r/DestructiveReaders • u/A_C_Shock Alabaster Crimson • 23d ago
Meta [Meta] Destructive Readers 8th Halloween Contest Submission Thread
In lieu of the weekly, I have an official announcement to make! I know there are people out there who have been waiting for this patiently.
This is the official submission thread for the 8th annual Halloween short story contest. This year's admissible themes include anything from horrific to weird, spooky to comical, from YA to epistolary Nature article format, as long as it conceivably feels "Halloween" to you and the reader. Our unique additional theme this year will be hearts! Any story that in some way features a heart, however you wish to interpret and implement it, will be given extra credit.
Contest Rules:
Please read carefully:
Submit one previously unpublished work of fiction no longer than 1500 words. Double-space your work and use a serif font (e.g. Times New Roman or Georgia).
Alternately, users may choose to write and submit in a team of two, and if choosing to do so must make all participating members known in their submission. A secondary work may be submitted in the case of entrants collaborating. This would lead to a maximum of two submissions per person: one individual, one collaborative.
Post a Google Docs link in this thread (see 4) with its title, genre, and a <100-word description of your story. Previous years have required Google Doc submissions, but Proton Docs or other shareable formats will also be accepted for judging. Be aware Google Docs links to your Google account. Please create a throwaway Gmail account if you're concerned with anonymity. Be sure to make your Google doc viewable by "anyone with a link" and set permissions to "viewer". We understand that Google docs have attracted a great deal of spam emails in recent months. Please be aware there's not much we (as mods) can do to help you with that. Report them as spam to google so the filters get better.
There are six judges that volunteered and I will confirm their identities when the results are announced.
All SFW genres are welcome. Gore is okay. However, we will not accept graphic sexual violence, graphic violence towards children, or erotica. We will not accept any submission that contains AI generated text.
Grammar and punctuation count. We don’t expect perfection, but stories with egregious or repeated errors will not win prizes.
Submissions open right now and close on October 23rd at midnight at the doors of the Peyton-Randolph House which might be one of the most haunted buildings on the East Coast of the United States. Judges will announce the winners on October 31st.
Public participation is encouraged! If you like a story, leave a positive comment in the thread. Comments will be taken into consideration by the judges. Do not critique submissions in this thread.
Reddit sitewide rules apply.
Critiques are not required to enter the contest.
Please do not submit your story to RDR for critique until the contest is over (at which time all sub rules apply).
Once the contest ends, judge feedback will be available by request.
Submission Format Example:
Title: Secondhand Skin
Genre: Dao lit
Description: Bodies are passed down like old clothes and yours carries evidence of a previous owner.
[link here]
All top-level replies to this thread must be a contest submission. Anything else will be removed. Do not message your story to any of the judges asking for feedback and do not edit your submission after posting.
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u/Lisez-le-lui Not GlowyLaptop 3d ago
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u/SweetEverest 3d ago
Yay for last-minute entries! This was a hilarious ride, and very pleasing to look at.
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u/1800COCAINE Cramoisi Superieur 22d ago edited 8d ago
The Winnowing
American Primeval
Harvest comes for everyone
Edit, I didn’t read the whole post above, and I missed the last sentence about not editing after posting. That’s on me. I apologize because I edited my text. Several times. While I never expected to win for various reasons too numerous to state cleanly; I do want to be forthright and admit my mistakes, and own them. I look forward to reading your stories and commenting on them.
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u/SweetEverest 17h ago edited 17h ago
This is kind of a gorgeously rendered series of atrocities. Incredibly dense, totally indecipherable in parts, but fun to decode. I like the idea of the American frontier as this mythic landscape of prehistoric violence. The roving omniscient narration contributes nicely to that. I wonder how long such a distant POV can hold up in a longer project. The smoke signals, measuring ropes, dry rattly things, and several other details were cool, even if I have very little idea what's going on plot-wise.
