The Styg, Melbourne (2025)

11/12/2025

Edition #30 ONLINE & IN COLOR PAPERBACK
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The Feast of Stephen by Diane Arrelle
The Harvest Moon by Oliver Broom
Survival by Dan Crawford
Nights Are Worst by Daniel Foley
Shooting Gallery by Andrew Kurtz
Those Damned Balls of Thorn by Tim Law
Tunnel of Love by Peter Mangiaracina
Darkspring Hollow - Part One by Geoffrey Marsh
Marooned by Steven Mathes
Gilded Hands by Augustine Miller
Appopolis Now - Part One by Jim Mountfield
The Court of Fools by Anthony D Redden
Time Lapse by Damir Salkovic
The Yule Lord by C. W. Stevenson

LINK IN COMMENTS

23/11/2025

PAST PERFECT by PAUL HODGINS

Digital & print editions available.

When time runs backward through a haunted window, one man’s curiosity becomes a descent through history itself.
In the perfectly planned suburbs of Irvana, California, nothing should be out of place—until Trevor Langley’s dog refuses to pass one particular house.

At first, the property at 21 Rivendell looks like every other beige dream of middle-class order. Then Trevor sees himself through the window—moving backward. What begins as a curiosity quickly unravels into a terrifying discovery: the glass does not reflect, it remembers.

Each visit peels away another layer of time—decades, centuries, millennia—revealing the land’s buried past and Trevor’s own unraveling sense of reality. Suburban lawns give way to cattle plains, then oceans; ghosts of progress dissolve into primeval silence. As his obsession deepens, the professor who dismissed superstition must confront the unthinkable: that time itself may be haunting him.

Past Perfect is a sharply intelligent and deeply unsettling tale about our craving to see what lies beyond the veil of the present—an eerie meditation on history, hubris, and the cost of curiosity.

22/11/2025

THE POET LAUREATE OF DAGUS MINES by DENNIS MCFADDEN

Digital & print editions available.

When poetry meets vengeance in the heart of coal country, justice bleeds in verse.

In the coal-scarred hills of Pennsylvania, a deputy named Darling faces a murder that tears open old wounds and buried grudges. When a local woman is found dead in her small-town store, the clues lead back to a name the county hoped it had buried—Smathers, a family synonymous with violence, madness, and myth.

As Darling digs deeper into the case, he discovers that history in these hills doesn’t stay buried—it festers. The further he follows the trail, the closer he comes to a man who reads poetry between acts of brutality and believes himself the keeper of a twisted legacy.

The Poet Laureate of Dagus Mines weaves crime, folklore, and noir-grit into a chilling Appalachian elegy. McFadden’s prose—lean, lyrical, and darkly funny—captures the uneasy beauty of rural America, where the ghosts of the past still hold the living in their grip.

A haunting story of retribution, myth, and the fine line between justice and obsession.

22/11/2025

THE SURROGATE by AMI ADDAX

Digital & print editions available.

What if healing your grief meant giving your memories—and your child—to someone else?

When Ella loses her young son, she’s consumed by a grief so total it feels inescapable. Enter The Lifeboat, a clinic that promises to relieve unbearable suffering through revolutionary neural technology. Their method is simple—transfer your pain to a trained “surrogate,” who will process it for you, then return your mind healed and whole.

Sceptical but desperate, Ella signs away her agony. Her surrogate, Farah, is a professional, drilled in absorbing trauma without breaking. Yet some wounds cut deeper than science can measure. As Ella begins to feel peace, Farah starts to unravel—and both women find themselves tethered by something neither understands.

Set in a chillingly plausible near future, The Surrogate explores the cost of erasing pain, the ethics of empathy, and the dark places grief will drive us when love refuses to die. Ami Addax delivers a haunting, human story of loss, memory, and the fragile boundary between salvation and damnation.

22/11/2025

Edition #29 ONLINE & IN COLOR PAPERBACK
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This issue is dedicated to Dennis McFadden - August 21, 1943 – August 8, 2025 - A storyteller whose words linger
long after the final line.

Arrangement in Gray and Yellow by Exeter Stevens
Bunnies of the Apocalypse by Gregg Chamberlain
Crow Bait by Eric J. Juneau
Dusty Rose by Shawn D. Brink
Evening Resurrection by Nemo Arator
Lump by William Kitcher
My Great-Grandmother's Eyes by Kay Hanifen
Past Perfect - Part Three by Paul Hodgins
Selfie by Mike Murphy
Thank You for Calling by Jennifer Andrews
The Accursed Conscience by Max Bindi
The Gospel of Malachi Slim by Cleve Lamison
The One Single Drawback by Natalia Plos
The Poet Laureate of Dagus Mines - Part Three by Dennis McFadden
The Scrapbook by Bryce Thayne
The Surrogate - Part Two by Ami Addax
The Weaver's Tale by Stephen McQuiggan
When Birds Bring Bricks by Tom Busillo

LINK IN COMMENTS

19/10/2025

🎉 We have a new website!

