UNSPLATTERPUNK! 4: Extreme horror short story and cover art submissions open

Gore at the fore, virtue in the wings: increasingly (un)popular extreme horror anthology to become a “goretet.” Writers encouraged to dredge up more carnage, more debauchery, more controversy . . . all while incorporating a positive message.

During one protest, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. saw a photographer put down his camera to help a protestor who had been knocked down by the police. The photographer’s job, said King, wasn’t to help people – it was to photograph the violence.

What the great civil rights leader understood, like Christ and Gandhi before him, was that spreading his message of universal brotherhood required packaging it in violence. Bloodshed gets attention.

Keeping this in mind, Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction (TQF) is seeking submissions for its fourth anthology in the UNSPLATTERPUNK! series. Unsplatterpunk stories wrap a positive message in typical extreme horror fare: over-the-top violence, grossness, and taboo subject matter. It’s a concept that one Goodreads reviewer calls “absurd, but fun all the same”. Think of Mary Poppins and her sugar that eases the distastefulness of medication. Only instead of sugar, we’re using faeces, viscera, and vomit.

With each UNSPLATTERPUNK! installment, the barbarity escalated and the depravity got nastier, but the ethical underpinning remained.

This time, we’re asking writers to take it all to the next level. We’re open to ultraviolent humour, backwoods perversion, raw realism, and massacre with a literary bent. We’ll take vile fantasy, gruesome sci-fi, and grossmance . . . anything so long as it defies contemporary sensibilities, repulses us, and integrates a virtuous message.

Artists: we’re also looking for cover art that captures the unsplatterpunk theme. Contact us at TQFunsplatterpunk@gmail.com.

Tips for Writers

Unsplatterpunk submissions get rejected for two main reasons:

• Not controversial enough – We’re not looking for a rehash of the latest popular horror film or TV series. If it’s not cringeworthily gross or offensive to the average Joe, then don’t send it. 
• No positive message – If the story doesn’t attempt to deliver a moral, then it’s not unsplatterpunk. What about all those writing instructors who advise that authors should never start with a theme or strive to impart a lesson? Ignore them.

Other advice:

• Make your story as attention grabbing and shocking as death metal at a piano recital. 
• Avoid stories in which the sole “moral” element is revenge exacted on a terrible person—that is not a positive message. 
• Don’t impress us with your writing style, your vocabulary, or your philosophical treatises. . . . Impress us with your story.
• Please, for the love of all that is holy, don’t write your story in a chatty style full of colloquialisms. You’re writing to your reader, not your BFF.  
• If someone asks what your story is about, your ten-second response should be enough to make their jaw drop. 
• Read UNSPLATTERPUNK!, UNSPLATTERPUNK! 2, and UNSPLATTERPUNK! 3 to get an idea of what we’re looking for.

Submission Requirements

Send stories of up to 10,000 words (no poetry, please) to TQFunsplatterpunk@gmail.com. Put “UNSPLATTERPUNK! 4 submission” in the subject line. In your cover letter, include a bio and tell us about the positive message that your story conveys.

• Deadline: October 31, 2020
• Word count: 500–10,000
• Reprints: No
• Multiple submissions: Yes
• Simultaneous submissions: No – We’ll get back to you within a couple weeks.
• File format: .doc (preferred) or .docx files only
• Payment: This is a non-paying zine. However, free epub, mobi, and pdf files will be available to everyone.

After publication, you are free to reprint your story elsewhere, but please credit Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction for original publication.

See the TQF standard guidelines for additional information on rights and legal matters.

Change via Nausea

What’s wrong with the world? How do you want to change it? Here’s your chance to spread your virtuous message (smothered in butchery).

Crank up your degeneracy dial. Make sure your readers walk away nauseated and shocked, but also morally enlightened. Make the grossest of it.

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #65: UNSPLATTERPUNK! 3: now out in paperback and ebook!

free epub | free mobi | free pdf | print UK | print USA | Kindle UK | Kindle US

GUEST-EDITED BY DOUGLAS J. OGUREK

Vicious parasites, punctured flesh, eyeball trauma, severed limbs, theatrical licking. The TQF UNSPLATTERPUNK! series returns with its third instalment. Six subversive stories, including an all-new tale by unsplatterpunk luminary Drew Tapley, aim to keep the reader entertained and aghast, while delivering a positive message.

