The Deadlands

The Deadlands exists in liminal spaces between life, death, and elsewhere. We are looking for speculative fiction that concerns itself with death–but also everything death may involve. A ghost in a shadowed wood. An afterlife discovered through a rusted door. An abandoned house in the middle of a haunted field. A skeletal figure moving with intent toward something unseen. Death personified. Burials in troubled lands. A raised scythe against a clouded sky. Memento mori. The rivers of the dead. The sprawling underworlds beneath our feet. The Deadlands would love to see stories from a worldwide perspective, different cultures, different approaches to death. We welcome stories from everyone, everywhere. Stories that feature characters impacted by someone passing away and processing the event of death, are fair game, but will likely be a hard sell. Stories about related subjects—zombies, demons, vampires, apocalypses, and the various undead—are not for us. An apocalypse may be your setting, but it isn’t your story. We are absolutely not interested in seeing weird West stories, or steampunk tales. Humor will be a harder sell than heartbreaking.

The Deadlands exists in the preparation of a burial shroud, the candlelit vigil, the etching of the epitaph. We are looking for essays that explore the relationship between humanity and death. We are looking for a wide range of subjects, including but not limited to: cultural funerary practices, rituals of remembrance, historical explorations of death imagery, death imagery used in art and by artists, death imagery found in graveyards and on tombstones. The Deadlands wants critical, academic, and personal essays from everywhere and from everyone. We are specifically not interested in reviews, or examinations of death portrayed in media, as these will be covered by our in-house reviewer. Essays should be between 1-4k words. We want clear, thorough work that shows an appreciation not appropriation of culture. If it is your own culture, and you have personal knowledge or experience or with your subject, all the better. We want to read ritual not spectacle. These essays should show the proper tone and respect that the final embrace deserves.

The Deadlands are a liminal space reached by a broad road and we are looking for the same diversity in our speculative poetry. We welcome the weird, the mythic, the interstitial, and the unclassifiable; we are as interested in the underworld and its denizens as we are in ghosts, grief, and history. We prefer the uncanny to the gross-out, although we do not shy from physical realities. Death may be personified or not as you please. We are at home to the hauntological in a major way. We value boundary-crossing in style as well as subject and will consider both experimental and formal verse, although we are a hard sell on full-scale epic poetry; we would love to see bilingual or multilingual work. We are especially committed to the voices of marginalized poets. Please try us rather than self-reject! Whichever way you approach these ambiguous lands, we want to read what you find there.

This project has permanently closed to submissions in this category.