Denver Horror Collective is seeking submissions for a Science Fiction Horror anthology: SINISTER SYSTEMS. Send us your stories of first contact gone wrong, the bio weapon that escapes containment, or an AI bleeding into the real world with disastrous results. We’re looking for mad science (Resident Evil), cosmic horror (Event Horizon), incomprehensible alien life (Annihilation), and more.

What we’re NOT looking for:

Please no heavy-handed politics. Politics can be part of the story, but it shouldn’t be the main theme. We want a strong speculative element, and make it scary!

No depictions of sexual assault, child abuse, or animal cruelty. These topics can be dealt with, but only if they happen ‘off-screen.’

We’re looking primarily for sci-fi horror; the following may be considered, but will be a hard sell: steampunk/dieselpunk/solarpunk, slipstream, alternate history, space fantasy.

If we suspect you have used generative AI or plagiarized any of the story, it will be instantly rejected.

The details:

1.5k-6k words length – hard limit

Submit stories as a Word Doc – .doc or .docx or .rtf

Please use the Modern Manuscript format:

• 12 point, easily readable font
• Double spaced lines
• 1″ margins

Simultaneous submissions are acceptable, but please let us know as soon as possible if your story is accepted elsewhere. No reprints for this anthology.

Please, no personal information on your document; include that information in the email only. Subject line should be written as: [Title] – [Author’s Last Name]

Send submissions to submissions@denverhorror.com

Submissions open from 1/12/26 – 2/13/26

For accepted stories, payment is ten dollars ($10) for the first 1,000 words, then a half (1/2) cent per word up to 6,000 words.

Thank you to JEFF WOOD for being on the Denver Horror Collective Steering Committee and hosting the virtual short fiction critique all these years! Your service has been much appreciated!

Here are a few 2025 publications (poems, short stories, collections, novellas, and novels) from some DHC members you might want to pick up as a holiday gift for yourself, your family, best friends, or worst enemies!

A TALE OF THREE CITIES by Elana Gomel

“Aqua Tofana” In BEAUTIFUL TRAGEDIES 4 by Sara Martinez

RABBITFACE AND FURTHER AWFUL ENCOUNTERS by Thomas C. Mavroudis

“It Goes On All Fours” in HORROR ON THE RANGE by Michael Picco

WHERE THE SHADOWS ARE SHOWN (now in audiobook!) by Josh Schlossberg 

DODGING ROCKS by Jeff Wood

“All Are Welcome Here” by George Woodruff

“Doll Parts” in  ROBOTS PAST & FUTURE SHORT STORIES by Marissa Yarrow

Archivist Mara accepts a quiet contract to catalog the crumbling Dumont estate. She expects solitude and routine; instead she finds a house steeped in silence, where the walls listen and the mirrors shift when no one is looking. The longer she stays, the more her own reflection falters. Her memories bend, her thoughts blur, and the line between herself and the presence within the house begins to dissolve. Somewhere in its history, a woman named Isabelle Dumont was erased—and Mara senses that same fate closing in.

What haunts the estate isn’t a ghost. It’s a patient predator, practiced in the art of rewriting lives, and it has set its sights on her.

The Memory Keeper is a gothic psychological horror about coercion, haunting, and the violence of being forgotten. It’s the first novel in Rowan Taylor’s chilling new series The Oblivion Cycle— standalone horror novels united not by character or plot, but by a single devouring idea: what if identity is not a fixed truth, but prey?

Each book opens a different doorway into oblivion, revealing how the self can be stolen, rewritten, hollowed out, or willingly surrendered.

Available now in ebook

Welcome to the quiet horror of Rowan Taylor — where memories linger, love unravels, and the line between presence and absence is never quite clear. These are stories that don’t scream — they whisper, weep, and wait in the silence.

Here, hauntings are intimate. Familiar faces become unfamiliar. Rooms remember. And some doors never close.

Rowan Taylor writes unsettling fiction that blends psychological dread with the supernatural, exploring what it means to forget—and to be forgotten. She is also known as Tracy Fobes, author of eight award-winning paranormal romances published by Simon & Schuster and Leisure LoveSpell. Fobes has also independently published numerous romantic suspense stories, including Hard Charger and Billionaire’s Hidden Heart.

As Fobes, she wrote of witches, grimalkins, haunted seas, and dangerous love. As Rowan, she steps fully into the dark.

She lives near Philadelphia, owns too many books and too few flashlights, and believes the scariest monsters are the ones who know your name.