In the tradition of Poe’s ‘A Tell-tale Heart’ and Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, This Way Lies Madness (publishing September 2025) will bring together a twisted tangle of dark stories featuring monstrous manifestations of trauma and guilt, paranoia and persecution, anxiety, addiction, and crippling terror. In these pages, readers should expect to find madness in all its forms, without the tired stigmatising tropes. Instead, these tales of deep-rooted terror will draw on metaphor, symbolism, imagery, structural innovation, and close introspection to challenge stigma and promote understanding around mental illness, reflecting broader cultural, generational, and societal impacts with authenticity and insight.
Think of horrific scenarios as metaphors for mental illness: trauma is the creature that drags its prey into its deep, dark lair; the hopelessness of depression is the person lost in a labyrinthine underworld, suicidal ideation is a person living in the belly of a great beast, addiction is the two-sided mirror, or the persecuted werewolf is the representation of a person’s struggle against the duality of bi-polar disorder. Writers are asked to be bold and inventive, to challenge convention, while being sensitive to the stigmatising constructs of mental illness in current society.
Up to 10 stories will be selected from this submissions route, and we welcome fresh interpretations and perspectives from diverse voices. Each selected story will be accompanied by a c. 300-word introduction by the author on their reflections / personal experience that inspired the story. Once selected, authors will be contacted to supply this additional text.
This Way Lies Madness will be curated by Lee Murray and Dave Jeffery, award-winning author-editors with lived experience of mental illness and advocacy.
Lee Murray is from Aotearoa-New Zealand and is a Shirley Jackson Award and five-time Bram Stoker Award® winner with more than forty titles to her credit. Murray holds a Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Fiction and is an Honorary Literary Fellow of the New Zealand Society of Authors. www.leemurray.info
Dave Jeffery is the author of 18 novels, two collections, and numerous short stories. Prior to retirement to write full time, Jeffery worked for 35 years in the National Health Service (NHS), specialising in the field of mental health nursing and risk management. He holds a BSc (Hons) in Mental Health Studies and a Master of Science Degree in Health Studies. A mentor on the Horror Writers Association’s Mentorship Scheme, Jeffery is the 2023 recipient of the HWA Mentor of the Year Award. He is currently co-chair of the HWA Wellness Committee.
Submissions to: madness@flametreepublishing.com
- Multiple submissions are fine but must be in separate emails.
- Simultaneous submissions are fine but you must have the right to license your story in an anthology.
- Please only submit unpublished/original/new stories for consideration. Reprints will not be accepted for consideration.
- For accepted stories we pay Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) rates of 8 cents/6 pence per word.
- We will aim to read each story and confirm its status by the end of this year.
- Payment for the chosen stories will be made within 30 days of the final advertised publication date (see our website flametreepublishing.com for details), although some may be paid earlier than that.
- Submission does not imply the right to publication. Each story will be read and assessed by the selection panel.
Important Notice about Submissions and Guidelines
We’re always looking for better ways of working so we’ve tweaked our submission process to allow us to read more stories, and spend more time assessing the balance of our books.
- Submissions must use the dedicated email address.
- The subject line of the email must be the story title.
- The file with the story must be attached to the email (.docx, .doc or .rtf format).
- The name of the file must match the name in the subject line.
- If submitting more than one story, please submit one story per email.
Other useful tips for a more successful submission:
- The file name of the submission must be the story name only.
- Please just use spaces between words in the title (not _ or – ).
- If the story name starts with A or The, please use it at the beginning of the file name.
- Story length is most likely to be successful at 2000 to 4000 words, but we will still read stories slightly outside this range.
- If submitting a story that has recently been submitted to us for consideration to another anthology, please state this in the submission email.
- Deadline for submissions is 13th October 2024
