Welcome to the 6th Monthly Writing Contest of 2026! The theme is: HISTORICAL, GOTHIC, or PERIOD FICTION.

Please note: Fanfiction is NOT accepted. Please submit original work only.

Winners are featured on Underground Bookshelf!

https://www.underground-bookshelf.com/3190763_june-2026-contest-submissions

#writing #shortstories #poetry #fiction #historicalfiction #gothic #gothicfiction #periodfiction #writingcontest #poetrycontest #genrefiction

Cenotaph

A Tale of Love Beyond the Tomb

I went each evening to the tomb because the dead had no one else.

It stood beyond the last lamps of the village, where the road narrowed into a path and the path, in time, surrendered itself to nettles, thorns, and the pale roots of ancient trees. There the hill rose like the back of some buried beast, and in its side, half-swallowed by ivy and weather, was the stone door behind which my beloved lay.

No name remained upon the lintel. The rain had taken it. Or the years. Or perhaps those who had carved it had done so lightly, as if afraid that naming the dead too deeply would make death more permanent. But I knew the place. I knew the stone. I knew the silence that gathered before it like a servant waiting for orders.

I had seen the black carriage pass beneath the sycamores. I had heard the bell. I had stood among the mourners while the wind pressed their coats against their bodies and made their veils tremble like wings. I had watched the door sealed with mortar. I had watched the priest lower his head. I had watched the others turn away.

Afterward, when they returned to their bread, their fires, their sleep, I remained.

Then I came the next evening.

And the next.

And in this way the years began.

I brought what the seasons allowed. In spring, violets. In summer, white roses stolen from the wall of the abandoned rectory. In autumn, red leaves that looked already wounded. In winter, when the earth refused all tenderness, I brought my breath cupped in my hands, warming nothing.

I never came armed.

This was often remarked upon in the village, though never to my face. The road was lonely. Wolves had once been seen in the upper wood. Worse than wolves, it was said, were the men who slept in the ruined mill and came out at dusk with knives beneath their coats. But I carried no pistol, no blade, no staff. I carried only the small candle I lit upon the lowest step.

I do not know why I refused protection. Perhaps because grief itself had rendered me defenseless. Perhaps because one does not visit the beloved as though entering battle. Perhaps because I believed, with a conviction I never spoke aloud, that no evil thing would dare approach a tomb already so well attended.

At the stone door I always said the same words.

“I have come.”

Nothing more.

It seemed enough.

In the beginning I wept. Later I spoke. Later still I sat in silence until the candle guttered and the darkness of the wood became one with the darkness of the tomb. There were evenings when I told small things: that the baker’s daughter had married the cooper’s son; that lightning had struck the church spire but spared the bell; that the old dog who used to follow the funeral processions had died beneath the market table; that the village had forgotten certain songs.

There were other evenings when I confessed what I dared not tell the living: that I had grown envious of those whose dead were buried in the churchyard, near bells, near footsteps, near the innocent disturbances of children; that I sometimes feared the face within the tomb had altered beyond recognition; that I could no longer remember the exact sound of the voice I had loved, only the wound it left by ceasing.

Still I came.

The villagers first pitied me. Then they avoided me. Finally they made of my devotion a superstition.

Mothers frightened their children with me. Do not linger after dusk, they said, or you will see the mourner on the hill. Young men, drunk on harvest ale, dared one another to follow me, but none came farther than the black pond where the reeds whispered without wind. Once I found a crude figure made of straw hanging from a branch near the path. It wore a scrap of mourning cloth. I took it down, carried it to the tomb, and burned it in my candle flame.

The smoke drifted beneath the door.

That was the first time I thought I heard movement within.

It was faint. So faint that a sensible mind would have named it settling stone, or a root shifting in the earth, or the sigh of air through cracks. But grief does not possess a sensible mind. Grief has ears everywhere. Grief hears the dead turning over beneath the world.

I placed my palm against the door.

The stone was cold.

“I have come,” I whispered.

From within there came nothing.

Yet after that night, the tomb seemed changed.

Not opened. Not visibly disturbed. But alert. The ivy appeared to have loosened its grip around the lintel. The candle flame bent toward the door though no wind touched it. The flowers I laid upon the step vanished by morning, though no animal tracks marked the earth.

At first I thought the villagers had stolen them to mock me. But who among them would climb that path before dawn? Who would dare lay fingers upon offerings given to the dead? No. Something received them.

This knowledge, if knowledge it was, neither comforted nor terrified me. It merely deepened the ritual. I brought better flowers. I trimmed the candle wick. I brushed dead leaves from the threshold. I spoke less and listened more.

Years passed.

The village altered as villages do, by slow betrayals. The mill collapsed inward. The inn changed hands. Children became adults and looked at me with the same uneasy curiosity their parents once had. The priest died and was replaced by a younger man with pale eyes and clean hands. He once stopped me near the church gate and asked, gently, whether I thought my nightly pilgrimage was good for my soul.

