About Us

Editor-in-Chief: Arthur Robert Tracy IV
Publishers: Jim Keller & Chris Boltz
Associate Editors: [yeah, don’t we wish…]

What We Do Here:

There’s a bit of advice we give to writers: “Keep submitting your story until hell itself won’t have it.”  (I first heard this advice associated with The Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, but I sadly do not know its true origins).  The unfortunate truth is that there are more humans out there producing great short stories than there are venues to publish them.

And, thus, Hell Itself was born.

Most editors will tell you that they reject far more good material than they accept.  A great story may simply not be a good fit for the current issue.  Or it could be great but the wrong choice for the publication’s tone and style.  It might be about something that the venue’s core readers wouldn’t like to read about.  Or there may just not be enough slots in the magazine to take everything the editor loved.

Well, sometimes those great stories can rack up a lot of rejections, leaving the author feeling like hell itself won’t take it.

We decided to try to let go of those reasons why great stories don’t get published.  We launched without a fixed number of stories we could take, a proscribed tone or style for the magazine, or a core readership we needed to keep happy.  We told writers that if they have a great story that no one else would take, we wanted it.

The result was a gloriously unpredictable magazine. The only thing consistent among our stories was that they were well crafted, human written, and fit broadly under the umbrella of “short speculative fiction.” 

As we got going, we settled into a regular schedule, with a new story every Friday. That does, unfortunately, limit the number of stories we can accept, but otherwise we remain that gloriously unpredictable publication. Check back every week, and you will be rewarded with intriguing stories that you’d never get anywhere else.