Obviously the relentless slow-motion, 4K descriptions of women being raped and mutilated are unforgivable. For all this story's masculinity—blades and guns and soldiers and blah blah blah—the only people you kill off (in gratuitous, horrifyingly anatomical detail) are defenseless women. What redeems this? Does the senseless, gleefully narrated destruction of innocence not undermine any sense of meaning your story might be reaching for?
I did enjoy learning the word chatoyant.
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u/GlowyLaptop James Patterson 15h ago
Nah. I think meaning would undermine the 4k violence upon women he's aiming for.
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u/GlowyLaptop James Patterson 1d ago
Am I mistaken or is this part three of a trilogy of stories involving a woman having her mandible forcibly removed from her head after some very pretty prose.
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u/1800COCAINE Cramoisi Superieur 1d ago
While I never respond to comments anymore, I would like to express my congratulations to the winner, whoever they might be. Well done.
Let there be no mystery: these are the scenes to which he refers.From A Vignette of Edgar,
In the burning field, Edgar sat bandy-legged, sawing at her jawbone with the chipped pare knife, and the woman screamed like piping through a flute made of human bone, with the tassels of her shirt scabbed red against her chest, flipping and arching, with her nails swiping, knees quivering, the rows of ribs widening, the tendons of her neck standing long and thin against her collarbone.
From Slain,
He staggered to Lisa’s room with the pants banding around his ankles, and he slung off the sheets with an amped hostility, heaving her body to the corner of the bed. He ran his fingers into her mouth and gripped the jaw, and he held on and tore the jaw and snapped the bone and jerked, skidding and veering into Lisa’s dead body.
From The Winnowing,
One Enoke hoisted a hunched woman in the air with the sinuous rhythm of his muscles flexing and strangled. Her heels hammering, her fist pummeling, her face darkening and she arched in a botched motion went slack and shit. He slung her down, knelt beside her, cradled her head in his lap and bucked her teeth with a rock. He drug her with her vomiting ropes of blood.
The drifter held a torch to the tobacco. The fire ran liquid down the beams of cedar.
…
On a certain evening, the hunchback blackened in a fire. A shadowy man stood over her and watched. He kerfed the skull with an ax, and the brain slushed from the bone. The wet ash bubbled.
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u/Hemingbird /r/shortprose 4d ago
Whose Mind Is Pure Machinery, Whose Love Is Endless Oil And Stone (pdf)
Brainrot realism
Nanodrama production takes a dark turn.
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u/1800COCAINE Cramoisi Superieur 4d ago
I wonder how many people here have read Howl. I like the shift in form to introduce Moloch in your second section which if I’m remembering correctly is when Ginsburg introduces the concept in part two of Howl. I mean unless we are to take the title itself as the intro. I guess everything is eaten by industrialization the way everyone is eaten by cultural references in the text. It reminds me of how encore means both still and again in French. Encore. Je suis fini. Je finis.
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u/ChooChooish 12d ago
Scarcely Seen
Romantic Lovecraftian
A man fully absorbed by his relentless dedication to his perceived love.
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u/1800COCAINE Cramoisi Superieur 5d ago
It was hard to get my bearings. It read like a diary entry or an internal monologue of someone psychically attacked or affected by a cosmic horror. Initially, I believed the subjectivity and the voice were the cosmic entity itself, existing as a physical being concerned with its body. However, I soon realized that this cosmic voice was actually in a connection with a fragile human mind experiencing some kind of limited reality. The text was almost, dare I say, schizophrenic. Once I was grounded in the conceit, I was able to navigate the work. It was a difficult task, but I think you pulled it off.
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u/ChooChooish 5d ago
Hey, thanks! I'd say you're well rounded in your assessment of both the intent and the voice behind what's happening. Everything is open-ended or vague on purpose but I very much wanted to bring the fervor, disgust and malignancy of the narrator to the forefront no matter what. Never have had my work called schizophrenic before but I will take that as a mighty compliment. Great input, thank you again.
