As Terror House Magazine nears the one-year anniversary of when it was untimely ripped from the womb, we’ve decided to step our game up a bit. In the time since our founding, we’ve grown exponentially, angering both the Puritanical, gender-neutral clods of #saferLIT and the disruptive federal agents of wignatdom, with our readership exploding, our book publishing division under development, and our submission queue growing like a teenager’s erection in the morning breeze. We’ve seen the departure of Calvin Westra as Editor-at-Large and his replacement with up-and-coming writers Reagan Cox and Dione, and with new blood comes new ideas.

As Senior Editor Glahn and others have lamented, outsider literature is too often synonymous with sexual and moral depravity. There’s nothing wrong with titties or violence—good art is defined by its willingness to probe aspects of the human experience that no one else will touch—but at the same time, writers don’t need to pour buckets of blood and/or semen onto their manuscripts to make them good.

With Easter around the corner, Terror House has decided to launch an Easter Submission Contest. Here are the rules:

  1. Write a short story or literary nonfiction piece on the theme of finding God, celebrating Easter, and/or religiosity/spirituality in general. Your piece must conform to both the theme and our preexisting submission guidelines (found here). No other types of submissions (poetry, photography/artwork, serialized works etc.) are eligible.
  2. Submit your work via email at submissions [at] terrorhousemag [dot] com or via Twitter direct message at @terrorhousemag. If submitting via email, please use the subject line “Easter Submission Contest”; if submitting via Twitter, state in your message that the submission is for the Easter Submission Contest. Failure to do so may lead to your submission being disqualified.
  3. The deadline for submissions is Friday, April 12 at 2PM Eastern (1PM Central/11AM Pacific/7PM WEST/8PM CEST).
  4. Winners will be announced on Monday, April 15. The first-place winner will receive a $20 prize, while the runners-up will receive $5 each. These prizes are separate from our $10 Best of the Month prize.
  5. The winning submissions will be published from April 17-19. Submissions that do not win first, second, or third place will not be published.

(UPDATE: The contest is over. You can read the winning stories here.)

If you have questions about the Easter Submission Contest, feel free to contact the editors: our email addresses and Twitter handles can be found on the About page here. Good luck!