The theme for our eleventh literary magazine is Decay. With the turn of the season, we’re craving literature which feels rich in nutrients, gets under our fingernails and is a slow demise to insanity. Here are some book recommendations on the theme which may inspire your submission.
Tender by Lauren du Plessis
The best way to describe this book is earthy. Nell believes to be cursed. Assisting the dig of three bog bodies, the skull they pull from the ground is laced with flowers through the eye sockets, and soon Nell herself finds nature growing beneath her skin. A haunting novel on how traumatic pasts can resurface and tainted memories can rip up reality.
We have always lived in the castle by Shirley Jackson
From the queen of gothic horror, Jackson is a master at storytelling. Merricat and Constance live in the house with their uncle after a poisoning wiped out their family. The girls are outcasts, living in isolation, and in that house they fester and thrive as the mulch of their past churns beneath their feet. With the arrival of their cousin Charles, they tiptoe around him, not wanting him to dig up the past.
Fever dream by Samantha Schweblin
Hallucinatory stories is a sub genre I am finding myself drawn to at the moment. This novel is aptly titled, and the narrator is slipping into delirium as she grapples with the days and weeks prior to her sickness, on vacation with her daughter. But she can’t place how she got there. Was she poisoned? Was it witchcraft? Horses are dying in the fields and the water is contaminated. The novel falls into a state of decay as life withers away and the narrator is left to take her final breath.
Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
Influencer trad wife Natalie is thrown into the 1800s, forced to live the life she promotes on social media. She’s traumatised by the labour and ruthlessness of that time. Her decent into madness, both in the present as she stresses over her public persona and her trapped self in the 19th century, is a can’t-look-can’t-look-away horror.
Yesteryear is one of those books which keeps you guessing until that sweet reveal. When the glass shatters, you’re left speechless.
Heap earth upon it by Chloe Michelle Howarth
A novel on a family trying to bury their past and build a life from the ruins. Set in rural Ireland in the 1960’s, four siblings desperately mask their secrets from the village folk, determined to move on with their lives and present as a normal family. But as obsessions grow again, and their bruised history bleeds new problems, nothing can stay hidden forever.
Innamorata by Ava Reid
Innamorata is a creepy, gross and shocking gothic trip. Set on an island where Death once ruled, Agnes is determined to bring the ancient curses of her bloodline back, but becomes distracted by the forbidden golden prince. It’s a love affair filled with moth wings, dark landscapes and an overwhelming feeling of rot and doom that you just can’t resist. Ava Reid is masterful in the genre and brings gothic literature back in full force.
Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley
The patch of land by their family home holds a twisted secret. Nothing grows there but the last dregs of hope, and whatever is buried in the soil can only be entangled in the curse-embedded roots… A novel of grief, wild nature, the occult, and the thin veil between life and death.
Submissions for issue 11 Decay are open until Sunday 11th October 2026. Read all guidelines before submitting here.