A soon-to-be father focuses on helping others amid a Martian base massacre that shows the repercussions of human intrusion. Outraged women unite to stop a high-ranking male oppressor, and in the process, unravel the key to combating male chauvinism and its disastrous effects. A woman, certain of the upstanding life she’s led, learns a lesson that will seal her postmortem fate. Support group bloodshed leads to a scientific breakthrough. Three brothers on an Irish farm dismantle a brutal patriarchy… and chop off body parts. Back-of-theatre make-out sessions plunge to new slimy depths in an exploration of the pressure teens feel to become sexual legends.

So put on your coveralls and jump into the carnage and debauchery… You’re going to get filthy, but you’ll also emerge with a sense of hope.

Also includes reviews of books by Aliette de Bodard, John Llewellyn Probert, Laurie Penny, Pixie Britton and William F. Temple, and of the films Aquaman, Crawl, Every Day, Glass, It Chapter Two, Mary Poppins Returns, Ready or Not, Under the Skin and Us, and of the television series Carnival Row.

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Here are the gore-unsplattered contributors to this issue:

Chris Di Placito is a writer living in Fife, Scotland. His work has appeared in magazines such as Litro, BULL, Porridge, Ink In Thirds, STORGY and Structo.

Douglas J. Ogurek is the pseudonym for a writer living somewhere on Earth. Though banned on Mars, his fiction appears in over fifty Earth publications. Douglas’s website can be found at www.douglasjogurek.weebly.com and his Twitter account is at www.twitter.com/unsplatter.

Drew Tapley is a British copywriter, journalist and filmmaker based in Toronto.

Garvan Giltinan is a recovering Irishman with a fascination with the bizarre/grotesque/puerile. His work has appeared in the anthologies New England: Weird, Triggered, and Fatal Fetish. Forthcoming publications include the novel Backdoor Carnivore (JEA Press) and the short story “Titty Kitties” (Thicke and Vaney Books). Giltinan has an MFA in Creative Writing from Pine Manor College, and really weirds out his wife with the subject matter of his stories.

Jacob Edwards also writes 42-word reviews for Derelict Space Sheep. His website is at www.jacobedwards.id.au, his Facebook page at www.facebook.com/JacobEdwardsWriter, and his Twitter account is at www.twitter.com/ToastyVogon.

Joanna Koch writes literary horror and surrealist trash. Author of the novella The Couvade and other short fiction, Joanna has been published in journals and anthologies such as SYNTH #1: An Anthology of Dark SF, Honey & Sulphur and In Darkness, Delight: Masters of Midnight. Joanna is a Contemplative Psychotherapy graduate of Naropa University and lives near Detroit. Follow their monstrous musings at horrorsong.blog.

Rafe McGregor lectures at Edge Hill University. He is the author of two monographs, two novels, six collections of short fiction, and two hundred articles, essays, and reviews. His most recent work of fiction is The Adventures of Roderick Langham, a collection of occult detective stories.

Stephen Theaker is the co-editor of TQF and shares his home with three slightly smaller Theakers, one of whom provided the art for this issue's cover. His reviews, interviews and articles have also appeared in Interzone, Black Static, Prism, BFS Horizons and the BFS Journal.

Manchester, UK-based Tom Over is a writer of dark, speculative strangeness. He grew up loving all things horror and has been suckling on the gnarled teat of weird fiction ever since he was knee high to a Mugwump. He generally divides his time between watching cult movies with his girlfriend and working on his first collection. To date, his work has appeared in CLASH Media, Aphotic Realm, Crystal Lake Publishing and Horror Sleaze Trash amongst others. His first collection is due for release in early 2020 from NihilismRevised.

Zeke Jarvis is a professor of English at Eureka College. His work has appeared in Moon City Review, Posit and KNOCK, among other places. His books include So Anyway…, In A Family Way, Lifelong Learning and the forthcoming The Three of Them.

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As ever, all back issues of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction are available for free download.

Ready… set… gross: seeking extreme horror submissions for UNSPLATTERPUNK! 3

Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction aims for three-pugnance with third instalment of controversial anthology that aims to shock, disgust, and morally enlighten.

Sixteenth century English poet Sir Philip Sidney encouraged writers to teach virtue and delight. If readers aren’t delighted (i.e. entertained), he argued, they’ll walk away.

Now that we’re in the twenty-filth century, the unsplatterpunk movement has put a new spin on Sidney’s advice by asking writers to teach and shock and/or disgust readers.

Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction launched the unsplatterpunk movement in 2017 with UNSPLATTERPUNK!. The British Fantasy Society called this inaugural collection “memorable and thought-provoking”. Last year, TQF upped the muck with UNSPLATTERPUNK! 2, which criminologist, aesthetic commentator, and novelist Dr Rafe McGregor called “a provocative, confrontational, outrageous, and innovative collection”.