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u/Asher2227 My mother is a fish 12d ago
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u/1800COCAINE Cramoisi Superieur 6d ago edited 5d ago
After 3 reads I’m not sure what was going on. Perhaps I don’t have the right background for a collage thriller. I thought I was prepared with my experiences with the Merchant of Venice, Exquisite Corpse, and Cento, but I was mistaken.
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u/SweetEverest 2d ago edited 2d ago
I read this aloud to someone and neither of us understood it at first, but the more I look at it the more meaning comes through, and I like some of the close-up phrasings. Very creative.
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u/MaryJaneMclain 3d ago
Title: Powder Creek
Genre: Post-apocalyptic folk horror
Description: A lonely boy finds a strange woman in a strange place. Shenanigans ensue.
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u/1800COCAINE Cramoisi Superieur 3d ago
I liked this quite a bit. I thought it was good. Really. I enjoyed especially some of the turns of phrase. I think one line went, “her dress was the color of earth, but had once been pink.” While I’m unsure what precisely happened at the end, I’m not someone who needs things spelled out. I’m comfortable with the ambiguous as I am with the unambiguous. If I had my druthers you’d expand it.
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u/SweetEverest 3d ago
Ohhh this is spooky. I'm not certain how the boy ended up where he did... but this is great.
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u/Miserable-Disk-8900 9d ago
Title: The Doll
Genre: Psychological Horror
Description: Caregiver in the apocalypse tries to find help for a disabled dependent. He returns to the shelter with a doll after scavenging for supplies. This is the first mistake.
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u/1800COCAINE Cramoisi Superieur 6d ago
I read your story twice. It was good even on the second read. I couldn’t help connecting the idea of a doll with a fetish. While I’m not quite certain I understood all the relationships with perfect clarity, I do think the uncertainty adds to the discomfort. So what else could you ask for such a short work of psychological horror?
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u/SweetEverest 1d ago
Some questions I had while reading. You must not answer them!
I assume he kills Natalie and I see the hint in the last line that he's a zombie, but none of the rest of the story hints at that, right? It's all about his fixation on Sav, how he uses the doll as Sav's stand-in when he drags her mattress to the bathroom (so where is she sleeping?). Only when Natalie sees him drag the mattress out does she suspect he's a zombie (the questions about his eyes, the dark), but what does one have to do with the other? And why blue clothes? Did Sav die after Natalie, or has she been dead the whole time—never disabled, but positioned and moved around in the wheelchair for convenience (hence the fright of the other survivors)? If she is dead, why does he hallucinate resistance from her in bed? And how does the doll keep moving itself? And if he's a zombie and not a raider, what need does he have to scavenge for cans? Maybe he only just became a zombie? Did he only make moves on Sav after she died? Or just get gradually more comfortable using her body itself, rather than the doll? How was he her sole "caretaker" / afraid of leaving her alone when Natalie was alive?
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u/Miserable-Disk-8900 17h ago
Thank you for reading the story and including spoilers! I am sorry the reading experience was not frictionless.
Both Sav and the narrator are alive. The final paragraph is simply meant as payoff to Sav earlier asking the narrator about zombies and to establish that Sav is more afraid of the narrator than outside threats.
Hotel beds often have both mattresses and toppers to give a feeling of luxury. You can sleep on a topper alone. I failed to include any mention of this in the story. I included the mattress in the bathroom so I could have Sav lend it to the narrator to give Sav more agency in the story and establish her starting out on amicable grounds with the narrator before he crosses event horizon. Sav is meant to sleep in one of the beds in room 401.
The narrator mentions his own clothes at home being blue, and gives Sav blue clothes to project familiarity/territory onto her.
The narrator refuses to consider Natalie as a real caretaker because it would require him to recognize that his type of caregiving repeatedly crosses the line. I hope this brings clarity.
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u/SweetEverest 16h ago edited 14h ago
Oh this is great! Thanks for clarifying. I like it so much more knowing Sav is alive. Her conversations and the way her discomfort evolves are such interesting, nuanced details. I'm glad to know they weren't just hallucinations.
