M I S S I O N

M E N A C E publishes work that encapsulates the dark, the transgressive, the gross. While not strictly a space for the speculative, M E N A C E seeks the “literary weird”—work that would be rejected from big literary magazines for being too genre.

M E N A C E walks the line between the gazes, so send us your best pieces about femme rage, femgore, period sex, queer sex, ghosts, girlhood, girlhood as a girl of color, grief, the gothic, demons, witches, climate, science, seas, mothers, monsters, any and all non-Twilight vampires. We want body horror, eco-horror, cosmic horror. We want work that walks into the shadows and illuminates the shape of something greater breathing in the dark—humor, wonder, love, repair, transcendence. Give us your unlikeable femme protagonists. Give us words that haunt.

W H A T W E L I K E

Emily Brontë; Emily Dickinson; David Lynch; the months of October through February; Mitski; Father John Misty; Carmen Maria Machado; Monstrilio; Ethel Cain; Cathy Park Hong; Candice Wheuhle; Toni Morrison; The Southern Reach trilogy; Eve Babitz; The Substance; Rekha; The Seas; Shruti Swamy; Sam Sax; Melissa Febos; Thirteen; Thoroughbreds; folk magic; tarot; It Follows; Leslie Jamison; June Jordan; Smile; surgery; stalking; The Lighthouse; Metric; Meshuggah; Lianne La Havas; midwives; doulas; Alice Glass; Safiya Sinclair; Elena Ferrante; Edgar Kunz; Audre Lorde; Amy Winehouse; Robert Mapplethorpe; Elle Nash; Rebecca; banshees; abandoned malls; the aughts; noir; Night Film; Suspiria; Salman Rushdie; Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov; Samantha Wall; Vandana Singh; Princess Mononoke; the original Nosferatu; Frankenstein; A Cinderella Story; Interstellar; cemeteries; Creamerie; creepypastas; cryptids; cookiecutter sharks; anglerfish; Black Swan; all three seasons of White Lotus; Sarah Rose Etter; CJ Leede, Saltburn; Barbara Borland; Heathers, Florence + The Machine; Venus; Jennifer’s Body; Cornelius Eady; Hiatus Kaiyote; Kaveh Akbar; Zeina Hashem Beck; Jeannette Winterson; Jimin Seo; Gillian Flynn; Nan Goldin; Sinners; Ling Ma; Paradise Rot; Ninth House; Lisa Taddeo; The House of the Spirits; Over the Garden Wall; sailboats; storms; Deadloch; Bikini Kill; Kiki Rockwell; Billie Holiday; Big Little Lies season one; Yellowjackets season one; Fire and Hemlock; zines; FKA Twigs; Lana Del Rey; Arundhati Roy; Mexican Gothic; Gojira; Kate Bush; Gwendolyn Brooks; CocoRosie; Tori Amos; Tilda Swinton; the women of the Addams Family; anatomy; Demeter and Persephone; Personal Shopper; Eyes Wide Shut; Alfred Schnittke; Hala Alyan; early Muse; Mona Awad; Han Kang; Taryn Simon; Octavia Butler; Practical Magic; Björk; Tananarive Due; Danez Smith, Ursula Le Guin; Antonia Kuo; the Watchmen limited series; poisons and potions; cum; The Neon Demon; Dune; the occult; The Last of Us; snakes; psychics; chainsaws; dirty martinis; taxidermy; True Detective: Night Country; the hot girl you don’t know if you want to be or want to be with smoking a cigarette outside your Catholic high school; Shirley Jackson; Zombieland.

M E N A C E especially seeks quality work from writers and artists whose voices remain underrepresented in literary and genre publishing. We encourage submissions from those who identify as queer, BIPOC, female, transgender, nonbinary, disabled, neurodiverse, or otherwise marginalized in contemporary publishing.

M E N A C E is anticapitalist and not interested in work that is racist, sexist, misogynist, ableist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, transphobic, etc.