“For my soul?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I looked past him to the churchyard, where the dead lay safely labeled beneath crosses and stones, each one accounted for, each one furnished with a place among the living.

“My soul,” I said, “is not buried here.”

He did not trouble me again.

There were nights when I almost believed the tomb loved me in return.

In rain, the threshold remained strangely dry. In winter, no snow gathered against the door. Once, when fever shook me so violently that I could scarcely climb the hill, I found the stone warm beneath my hand. Another night, upon arriving late, I discovered my candle already lit.

I knelt before it a long while.

I told no one.

For who could have understood? Those who have never loved the silent dead think silence is empty. They do not know how crowded it is. They do not know the multitude that gathers in one withheld word, one vanished face, one unopened door.

My body failed before my devotion did.

First the breath. Then the knees. Then the hands, which trembled so badly that I spilled wax upon the stone. I began to leave earlier each evening and return later, for the path grew longer though the hill did not move. Some nights I slept beside the tomb, waking before dawn with frost in my hair and my cheek against the step.

It was then that the dreams began.

I dreamed I stood inside the tomb. Not outside, not kneeling at the threshold, but within. The chamber was larger than it could possibly be, descending far beneath the hill by corridors of black stone. Niches lined the walls, and in each niche lay something I had lost: a child’s shoe; a broken instrument; a letter never sent; a lock of hair; a bowl of soup cooling beside an empty chair; a song I had once intended to write; a prayer abandoned halfway through because no answer came.

At the end of the corridor was a door.

Behind it, someone breathed.

I would wake with soil beneath my fingernails.

The last evening came in November.

All day the sky had lowered until it seemed the world was trapped beneath a lid of iron. Crows gathered on the church roof. The air smelled of rain and extinguished lamps. Villagers later said they watched me pass and knew something final moved beside me, though I walked alone.

I carried no flowers. None remained. I carried no candle either, for my hands could no longer shield the flame.

I climbed slowly.

The black pond gave back no reflection. The trees did not stir. Even the brambles seemed to withdraw from the path, as though making way for what had already been decided.

When I reached the tomb, the door stood open.

Not wide. Only a little. Enough for the dark to show itself.

I was not afraid.

Or if I was, fear had become indistinguishable from longing.

For many years I had spoken through stone. Now the stone had answered.

I pressed my shoulder to the door. It yielded with a sound like a breath being taken after long restraint. The darkness inside was complete, yet not hostile. It surrounded me with the intimacy of closed eyes.

I stepped in.

The chamber was smaller than my dreams. Bare walls. Low ceiling. A shelf cut into the rock. Earth beneath my feet. The air held no corruption, no sweetness of decay, no ancient bitterness of sealed flesh. It was cold and pure.

I reached toward the shelf.

My hand found nothing.

I searched the chamber wall to wall. My fingers swept stone, dust, root, emptiness. There was no coffin. No shroud. No bone. No ring. No remnant of the beloved body to which I had given my years.

Nothing.

Only then did I understand what the word meant.

Not tomb.

Not grave.

Cenotaph.

The realization did not strike like lightning. It opened beneath me like a floor giving way.

All those evenings. All those flowers. All those whispered reports from the world. All the candles. All the kneeling. All the weather endured. All the love poured through stone into a chamber that had never held the dead.

I laughed then.

The sound horrified me.

It rose from my chest like something winged and wounded. I laughed until I could not breathe, and then the laughter broke apart and became weeping. I lowered myself to the floor and pressed my forehead to the dust.

“Not here,” I said.

The words seemed to pass through the chamber and into some deeper hollow beneath the hill.

“Not here.”

And then, after a long while, I felt beneath my hands what I had never felt outside the door.

Warmth.

It came not from the shelf, nor from the walls, nor from any body hidden there. It came from the earth itself, faint but living, as though all the years of attendance had gathered under the stone and kindled there.

My eyes adjusted.

Upon the empty shelf lay the flowers.

All of them.

The violets. The roses. The cedar. The red leaves. The pitiful winter twigs. The offerings of every season lay in a heap of impossible preservation, neither dead nor alive, neither fresh nor withered. Each retained the form of the day I had brought it. Each remembered my hand.

The tomb had been empty.

But it had not been indifferent.

I understood then—not with the mind, which is always late to mercy, but with the ruined heart—that I had not kept vigil over bones. I had kept vigil over faithfulness itself. I had honored the absent. I had loved without proof. I had returned to the place that could not answer until the returning became its own reply.

The beloved was not there.

Yet love had been there.

And perhaps love, having nowhere else to lay its head, had made of that emptiness a dwelling.

At dawn they found the tomb open.

They found the flowers.

They found my coat folded on the threshold and my shoes placed neatly beside the stone, as though I had entered some house where footwear was not permitted.

