Horror 4: Read by Dawn - an anthology of new Horror Fiction.

READ BY DAWN
AN ANTHOLOGY OF NEW HORROR FICTION
Solicitation to Submit

Dead by Dawn, Scotland's International Horror Film Festival, will turn 13 in April 2006. Over the last 12 years, the event has grown into a four-day event full of gruesome indulgence - showcasing the very best the genre has to offer in short film, indie and mainstream features and classics.

To coincide with our 13th celebrations, Beautiful Books will launch a horror imprint - Bloody Books - with the inaugural publication being Read by Dawn Volume I, an annual collection of contemporary horror writing published under the Bloody Books imprint. Imprint curator Adèle Hartley is the Director of Dead by Dawn

For the first volume, Ramsey Campbell has accepted an invitation to host the collection and has contributed a story of his own. Ramsey is known and loved by genre fans the world over for his extraordinary talents, which have not only scared millions of readers over the years, but movie-goers have had nowhere to hide either as his novels The Nameless and Pact of the Fathers both became spine-chilling and successful movies in recent years.

Dead by Dawn is a member of the European Fantastic Film Festivals Federation and a major feature of the international horror film network. Already garnering interest from Western Europe and the US, I expect the Read by Dawn series to establish itself quickly as an international celebration of the best in contemporary horror.

Alongside the Read by Dawn collections, Bloody Books will also publish Classic Horror Volume I, the first in its series of classic horror stories. Volume I will be published in April 2006 and will include:

The Ghostly Rental (Henry James) Markheim (Robert Louis Stevenson) / The Horla, (Guy de Maupassant) / The Dream Woman (W Wilkie Collins) / A Confession Found in a Prison (Charles Dickens) / Silence (Leonid Andreyev) / The Withered Arm (Thomas Hardy) / The Mysterious Mansion (Balzac) / Transformation (Mary Shelley) / The Tell-Tale Heart (Edgar Allan Poe) / Some Terrible Letters from Scotland (James Hogg) / Lost Face (Jack London) / True Relation of the Apparition (Daniel Defoe) / The Man and the Snake (Ambrose Bierce) / The Blast of the Book (G K Chesterton)

You're receiving this call for submissions because horror is all about great story-telling and I'm soliciting stories from all over the world, from people who are known to me as writers and those I suspect have great stories lurking in the back of their brain. Or in a box under the bed. If you think you know someone who might be interested in submitting, please feel free to forward this mail on.

Ideally I want the stories to leave the reader unsettled, vulnerable and challenged. I want to make them wish they'd gone to the bathroom before they started, because now the journey down a long dark hallway doesn't look so appealing. I want them to jump when the phone rings. I want stories that break barriers people didn't know they had, stories that make the ordinary seem threatening, stories which ruin daily things for people - think about how horror films ruined things like going for a nice swim in the
ocean, or retrieving something from the attic or smiley clown dolls!

Whether you choose to go with body horror, psychological terror, stalk 'n slash, the supernatural or anything else that takes your fancy, please use this as an opportunity to use your fears and nightmares to induce blind terror in the unsuspecting! After all, horror can only be defined as what scares you - beyond that, there are no restrictions.

The rules
I hope to include a range of styles and formats so anything from flash fiction to an optimum story length of around 5,000 words is fine, although longer works will also be considered (up to a maximum of 7,000 words).
And as for whether or not it'll make you rich and famous, well, there's a basic advance that will be divided among the contributors and that will be topped up through a 15% royalty deal. It's a standard contract and a blank copy can be made available to you on request.

Global rights on any work submitted should be available exclusively to Bloody Books if signed.

My preference is for all submissions to be as Word or Rich Text Format attachments to e-mails. Please send all material as prose or poetry - screenplay format is not acceptable. All stories or enquiries should be addressed to:

info@deadbydawn.co.uk

The deadline for submissions to Read by Dawn is 15 December 2005