Text Box: City Slab Publications,1705 Summit Ave. Suite 314, Seattle, WA 98122 U.S.A. The maddening drip of a dirty rain leaking from the ornamented facades of buildings two centuries old…the hot, stinking wind that chases discarded newspapers down blind alleys into a darkness that smells of garbage and fresh blood…the staccato slap of naked feet on asphalt, running at full speed over broken glass and still-smoldering cigarette butts, while a scream disappears like a fading siren into the distance…the red slash of a neon sign like a wound in the belly of the night, while out there in the unquiet stillness of the sleeping city, something inhuman shifts and shudders to life— City Slab is a gloss-copy, magazine-bound publication with nearly half our content produced in color. We’re looking for taut, intelligent horror fiction in an urban setting. The city should be an integral part of your story if you want to publish it with us: give us a sense of place, a sense of your city’s identity. If it’s a real city, make us feel you know it. If it’s fictional, make us feel it’s real. Show us that the story you have to tell could not have been told in another setting. There’s a certain grit and unique quality to life in the city, with a million wonders and horrors waiting around each corner. Seek them out. Find them. Show them to us. Start your story with action. If we start the story with a character sitting in his apartment thinking about his life, by page two he’d better be off his ass and doing something. We like stories where things happen. Contemplation and introspection are admirable and useful, but so are boots on the sidewalk. Get your characters out there. We are a magazine for adults and don’t shy away from adult themes. Make sure your story is worthy a thinking, feeling grown-up’s attention. And make sure the sex and violence work to elucidate your theme. Make sure you have a theme. Above all, don’t forget that City Slab is a HORROR magazine. Frighten us, startle us, make us uneasy, or give us a sense of creeping dread. BE SCARY. You’d be amazed how many writers forget this part. While we like all kinds of fiction, we have a preference to stories with a supernatural element, monsters and ghosts and things that go bump; while horror can be done without it, we see far too many “madman/serial killer/revenge-seeker on the loose” stories. Lastly, steer away from the first-person point of view. While we occasionally publish stories with this p.o.v., our preference runs otherwise. Yeah, it’s arbitrary. You think life is fair? If you really want to know what we’re publishing, read the magazine. Sure, everybody says this, but there’s a good reason: we get a lot of stories from authors who have no idea what we’re looking for. This is not the way to get published. FORMAT: Stories must be less than 5000 words; no simultaneous submissions. Include a cover letter with publication history, if any, and a little bit (2 or 3 sentences) about yourself. Don’t summarize your story in the cover letter: we’re going to read it, let it speak for itself. Short and sweet is the order of the day. Stories should be proofread and spellchecked. We’re a professional operation here, and we expect our contributors to be professional too. We won’t reject you necessarily for a misplaced modifier, but excessive sloppiness in your submission doesn’t give us confidence that the story was created with great care and craft—in fact, it pisses us off. POSTAL: Snail mail submissions go to City Slab Publications, 1705 Summit Ave, Suite 314,Seattle, WA 98122. Include a SASE if you hope to get a response. E-SUBMISSIONS: Electronic submissions should be in either .rtf or Word .doc format, or (preferably) pasted into the body of your email. Send them to Submission@CitySlab.com and/or Scott@CitySlab.com. Put the word “SUBMISSION” and the title of your story in the subject line. Make sure it’s readable; while the loss of some formatting in pasted stories is understandable, we still get tweaked when we see fonts smaller than 12 point. PAYMENT: Payment for fiction ranges from one cent to five cents per word, payable within 60 days of publication. We’re currently handled in the United States and Canada by four different distribution companies, and our outlets include Barnes & Noble, Hastings, and other national book stores. So exposure is another facet of payment. ARTISTS: send in samples of work and we’ll let you know if we’ve got an assignment for you. Interior illustrations pay $30.00 each. Covers can be negotiated. We would also like to see photographic art, images of architecture, gargoyles etc. NON-FICTION: We accept interviews on a regular basis. Query with a pitch. We also publish articles on topics of interest to horror readers (recent subjects have included Jack the Ripper, Death Machines, and the history of Absinthe), film critique and review (recent retrospectives on the Halloween series, the films of Dario Argento, and an introduction to Miike), and horror-related video game reviews. Again, query before submitting. RESPONSE TIME: Three months. If we haven’t responded in that amount of time, query us. Be sure to include the name of your piece and the date you submitted.


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