We’ve given our digital home a fresh new look — easier to explore, faster to load, and packed with all the dark, delightful things you love.

Come take a look around, see what’s new, and tell us what you think.

🔗 Links in comments!

19/10/2025

SWIPE TO UNLOCK by JOSHUA GINSBERG

Digital & print editions available.

When a desperate man steals a stranger’s phone, it unlocks a job—and a nightmare—that won’t let him hang up.

Chase’s bad day ends with a drink and a stolen phone. Then it rings.

The voice on the other end offers him work, money, and a threat that’s impossible to ignore. Soon, Chase is running mysterious deliveries for unseen clients, each job stranger and more dangerous than the last—until the line between criminality and the uncanny begins to blur.

Every call leads him deeper into a world of shifting loyalties, occult symbols, and faceless overseers who always seem to know more than they should. As he moves from city streets to desert graves, Chase discovers that what he’s carrying—and who he’s working for—defies reason.

A dark blend of crime thriller and modern horror, Swipe to Unlock explores the sinister edges of technology and the price of desperation. Once you answer the call, there’s no way to hang up.

19/10/2025

Edition #28 ONLINE & IN COLOR PAPERBACK
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If You Wake in a Room with No Windows by Dawn Bernadette Haigh
Molting by Jared Bryer
Mr. Stix by R.J. Butler
Mushroom Landscape by Clay Craft
Past Perfect - Part Two by Paul Hodgins
Seance for a Live Cat by Bob Johnston
Song of My Dark Self by Max Bindi
Swipe to Unlock - Part Two by Joshua Ginsberg
The Celebration by Damir Salkovic
The Hunt by Elijah Fischer
The Poet Laureate of Dagus Mines - Part Two by Dennis McFadden
The Surrogate - Part One by Ami Addax
Trashman by Colin Adams-Toomey
Why Am I Writing by Dale Parnell

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19/10/2025

HOW BEAUTIFUL THINGS DIAPPEAR by EUAN LIM

Digital & print editions available.

Two lovers on the edge of escape, bound by music, folklore, and each other—until the night the forest calls one of them away.

In the shadowed streets of Cluj-Napoca, Vasile and Alexandru are running out of time—and places to hide. Fired from the orchestra, living in an abandoned house, and haunted by the stares of those who will never understand them, they cling to each other as fiercely as they cling to their dreams.

Alexandru dreams of flight: a new life in New York, freedom from fear, and the space to finally live as himself. Vasile dreams only of keeping him close, even as the looming forests whisper of things older and stranger than either of them can name.

When Alexandru leaves on a short errand, Vasile waits for him at their favorite café. But as the sun dips behind the city and night deepens over the rooftops, that wait stretches into something darker—until a single choice will send Vasile down a path into the heart of Romania’s most haunted forest, where folklore breathes and nothing is as it seems.

How Beautiful Things Disappear is a lyrical, devastating tale of love, identity, and the strange ways the world can take us—and the strange ways it sometimes gives back.

19/10/2025

Edition #27 ONLINE & IN COLOR PAPERBACK
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A Kolkata Cemetery by Sarah Das Gupta
Apocalypse by Camellia Paul
Capitalism at its Finest by John Leahy
Cog by Eric J. Juneau
Dancing Cheek to Cheek by Sarah Das Gupta
Death From Above by Armand Rosamilia
Gosh Darn It I'm Wet! by Glenn Dungan
How Beautiful Things Disappear - Part Two by Euan Lim
Mairi by Caroline Ashley
On Donovan’s Hill by Chris Bunton
Past Perfect - Part One by Paul Hodgins
Shadow Life by Chris Bunton
Swipe to Unlock - Part One by Joshua Ginsberg
Taking Care of Our Own by Kelly Matsuura
The Poet Laureate of Dagus Mines - Part One by Dennis McFadden
Unbeliever by Suzanne Paul

LINK IN COMMENTS

18/10/2025

Edition #26 ONLINE & IN COLOR PAPERBACK
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Blood Ties by Malina Douglas
Bu****it, Inc by Jeremy Stelzner
Dear Raven, by Nick Romeo
Department of Murderous Vixens by Don Money
Get In! by Steve Calvert
How Beautiful Things Disappear - Part One by Euan Lim
Howl by Albert N. Katz
In Sections by Dee Allen
Memories Saved by Allen Cash
Not All Who Wander by Damir Salkovic
One More Drink by Meta Paige Taylor
Sin Eater - Part Three by Paul W. La Bella
The Animals of Inkwhich Inn by Steven McClain
The Hinge That Shouldn't Have Moved by Fendy S. Tulodo
The Hungriest Tuesday by Lawrence Dagstine

LINK IN COMMENTS

21/07/2025

CALL FOR EDITION 28 CLOSES 25th

Looking for:
dark short fiction
dark serial fiction
dark poetry
original artwork
creative non-fiction
articles
essays
reviews

Published in ezine & print.

See website for submission requirements: https://stygianlepus.com

The Styg

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