Limited Demographic: women and gender diverse people

Note: an unspecified percentage of sales will be donated to SoCo Women in Horror Festival

For Sweet Screams, we're looking for horror stories centered around themes of sweetness, baking, cooking, desserts, and the unsettling things that can exist beneath comfort, nostalgia, celebration, or indulgence.

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This can include baked goods, bake sales, bakeries, candies, pastries, recipes, cafés, diners, holiday treats, cooking competitions, trad wife aesthetics (when meaningfully tied to cooking or baking), strange ingredients, hospitality, obsession, family traditions, celebrations, or anything else that fits within the thread of sweetness colliding with horror.

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We're especially interested in stories that approach these themes in creative, unexpected, emotional, unsettling, atmospheric, or deeply human ways. The horror can be literary, psychological, gothic, folk, surreal, quiet, darkly comedic, or grotesque, but this anthology is not a fit for extreme horror, splatterpunk, or stories that rely heavily on exploitative shock value.

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Most of all, think of your story as the dessert itself. Sweet Screams is the bake sale from hell, and we want every story in this anthology to feel like its own terrifyingly irresistible confection; the kind of sweet treat a reader knows they probably shouldn’t touch, but would die to take a bite out of anyway.