The voting booth is closed after 4 weeks and the winners are:

Congratulate all of them! Well done!

Payments are scheduled for September 1 via paypal.

Greetings twisted ones and welcome to issue 1 of The Dark Fiction Spotlight!

Thank you to all who have submitted and to the over 4,000 people who have frequented the site without the debut issue even published! The journey has been long, not tedious at all, and most of all fun.The editing team has put together a very surprising issue with 10 stories from authors who can now officially be deemed psychotic, and that’s the best accolade we can think of! Also featured is a plethora of fantastic perturbing poetry that has lead the editing staff to believe that the world is just not as reserved as people tend to think it is.

One of the innovations we have presented here is the right to vote. Simply click on the issue number of your choice after reading and vote for your favorite author! Choose carefully, for your vote is only counted once! We want readers and fans to be choosing who should win the monetary prize in the SHOWDOWN and FICTION section of the e-zine. This is the best way that we can think of to eliminate snark and bring readers, fans, families and writers back into the front lines and keeping the editing staff  in the shadows, patiently waiting to give them the winners well deserved earnings.

We’re the only dark/horror/horrotica and etc. magazine around doing such. So support it! The editing staff could have easily chosen the best o’ the bunch, as all the rest do, but we all felt that each story brought its own flair and flavor, and choosing one over the other would have been just plain wrong. So we are leaving it up to our loyal readers to vote for their favorites! First place wins $50, second place wins $25 and third place wins $15 and $10 prize for the SHOWDOWN. It’s the fairest game in the world.

There are, of course, stories that the editors thought were stronger, but that does not mean that one story/poem is better than the next, it just means that it tickled our fancy more than the others. With over 80 fiction submissions and almost just as much poetry, this issue has wiped the editing staff out, but we’re ready for the next challenge. The writers should be most proud, for they have made it into history with our debut issue, and we applaud them and their poetic counterparts, and of course our flash fiction-ites in the SHOWDOWN.

Now take a deep breath and get ready to devour some unconventional fiction, the kind that you won’t find at a typical horror web-zine. We’ve avoided robot writing and pretty much avoided what the majority of work that other horror editors would call genius fiction. Get your garbage pail ready because you will need it when your gag-reflex is challenged, and make sure to keep your lights on. The tunnel is very dark in here.

Much gratitude,

TDFS Team