They did not find me.

Some said I had wandered into the wood and died beneath leaves. Some said I had thrown myself into the black pond, though the pond gave up nothing. Some said the devil had taken me, for the villagers preferred damnation to mystery.

But the young priest, older by then and less certain, stood a long while before the open chamber. He saw the flowers. He saw the two dark impressions in the dust where knees had rested. He touched the stone shelf and drew back his hand.

It was warm.

After that, the path changed.

Not all at once. Gothic mercies do not hurry. But the brambles loosened. The pond cleared. In spring, flowers grew thick around the tomb, though none had ever rooted there before. Those who grieved without graves began to come: mothers whose sons were lost at sea; wives whose husbands vanished in war; children who remembered faces no one else would name; old men mourning the selves they had outlived.

They came ashamed at first.

Then less so.

Each stood before the empty chamber and whispered into it what I had whispered for years.

“I have come.”

And though no corpse rested there, and though no voice replied, many left with lighter steps.

For the tomb held no body.

It held attendance.

It held the honor of loving what could not be recovered.

It held the terrible mercy of absence made holy by return.

And beneath the stone, where no beloved had ever lain, something like a heart continued to keep warm.

Today, I found an interesting post explaining the difference between gothic fiction as a genre, and other genres that (only) have a gothic aesthetic.

If you cannot or don’t want to open Instagram:
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#gothic #gothicfiction #gothicAestheric
#fiction #reading #writing

Manchmal beginnt eine Geschichte nicht mit einem Mord.
Sondern mit einer Einladung.

Ich habe in den letzten Monaten an einer neuen düsteren Mystery-/Thriller-Erzählung gearbeitet: Le Malheur de la Maison de Beaumont

Eine Geschichte über Macht, alte Familien, Luxus, Verfall — und die Dinge, die Menschen tun, um ihre Welt zusammenzuhalten, wenn sie längst begonnen hat zu zerbrechen.

https://bit.ly/4df1Bhq

#PsychologicalThriller #GothicFiction #DarkMystery #WritingCommunity

Author Spotlight: Gothic Horror author Julie Lew

Julie Lew (she/they) loves all things fantasy and horror, the darker and queerer the better. They are the author of adult gothic horror novel, THE WIVES OF HERRICK HALL (May 2026), and the YA fantasy mystery, DEATH IN VERSE (Fall 2026). She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her partner, and when she’s not writing books about the magical and the monstrous, she’s likely playing endless games of fetch with her chihuahua-terrier mix pup Kody.

AUTHOR LINKS:

Website: www.julielew.com

Instagram: @julielew

Links to books: linktr.ee/julielew

BOOK PITCH:

Herrick Hall doesn’t let anything go without a fight. Least of all its masters’ dead wives…

After a dalliance with another woman leaves her reputation in shambles, Josephine Carter is banished to the isolated manor to serve as lady’s companion to Herrick’s mistress. Lady Nora Blake is a headstrong, capricious woman, who spends her days convalescing from a mysterious illness—and her nights witnessing her imminent death over and over. Shackled to her side, Josephine is certain life could not get worse. But then she meets the Herrick wives.

Ghosts veiled in shadow stalk the halls and trespass into Josephine’s dreams, trapped forever in the fury of their last dying wish: to destroy Herrick and everyone beneath its roof. Josephine determines to escape by any means necessary. Until she and Nora fall in love.

Together, Josephine and Nora must confront Herrick’s curse to battle their way to freedom. But Herrick has already claimed them as its next ghostly brides, and neither the house nor its vengeful wives will relinquish them without bloodshed…

The Wives of Herrick Hall is your Gothic Horror debut novel, released in May 2026 by Quill & Crow. Can you tell us where the seed for this novel came from, and what came first – setting, character, premise, or something else? 

The seed for The Wives of Herrick Hall was planted way back in 2019, while I was balancing working in the entertainment industry by day and attending film school at USC by night. Back then, I wrote screenplays during my free time (like literally everyone else in LA!), and after watching Yorgos Lanthimos’ “The Favourite” and then Celine Sciamma’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” I began toying around with an idea about two women falling in love in a cursed house.

I’ve always adored sweeping historical romances and eerie gothic tales (both as a reader and moviegoer), but as a queer person, it’s always been hard to find myself in those stories—that someone like me could conquer evil or find joy or deserve a happy ending. I knew I wanted to play in that sandbox and that my protagonists would be sapphic, but I struggled breaking that story out as a screenplay. I kept wanting to slip inside my protagonist Josephine’s mind and explore what she was thinking—something that’s more difficult to get away with in a visually-driven form like screenwriting. But when I decided to tinker with the idea as a novel instead of a screenplay, everything just fell into place and the story began to work at last.