Next year, TQF will flay new trails with UNSPLATTERPUNK! 3, edited by Douglas J. Ogurek. We challenge authors to submit short stories that submerge a positive message in filth, carnage, and whatever else shocks people.

We’ll take ultraviolent humour, perverted country bumpkin, and raw realism. We’ll take vile fantasy, gruesome sci-fi, and grossmance… anything so long as it defies contemporary sensibilities, repulses us, and integrates a virtuous message.

Bear in mind that this is not an easy task. “Unsplatterpunk is an exceptionally demanding genre in which to write, requiring an almost impossible balancing act between the disgusting and the morally uplifting”, writes Rafe McGregor in the foreword to UNSPLATTERPUNK! 2. “If it doesn’t convey a positive moral message, then it’s splatterpunk, not unsplatterpunk; if it isn’t disgusting enough, then it’s neither unsplatterpunk nor splatterpunk.”   

Also remember that gore is the new norm. Popular TV shows and films drip with eviscerations, decapitations, and amputations. Then there are the splatterpunk/extreme horror books that make those TV shows and films look like children’s programs. The most abhorrent stuff imaginable? We think not. Writers can take it to the next level.

Submissions are open to both established writers and hobbyists. Alas, the only payment we can offer is a pdf copy (available for download to all) and recognition – or is it notoriety? – for contributing to this genre-defining series.

Send your vile concoctions of 10,000 words or fewer (no poetry please) to TQFunsplatterpunk@gmail.com.

Tips

• Try to gross out or appall the person who thinks he or she has seen everything.
• Convey a positive message, whether blatant or subtle.
• Make the story as attention-getting as a death metal concert in a spa.
• Give us something we haven’t seen.
• Avoid traditional revenge stories. Torturing a bad guy isn’t a positive message.

Some people say, “Nothing’s shocking.” Make them eat their words. Give us your worst.

Deadline: 31 July 2019

Word count: 500–10,000

Reprints: No

Multiple submissions: Yes

Simultaneous submissions: No – we’ll get back to those who submit for this project within a couple weeks.

File name: [story title]-[author surname].doc

Payment: Non-paying zine (free epub, mobi, and pdf copies available to everyone including contributors) plus participation in an emerging subgenre

Send submissions as a .doc or .rtf attachment, along with a 3rd person bio, to TQFunsplatterpunk@gmail.com. Please include UNSPLATTERPUNK! in the subject line.

After publication, you are free to reprint your story elsewhere, but please credit Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction for original publication.

See standard guidelines for additional information on rights and legal matters.

UNSPLATTERPUNK! 2 (TQF63): now out in paperback and ebook!

free epub | free mobi | free pdf | print UK | print USA | Kindle UK | Kindle US

GUEST-EDITED BY DOUGLAS J. OGUREK

“Ghastly.” “Bloodthirsty.” “Transgressive.” “Over-the-top violence and sexual deviation.” So said the reviews of UNSPLATTERPUNK!, the first official collection in the unsplatterpunk subgenre.

Now, seven goreslingers and propriety defilers have grossed up their game to deliver UNSPLATTERPUNK! 2. True to the unsplatterpunk subgenre, these stories deliver a moral message while shocking or repulsing the reader. The collection includes a foreword by criminologist, philosopher, and aesthetic commentator Rafe McGregor.

Returning contributor Drew Tapley kicks off the awfulness on an impressively juvenile note with the anthology's most straightforward story. In “First Kiss”, a high school student deals with an expulsive situation with as much stoicism as Conan the Barbarian… maybe “Barfbarian” is more relevant. Trophy hunting is Triffooper Saxelbax’s target as his protagonist, a designer of controversial augmented reality games, takes on the corporate obsession with teamwork in “The Villainy of Solitude”. Hugh Alsin’s satirical piece “Convention Hitler!” explores intolerance run amok when the story’s namesake attends a British horror convention. In “The Music of Zeddy Graves”, Stephen Theaker brings his planet-hopping duo of Rolnikov and Pelney to Melodia, whose inhabitants participate in an endless music festival, and whose main attraction goes to gruesome extremes to achieve her compositions. Douglas J. Ogurek’s “Gunkectomy” alternates between an embittered architect/author and a husband hunter who finds commercial and social value in her earwax. “The Tapestry of Roubaix” by Howard Phillips seems to come off the shelf of a nineteenth century library, until it reveals what the protagonist does in his washbasin. M.S. Swift, another returning contributor, closes out the collection with “The Bones of Old England”, an extravaganza of mania-induced carnage.

Delve deep into the cesspool that is UNSPLATTERPUNK! 2, and remember – sometimes to learn a lesson, you might have to get dirty.

