor, who worked with them to create the strongest piece they could moving forward. The first editor scored the final piece from 1 to 10, and passed it on to a second editor, who scored as well. The average of the two scores became the piece’s final score.

We were blown away by the quality of the submissions to this collection! We received 73 chilling stories by the end of the call for submissions and so many delivered scary, innovative pieces of horror from across the genre.

We want to thank the #tldrwriters community for your stories and support while we curated a fantastic lineup of new voices. This collection is the work of hundreds of hours thus far, and we can’t wait to share it with the world.

The lineup*

*Please note there may be some discrepancies between this list and the published version.

Deer in December by Emily Deibler

Conspiracy Theory Weekly Issue #289 by Ryan Walraven

The Bone Keys by T.A. Sola

The Trip by Tee Linden

Cream of You by Diane Callahan

We by Joe Butler

Tsukumogami by Lyle Enright

Family Dinner by C. Scott Frank

A Simple Shave by Gareth Topping

Asphyxia by Joshua Stoll

Cheek to Cheek by Mike Blackwelder

Fritz by Brad McNaughton

Faceless by Shanika Bynum

911, What Is Your Emergency? by Ralph Benton

The Rectification of Walter Piggott by Kurt Newton

The It by Philip Hauser

Mama by Tara Keiser

The Wizard’s Heart by Callum Colback

Cluster by Sarah Linders

The Ghost Story of Clair Clairmont by Carrie Connel-Gripp

A Sense Less by Chanelle Loftness

Nyx Nocturnally by Daniel Alvarez

Ethereal Hunger by Douglas Sisson

Too Hungry, Too Bloody by Katie Conrad

The Lowland Hunger by Jim Johanson

It Works by Kat Veldt

Congratulations to the 26 accepted writers! If you’d like to congratulate them as well, please join in the celebrations on Twitter!

When can I buy it?

We plan to release the collection just before Halloween, and will keep updates on this blog, on our Twitter, on Facebook, and in our writing group.

Subscribe to our newsletter to be the first to know when the Quarterly drops, and for more information, email tldrpress@gmail.com or DM us on Twitter!