Although it’s Gothic Horror, a major theme in this novel is Queer Joy, specifically a romance between the central characters Josephine and Nora. Can you share what you think about the importance of sapphic/queer stories in a genre like gothic horror/historical fiction, and especially in context of queer joy as a theme, rather than tragedy?

From the outset, I knew that while the book wouldn’t ignore the homophobia and discrimination queer people faced in the time period in which the book is set, it would never be solely *about* that.

Traditionally, mainstream media tends to tell queer stories (when it tells them at all) as ones predominantly steeped in trauma and tragedy. While these types of stories are absolutely valid and powerful, we deserve stories that are as diverse as we are.

Dark and horrible things can and certainly do happen in Wives, but I’ve always wanted Josephine and Nora’s romance to be the light at the heart of the book. We get to fight ghosts and the patriarchy AND win the girl at the end.

What other Gothic themes can readers expect within the book, and how does centering female characters and their experiences help to draw out these themes? (Mirroring/Doubling is a pretty Gothic thing, would you say that there is an element of this in their experiences too?)

The theme of doubling definitely appears in Wives! Josephine is well aware of her limitations as a woman in her time period, and as a newcomer to Herrick, she sees her own fate in both her mistress Nora and the ghosts who are trapped in the house.

The phantom wives and their undying fury show Josephine what she stands to lose if she remains at Herrick: she’ll be stripped of humanity, reduced to a single potent emotion, and lose complete control over herself for eternity.

Some of my other favorite gothic themes that make their way into Wives’ pages are curses and nightmares, as well as psychological stability and doubting your own and others’ minds. Josephine’s mistress and eventual love interest, Nora, has received the medical diagnosis of her female mind being unstable and untrustworthy, and so it’s easy for men (and even Josephine at first) to dismiss her—especially when she makes claims like she witnesses her death every night in her dreams.

Society tries to condition us to doubt people who are not straight, white men, and I wanted to explore this through the gothic lens of heightened emotions and the appearance of the supernatural.

Where did the concept for the ghosts come from, and what ghostly traditions were you drawing on to create/develop them?

The concept for the ghosts came about as I was thinking about the patriarchy and the entitlement men feel towards women’s bodies. What does that look like in this house that is a mirror to society?

For me, that meant the house holding onto them like property even after death. The previous wives of Herrick cannot pass or leave Herrick after dying, but are still shackled to it like the silverware in the cupboards or their portraits on the walls.

Women as victims is a common trope in classic gothic fiction, and I wanted to subvert that—yes, they find themselves trapped in a house and their circumstances don’t permit them to escape, but they are going to fight back and be their own saviors.

How did you develop Herrick Hall itself – is there a real place/places that it’s based on? How much detail did you go into to create it as a setting?

I love creating stories in isolated, contained settings like a sinister mansion or a remote boarding school. Setting becomes such a microcosm of the story’s world that puts a magnifying glass up to our own world and politics, and tension immediately becomes that much higher (how do you get out? how do you survive?).

With Herrick, I was inspired by the eerie mansions of gothic tales like Thornfield in Jane Eyre and High Place in Mexican Gothic. I wanted Herrick to feel like another character in the book, though the house remains inanimate (or does it??), another foe Josephine must contend with to win her happy ending.

I created a detailed look book for Herrick and the book’s characters, back when it was originally conceived of as a screenplay. Before every writing session, I’d listen to a few songs from my themed playlist (lots of eerie instrumental music) and revisit the look book while taking a walk. Then when I felt really immersed in the world and like I could envision the cinematic trailer in my mind, I’d hurry to my laptop to get more words on the page.

Do you have anything else to plug here that is currently out or coming soon? What should readers look out for?

I am so incredibly lucky to be publishing two debuts in 2026! My young adult debut comes out this fall, a dark fantasy murder mystery called Death in Verse.

Set in an alternate 1920s with a poetry-based magic system, it follows a nonmagical girl whose search for her missing mother leads her to an abandoned school where she and a group of kidnapped poets are tasked with finishing the final lines of a spell before the clock runs out. It’s a bit different from The Wives of Herrick Hall, but it is also steeped in a gothic sensibility and I hope readers enjoy it as well!

Starting today: Dracula Daily
This is an email newsletter that sends you the novel Dracula, in 'real-time', as it happens to the characters.
https://draculadaily.com/

#Dracula #vampire #newsletter #gothicfiction #gothic #victorian #BramStoker #reading #BücherSonntag #books

The Enduring Appeal of the Gothic in Fiction

Author Rosemary Hennigan reveals the enduring appeal of the gothic in fiction by sharing what gothic is and many gothic books to check out.
The post The Enduring Appeal of the Gothic in Fiction appeared first on Writer's Digest.
https://www.writersdigest.com/the-enduring-appeal-of-the-gothic-in-fiction

#Genre #Horror #MysteryThriller #WriteBetterFiction #gothicfiction