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Here are the unsplattered contributors to this issue:

Douglas J. Ogurek is the pseudonym for a writer living somewhere on Earth. Though banned on Mars, his fiction appears in over forty Earth publications. Ogurek founded the controversial literary subgenre known as unsplatterpunk, which uses splatterpunk conventions (e.g. extreme violence, gore, taboo subject matter) to deliver a positive message. He guest-edited Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #58: UNSPLATTERPUNK!, the first ever unsplatterpunk anthology. He also reviews films at that same ezine. Recent longer works include the young adult novel Branch Turner vs the Currants (World Castle Publishing) and the horror/suspense novella Encounter at an Abandoned Church (Scarlet Leaf Publishing). More at www.douglasjogurek.weebly.com. Twitter: @unsplatter

Drew Tapley is a copywriter, journalist and filmmaker based in Toronto.

Howard Phillips is the author of His Nerves Extruded, The Doom That Came to Sea Base Delta and The Day the Moon Wept Blood.

Howard Watts provides the exceptional wraparound cover for this issue.

Hugh Alsin is a writer who now stays away from conventions, although he stresses that the events in his story are completely fictitious, and any resemblance to people living or dead is either unintentional or for the purposes of satire or parody.

M.S. Swift’s work has been published in a wide range of horror and fantasy anthologies, including the first TQF unsplatterpunk collection. Swift’s writing is inspired by the landscape and mythology of his native Britain. He recently completed a witch hunter novel set in an alternative medieval Britain and is seeking a publisher courageous enough to back it.

Rafe McGregor lectures at Leeds Trinity University and the University of York. He is the author of The Value of Literature, two novels, six collections of short fiction, and two hundred articles, essays, and reviews. His most recent book is The Adventures of Roderick Langham, a collection of occult detective stories.

Stephen Theaker has written several novels, but does not recommend reading them.

Triffooper Saxelbax is an emerging (and often grating) voice in the unsplatterpunk subgenre. When he is not writing, he stir-fries vegetables and decorates pine cones. His work has not been translated into any other languages. Neither has it been nominated for nor appeared in the year’s best so and so. Saxelbax’s mental exertions have caused numerous regional power outages.

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As ever, all back issues of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction are available for free download.

Coming Soon: UNSPLATTERPUNK! 2

Stories selected for sequel to controversial genre-defining anthology.

What do the following things have in common? A money-grubbing executive makes huge donations to third world countries. An animal welfare group uses fake images of dead hookers and strippers to advertise “No Makeup May,” a month-long event that encourages women to donate money that they would otherwise spend on cosmetics. A porn star, concerned about overpopulation, urges her young male admirers to “get snipped”.

The answer: they all use controversial means to achieve a positive outcome. These are confusing combinations – people don’t know how to react.

Last year, Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction released UNSPLATTERPUNK!, an anthology that achieves the literary equivalent of these odd juxtapositions. The collection included five stories that launched the unsplatterpunk movement. Unsplatterpunk, like its splatterpunk forerunner, assaults the reader with stories soaked in gore and controversial subject matter, but it takes a slightly different path by incorporating a positive message.

Soon, TQF will release UNSPLATTERPUNK! 2, a follow-up to the anthology that one British Fantasy Society reviewer called “memorable and thought-provoking”. After reading many submissions, we’ve selected seven tales of depravity and revulsion that also deliver a moral statement:

“Convention Hitler!” by Hugh Alsin
“Gunkectomy” by Douglas J. Ogurek
“The Tapestry of Roubaix” by Howard Phillips
“The Villainy of Solitude” by Triffooper Saxelbax
“The Bones of Old England” by M.S. Swift
“First Kiss” by Drew Tapley
“The Music of Zeddy Graves” by Stephen Theaker

The collection will also include a foreword by Rafe McGregor, author of The Value of Literature.

So stay tuned for an unlikely horror convention attendee, a booger-eating helicopter parent, shocking pleasures, a murderous musician, a disgusting augmented reality game, a maniacal heir, and expulsions galore. Perhaps you will find beauty in the darkness.

Extreme Horror Writers: Two Months Left to Submit to UNSPLATTERPUNK! 2 Anthology

Contribute to an emerging subgenre and become a humanitarian in monsters’ clothing.

Many fiction anthologies, journals, and zines have a similar attitude when it comes to “excessive gore” or “shock value”—they don’t want it. We do… for the forthcoming sequel to Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction’s controversial UNSPLATTERPUNK! anthology.

Unsplatterpunk has all the grotesqueness and transgressive subject matter of splatterpunk, plus it contains a positive message—that’s where the “un” fits in.

