“Nainaine of the Bayou” by Christopher Keelty

Nell watched a beetle trundle past her shoe. The white lady gurgled like a backed-up sewer, and then she was quiet and there were only the wet smacking sounds of Grandmother eating.

The white lady’s gun lay in the dirt. Nell thought about taking it, but it was too heavy and too long–at least twice as long as the rifle Mama was teaching her to shoot. Instead she dragged it into the shadows and hid it beneath some scrap wood. The spyglass on top looked valuable, but Nell didn’t have time to salvage it. Continue reading →

“Corn-fed Baby and Gravy” by Christian Riley

The McClemen’s residence looked like an abscessed tooth jutting out of the earth, three stories high, flaccid and diseased. It was surrounded by a sea of cornfields of green presently bending lightly to a south-westerly wind. There was an aged sycamore at the end of the driveway, chained to it, a dog and a goat, and Lawrence Shoemaker at last rolled his Cadillac to a stop in the tree’s accompanying shade.

The stink of shit and animal parlayed with a cloud of dust, rising up and through the opened windows of the Cadillac. Lawrence cursed, reached for a handkerchief and covered his nose. When the dust settled, he grabbed his clipboard and stepped outside, shielding his eyes against the rays of a setting sun. Continue reading →

October’s issue will be Halloween-themed

Pumpkin Patch
“Pumpkin Patch” © 2009 Kam Abbott, used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License

For our October issue, we are looking for submissions of short stories and non-fiction that are halloween-themed.

Halloween-themed can mean a lot of things, and we are purposely not being too specific on what that means to us, as we want to see your interpretation.

At a minimum, your story needs to be set in October (though an aftermath story set in November would be considered) and Halloween needs to be an integral part of the story.

There are plenty of Halloween tropes that still have some mileage in them, so don’t be concerned with cliche, just worry about telling a good story.

Reading period ends October 4th, 2013
Submissions Guidelines

“Waking up from the American Dream: The Horror Of Memory in Brad Anderson’s Session 9” by David Annandale

Memory plays a crucial role in many a horror narrative. In memory can lie, for instance, the key to defeating the evil. “You will remember what your father forgot” (King 422), Danny is told in Stephen King’s The Shining. And he does: in the nick of time he remembers the boiler (which, untended, will explode) and thus deflects his possessed father’s murderous rampage. Often, memory’s unlocking of a mystery leads only to further danger (to Jessica Harper’s dismay, as she discovers the witches’ secret lair in Dario Argento’s Suspiria), or the resolution arrives too late to do any good (and so David Hemmings realizes who the murderer is in the split second before she attacks him in Argento’s Deep Red). In Session 9, written by Steve Gevedon and Brad Anderson, and directed by Anderson, memory is itself the horror, and so it is repressed. The effects of that repression, however, are still more horror. This is the despairing dynamic of the film: false dreams are lethal, but to wake up from them is to confront a reality no less destructive. The diagnosis, however, leaves the viewers with the responsibility to defang that terrible reality. Continue reading →

“The Autobiography of Jeffrey Kline” by Laura-Marie Steele

Della wiped the outcropping of books from her brow. Damned things were appearing more frequently. She flicked aside a copy of Jeffrey Kline’s autobiography as small as the nail on her little finger. She wouldn’t have minded so much if she sweated classics, but the trash that came from her pores was just embarrassing. Worst of all, she had no idea why it kept happening. The bin by the side of her desk was full of the miniscule paperback tomes. Yesterday she had wiped at least fifty copies of the chat show host’s autobiography from her neck and under her arms. She didn’t even watch his chat show Talking Life. Continue reading →

Publication Schedule & Pay Rate Changes

Starting today, Black Treacle will be moving to a bimonthly publication schedule. Here are the release dates for the remaining issues of 2013:

Issue #3 – Tuesday, June 4th 2013
Issue #4 – August 6th, 2013
Issue #5 – October 1st, 2013
Issue #6 – December 3rd, 2013

The decision came about as a combination of factors, but the prime reason was submission volume– We are just not getting enough yet to be able to put out an issue every month.

We will revisit this choice in 2014.

PAY RATE

With the lower frequency of publication, we’ve decided to up the pay rate to 25.00 CAN for both fiction & non-fiction pieces (You know we are open to non-fiction submissions, right?).

“A Pair of Ragged Claws” by Kate Heartfield

They came from the darkness at the back of the stage, with the easy speed of eight-legged creatures. Rona felt the whoop rising from her lungs to join the roar of the crowd.

The Scorpions scuttled to their low, custom instruments: theremin, drum machine, sampler, turntable. A siren whine, a backbeat, fast and loud.

The bass drove Rona’s heartbeat.

The crowd bounced like a single organism, every strobe a snapshot. Between flashes, the exoskeletons on stage glowed blue-green in the ambient black light. Continue reading →

“The Three Hundredth Day” by Bruce Memblatt

He was never an emotional man. Even as a child when his brother Billy teased him something awful Taylor never showed his cards, but what happened to him, what he brought on, changed everything.

“Even the air stank of death,” Taylor whispered running his fingers across the bars. The metal was always cold. Everything was always cold down to the coffee. Day three hundred on death row was going to be just as dark as day one. Continue reading →