This Place Is Weird.

Some places are just Weird — unwelcoming, eerie, disorienting, mind-warping. Many seem to have a different set of rules, a thinness to their membrane, even a will of their own. Sometimes, what they want can be quite inscrutable.

House Blackwood extends an exclusive invitation for you to submit a story that reveals the Uncanny in the fundamental fabric of reality itself.

In the tradition of Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Eternal World,” where time itself becomes alien, and Borges’ “The Aleph,” where infinite space collapses into a single point, we seek stories that explore the weirdness in:

♦ Place and space: Non-Euclidean geometry, genius loci

♦ Time and temporality: Non-linear experience, chronological aberrations

♦ Mathematics: Angles and equations that shouldn’t exist

♦ Sensory experience: Impossible senses we lack names for

We want:

♦ Stories that make the familiar alien through conceptual displacement

♦ Tales where strangeness emerges from the structure of reality

♦ Philosophical horror and ontological uncertainty

We don’t want:

♦ Tentacles, eldritch abominations, or other Lovecraftian conventions

♦ Gore, body horror, or shock pieces

♦ Contemporary horror tropes or creepypasta aesthetics

♦ Stories in which the Weird is merely decorative rather than fundamental

Think less “creature feature” and more “the universe is not what we thought.”

Our ideal story doesn’t have readers questioning what lurks in the shadows, but the nature of the shadows themselves.