We encourage emerging and established writers to “take a stab” at this subgenre and submit a story to UNSPLATTERPUNK! 2. Here’s the official call for submissions.

Unsplatterpunk is the villain that helps the needy, the pool of vomit that nourishes. So if you have some diabolical idea brewing, spew it out and send it to us. You have two months.

Authors: One Month Left to Submit to TQF Unsplatterpunk Anthology

It’s gore… for goodness’ sake! 

We’re looking for writers with the most demented imaginations to be part of the first anthology in the festering subgenre of unsplatterpunk. However, you only have one month: the submission window closes on August 31.

NB: TQF is a non-paying hobby zine, so if writing fiction is your job, this isn’t the project for you; this is for the dilettantes, the hobbyists, the Saturday afternoon softball players and Sunday morning footballers.

Check out the submission guidelines, then get your head into the gutter and start writing. Just remember the one thing that distinguishes an unsplatterpunk story from a splatterpunk story: a positive message.

Plot, character, setting… they’re all important, but they’re all peripheral to gore and violence. And the message. Don’t forget the message!

So write something that would make readers of pop fiction cringe… something that would make the sword and sorcery geeks gag and the sci-fi nerds squirm.

Not gore for gore’s sake, but gore for goodness’ sake. See guidelines here.

Closing to submissions till December (except for the Unsplatterpunk Special!)

We've just closed to submissions for Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #56, and looking at what we have in hand already for that issue, and the additional submissions that have come in over the last month, and the pile of material produced by all of my hard-working pseudonyms, I think we have enough now for both #56 and #57, while #58 is a special issue (see below), so I've decided to close to regular submissions until December.

The exception would be reviews, which are always welcome, and further instalments in any of our ongoing serials, which we can always squeeze in.

Frustrated? Need another outlet for your literary genius? Turn your attention instead to #58, our upcoming Unsplatterpunk Special, edited by TQF regular Douglas Ogurek: submission guidelines here for that one!

By the way, apologies for the delay in publishing issue 55. It's all my fault. Our guest editor Howard Watts completed his work a while ago and it's been waiting for me to do my bit. It'll be with you soon, and it'll be worth the wait, I promise. Issue 56 will probably follow hard on its heels.

Call for submissions: Theaker's Quarterly Fiction Unsplatterpunk Special

Just a storyful of splatter makes the medicine go down.

If ever there were a subgenre that demonstrates the idiom, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” unsplatterpunk is it. Unsplatterpunk offers the same vile ingredients of splatterpunk, literature’s most extreme progeny, with one exception: somewhere within all that nastiness, unsplatterpunk offers a message that promotes virtue.

TQF is seeking fiction or satire submissions (no poetry please) for an unsplatterpunk special slated for publication in December of this year. Please note that TQF is a non-paying hobby zine, so if writing fiction is your job, this won’t be the project for you; this is for the dilettantes, the hobbyists, the Saturday afternoon softball players and Sunday morning footballers. As always, the zine will be available free in pdf, epub and mobi formats, as well as on Kindle and in print via Amazon at the cheapest possible price.

TQF regular Douglas J. Ogurek will edit the issue. Here’s Douglas:

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Ever heard Sir Philip Sidney’s dictum that literature should “teach and delight?” We’re going to apply that sage advice to horror’s most controversial subgenre: splatterpunk. Well, maybe “teach and disgust” is more appropriate in this case.

Unsplatterpunk has all the gore, depravity, and violence of splatterpunk, plus it embeds a positive message.

Advice

• Offend John and Jane Doe in the first couple of sentences
• Make story concept as attention-getting as a balloon popping at a party
• Approach your subject matter with a 14-year-old boy’s mentality, but align your technique with that of a literary virtuoso
• Incorporate a positive message
• Try to avoid revenge or comeuppance stories: they often fail to teach a virtue

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So give us your taboo and your controversial. Give us your cartoonish violence and over-the-top carnage. Just don’t forget the positive message.

Deadline: August 31, 2016

Word count: 500 – 10,000

Reprints: No

Multiple submissions: No

Simultaneous submissions: No

File name: Unsplatterpunk[story title][author surname]

Payment: Non-paying zine (free epub, mobi and pdf copies available to everyone including contributors) plus recognition for helping create a new subgenre

Send submissions as a .doc or .rtf attachment, along with a 3rd person bio, to TQFunsplatterpunk@gmail.com. Please include UNSPLATTERPUNK in the subject line.

After publication, you are free to reprint your story elsewhere, but please credit Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction for original publication.

Please refer to our standard guidelines for additional information on rights and legal matters.