You may have read about Psychopomp’s recent reorg, but we are still doing Afterlives 2025: The Year’s Best Death Stories!

Instead of having open subs for authors, we are asking editors to send the deathly stories they published. If you are a writer who had story about death published in 2025, please be in touch with your editor and ask them to send it to us! (Editors: we are looking for doc/docx files, thank you.) We have sent submission info to editors, but may not have reached every single editor, it’s true.

Stories should be 1k to 17,500 words in length (shorts to novelettes). Stories should be about death, not slasher horror. Hopefully you know the vibe by now.

For our 2025 edition, Maria Haskins will be picking the final table of contents. Maria Haskins is a Swedish-Canadian writer and reviewer of speculative fiction. She is a non-fiction editor at Ruadán Books, and a fiction editor at Many Worlds. Maria reviews short fiction for Locus Magazine. Her essays and reviews are also available to read at Pyschopomp, Strange Horizons, and Maria’s Reading.

We will be open from February 1 to February 28, 2026.

Magazines

The Deadlands is eligible for the Locus Award for Best Magazine, British Fantasy Award for Best Magazine/Periodical, and the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine.

Fantasy Magazine is eligible for the Locus Award for Best Magazine, British Fantasy Award for Best Magazine/Periodical, and the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine.

Editors

The Deadlands editors are eligible for the Best Editor Short Form Hugo Award, and the Best Editor category in the Locus Awards.

Deadlands fiction: E. Catherine Tobler, Vajra Chandrasekera (guest, #40), Laura Blackwell (copy editing), Annika Barranti Klein (copy editing), Josephine Stewart (proofreading)
Deadlands poetry: Nicasio Andres Reed
Deadlands nonfiction: David Gilmore

Fantasy Magazine editors Shingai Njeri Kagunda and Arley Sorg may be considered for Best Editor Short Form Hugo Award, Best Editor for the Locus Awards, and the Special Award for World Fantasy.

Short stories (under 7500 words)

Everyone Keeps Saying Probably, Premee Mohamed
Extreme Sports Club for Octogenarians, Kate Lechler
his love’s ashes on his tongue, Monte Lin
The Path She Sings, Vanessa Fogg
Saint Gremmy, Robert Nazar Arjoyan
The Scythe and Other Simple Mechanisms, T.E.Z. Moore
Highway 1, Past Hope, Maria Haskins
Soul Shepherds, Joshua Lim
Whalesong, Guan Un
The Twelve Deaths of You, C. J. Subko
Penny For Them, Die Booth
The Wanderer, C. T. Muchemwa
Fractionated Doses Don’t Quench the Thirst of Those Who Knew the Whole, Le Werner
For Those Who Stay Buried, Amanda Cecelia Lang
Everlasting, Daniel Oluremi
Deliquescence, Kelsea Yu 
Plus One, Olufunmilayo Makinde
Miles To Go Before I Sleep, Beth Goder
Little Trinkets, A. J. Sharpe
One More Episode, Ashok Banker
The Last Minute Before the Rooster Crows, Malena Salazar Maciá
Hamaka, Leave Me Alone, Testimony Odey
The Destruction of All That is Good and Holy, Otherwise Known as Green Beans, Erin Ulm
The Ghost of Cerrera Orbital Station Makes Herself Known, Laila Amado
The Pretendian, Jason Pearce
Punks Don’t Die, Kat Sedia
Liminalities of the Second Contraction, Scott Payne
Corporate Policy, Eden Royce
Knife Plus, Tracie McBride
The Matriarchs, Malena Salazar Maciá
Silence Starved and Swallowed by Sydney Paige Guerrero
When You Hit The Poison Ivy Thicket, You’ve Gone Too Far, by Corey Farrenkopf
The Memory Breach, Christian Emecheta
That Time Uncle George Caused the Apocalypse, Vanessa Kyn
The Interrogation of So-ssang, Seoung Kim
The Dragon and the Bog, Sunwoo Jeong
They Return, Eleanna Castroianni
A Cup of Forgetting, Eleanor Glewwe
Ichthyosis, M. L. Krishnan

Novelettes (7500-17500 words)

UPDATE: The Buildings Are Hungry and the Plague Can Speak, Natalia Theodoridou
Garden of the Bloodpotter, Erin Brown
Forsaking All Others, Premee Mohamed (found in the collection One Message Remains)
The Weight of What is Hollow, Premee Mohamed (found in the collection One Message Remains)

Novellas (17500-40000 words)

One Message Remains, Premee Mohamed (found in the collection One Message Remains)
Starstruck, by Aimee Ogden
Summer In the House Of the Departed, by Josh Rountree
No One To Hold the Distant Dead, by K. L. Schroeder

Collections

One Message Remains, by Premee Mohamed (this collection includes two novelettes and one novella)

Nonfiction

Nonfiction essays are generally eligible for the Best Related Work Hugo Award, and authors are generally eligible for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award.

Five Treasured Tropes of SFF K-Dramas, Cressida Blake Roe
John, Penelope K. Parker
Blind Date With a Corpse, RJ Aurand
The Ritual, by Matthew Wollin
Ask a Necromancer: Autopsy of a Horror Film, Amanda Downum
Ask a Necromancer: Fun with Formaldehyde, Amanda Downum

Poems

Longer poems are eligible for the Rhysling Award. Poems under 10 lines are eligible for the Dwarf Stars Award. 2026 will also include a Hugo Award for Best Poem!

The river, Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi
Suffer the Blessing, Aaron Knuckey
The Language of Fireflies, Angela Liu
Things for which I have not ascertained your consent, RB Lemberg
Treatise of the Lyric on the State of Things, Justin Cruzana
After the Storm, Ishita Basu Mallik
Flesh Ghosts, Andrew Kozma
Interrogation of Saint Winifred, Caroline Shea
The Clothier of the Sunless, Arda Mori
Query Telling on Other Elder, Michael Hessel-Mial
Séance, Elizabeth Wing
quietude II, Adamu Yahuza Abdullahi
Amanita Season, Belle Biscotti
I had a dream and in the dream I knew I was dreaming so I believed I could change things, Shana Ross
Bay nakht afn altn mark: A rehearsal, R.B. Lemberg
Not a Bird, Ellen Romano
Seascape w\Ṣàngó & Ọya’s Incarnations, Mu’izz Ọpẹ́yẹmí Àjàyí
How the road extracts an elegy, Aishat Yahkub
All of Our Mothers are Dead, Eleanor Ball
Fear is a Dagger, Mateo Perez Lara
More Than A Blank Parenthesis Equals God’s Forgetfulness, Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan
Grove of Jealous Lovers, Alex Jennings

Artwork

Artists are eligible for the Best Fan Artist Hugo Award and the British Fantasy Award for Best Artist. Art may be eligible for the BSFA Award for Best Artwork.

Our artists:
Summer In the House Of the Departed: inkshark
One Message Remains and Starstruck: John G. Reinhart
Deadlands #40: Carly A-F
No One to Hold the Distant Dead: MMIX (Rust + L)

Thank you for your support in 2025. In 2026, we are getting back to our Deadlands roots and trying to build a better foundation for all we hope to do in the coming years. Have a blessed awards season (we have always lived in awards season…).