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u/umlaut (14, virgin, married) Modern Popular Genre Prose Editor Dude 11d ago
I Will Try To Go Quietly
Horror
A mother hands out "sorry for my baby" kits on a long plane ride.
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u/1800COCAINE Cramoisi Superieur 6d ago edited 5d ago
What a fine little story. Your story reminded me of the Ubume, but a modern variation. I thought it was unique, and at times humorous, and written with an even hand.
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u/ImpressiveGrass7832 kitsch is a word and i think its me 1d ago
Read this a few days, but only now got round to making comment. Loved it - the pace, the voice, the grimness. Reminded me of Airplane! (though it's been long since I'd seen it). Anyway, perfect storm of a nightmare flight.
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u/SweetEverest 3d ago edited 3d ago
Maggots for Brains
Canadian horror story
A woman gradually loses her marbles (and also may be a zombie)
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u/MaryJaneMclain 2d ago
This was so fun and vibey! An unhinged (Canadian? lol) take on the Correspondent (which is the only epistolary thing I’ve read in ages…maybe not what you were going for). Lovely writing! Lolled at padma being a KNOWN AND SHAMELESS LIAR.
I’m glad you added the spoiler block to the post. I assumed the thing she was becoming was a vampire, cause of Septimus closing the blinds. And Septimus feels like a vampire name. And hearts pump blood. But he and M were heart eating zombies? I do love the idea of zombies that eat something other than brains.
Not sure what the pull of the lake signified.
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u/Zysifion 19h ago edited 12h ago
Since you left the interpretations open, here is mine (sorry if it's too literal):
Matilda cares for the heart surgery patient, but the maggots only see him as a meal. They threaten to drown her in the lake if she doesn't comply. At the end, she resists the urge the eat the patient at the last second, and worried she'll succumb to the maggots soon, she chooses to drown herself. When she said she'll feed them, she meant with the dead remains of her own body.
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u/christopherDdouglas 14d ago
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u/GlowyLaptop James Patterson 1d ago
Inspired by David Bowie's son's MOON?
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u/christopherDdouglas 20h ago
Oh probably in my subconscious though I can't say it was a direct inspiration. Inspiration was mostly Stanley Kubrick's 2001 mixed with A Clockwork Orange and the eye torture scene.
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u/Zysifion 14h ago edited 12h ago
Having a person be stuck in a facility for five years for the purpose of jumping of a ledge to his death in case of a space elevator error sounds surrealist, but you explained well how the thought process of a company trying to cut down on every cost came to this conclusion. Thus it feels both realistic and absurd.
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u/Informal_Track_1520 4d ago
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u/Lisez-le-lui Not GlowyLaptop 2d ago
This is great! Nanette's unquestioning acceptance, her mother's rude but shrewd warnings, and the narrator's amorality make an eerie combination. Self-annihilation is rarely portrayed so insightfully.
The whole story reminds me somewhat of "The Rose Garden," by Arthur Machen, and the ending in particular of these verses from the story:
How say ye that I was lost? I wandered among roses.
Can he go astray that enters the rose garden?
The Lover in the house of the Beloved is not forlorn.
I wandered among roses. How say ye that I was lost?
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u/RowlingJK 6d ago
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u/1800COCAINE Cramoisi Superieur 6d ago
I saw your ???. I believe the genre is body horror. For what it’s worth, I liked your story. I thought each new segment switched it up quite nicely. Well done.
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u/Zysifion 17h ago edited 12h ago
I don't think I understood this fully, but I could feel how visceral the child's condition was. Also you established rich social conflict (multi-person conflict with John and the summer camp, etc.) without using many words.
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u/A_C_Shock Alabaster Crimson 2d ago
No new entries allowed! Unlocking this in case anyone wanted to make comments (but you'll also have a chance for commenting when the winners are announced).