Not Deer Magazine

22/11/2021

Here are the Top 3 winners of our "Create-a-Cryptid" contest! Congratulations to Tom Coombe, Jae Kent, and David Busboom:

notdeermaga day ago4 minAlways More, Jae Kent2nd Place Winner Of The "Create-a-Cryptid" Contest Breath. Quiet, damp, steady. Close. When the Grazzle comes for her, she should have...

01/10/2021

We’re not on Facebook often, but we use Twitter religiously. If you’d like to stay up-to-date on our content and all the fun stuff we’ve got going on, give us a follow !

01/10/2021

Some of our new designs! Find them and many more on our Redbubble page!

01/10/2021

Happy Halloween 1st! We've added some new sticker designs to Redbubble. If you like pastels or vintage Halloween decorations, these might be for you 😏:

NotDeerMag is an independent artist creating amazing designs for great products such as t-shirts, stickers, posters, and phone cases.

16/09/2021

Contributor Jack Bedell made Nightfire Books Best Horror Short Fiction and Poetry for August 2021 with his poem “Swamp Lesson”, which was also the first place winner of our “In the Woods Somewhere” contest!

Let us guide you through the dark corridors of the best short horror fiction and poetry the internet has to offer in this new monthly series.

15/09/2021

It's been a while since we posted to Facebook, but we're still publishing content on our website! One of our recent works of poetry, Rick Hollon's "Honey-eater" is delicious and nauseating:

CW: bodily injury including broken bones, scarring Honey-eater marked my sunburn shins split and granite battered scratches on broken wrist and ulna carried me teeth to sternum, pierced a bundle of snapping twigs I sprouted in fireweed, snowmelt ran staircase down thighbone scar my tongue in butterf...

15/07/2021

The Not Deer editors were lucky enough to get the chance to answer some questions with our friends Katherine Silva! Check out the interview on her website:

Hello my avid dark fiction lovers! I have the wonderful distinction of getting to interview NOT DEER MAGAZINE today. You may have heard their buzz on Twitter as they post short but brilliant sparks…

15/07/2021

So happy to announce our collaboration with Katherine Silva, a dark fiction writer from Maine. Information on Katherine's upcoming novel, "The Wild Dark", can be found on the Promotions tab on our site! Check it out and be sure to keep an eye out for the preorder drop:

Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Raleigh has lost everything: her job as a police detective, her partner, her fiancé, and her peace of mind. After a month of solitude at a cabin in the woods, she finally feels as though she’s ready to move on.

12/05/2021

We're on hiatus until May 17th, but we're still putting out content! Read the latest pieces from our contributors here:

01/05/2021

"Full Moon Motel" by Claudia Lundahl is an eerie piece of flash fiction:

CW: implied su***de At the intersection of three dirt roads there is a gas station. Inside the gas station the walls are paneled in oak and there is a full bar complete with some top shelf liquor. You’ve never seen a gas station quite like this. The attendant is dressed in royal blue coveralls spe...

01/05/2021

"Ningyo" by Tashi Saheb-Ettaba is a personal take on the Japanese yōkai of the same name:

CW: mild blood I just want to be left alone. To roam wherever I please as I sing my song. But men like you keep coming after me. You assume I’m some exotic animal that’s easy to dominate because of my soft voice and delicate scales. If I don’t give into your orders, you tear me apart and eat m...

01/05/2021

Read "Equinox" by Callan Latham here:

My god answers me in a fit of teeth. It’s almost midnight, past the yellowing of the horizon. Grass not yet bare enough to collect dew, neighbors turning off lights. Dreams clatter, filling my empty spaces like small porcelain dishes. She asks me if there are opals in my ears. I draw the curtains ...

28/04/2021

Who lives upstairs? You hear them, but have you ever seen them? Coldly unsettling, "Upstairs" by Nathan Breakenridge is an excellent piece of psychological horror:

The rain had started sometime in the afternoon. Michael sat in his car and stared across the road at the tenement door, waiting for the rain to stop. It didn’t, so he pulled his jacket tight around him and set off jogging. The wind harried him as he went, shouted after him as he shut the door at h...

27/04/2021

Ever wondered what a semi-cannibalistic child living in a post-apocalyptic Australia would get up to? Wonder no longer because Saoirse Ní Chiaragáin put it into words for you:

CW: blood, human remains I get to know the world long after it has ended. The lunar cycle is the first thing I learn, waiting for Selene to bloom full-bodied in her bough, so that I can see the way. It isn't safe to go out in daylight, the way the people did before. Selene is what Ma called the moon...

26/04/2021

"Rural Patricide" by K. Blair draws on classic elements of folk horror. Read their poem here:

CW: religious horror, threats of violence, threat of human sacrifice He takes me to the corn field where the sky is so vast it could swallow you and the corn so high I feel like a child again escorted by my father to a makeshift altar I’ve always hated my lower back being touched perfect place to ...

26/04/2021

"Catamenia" by Louise Mather sinks its hands into blood and ritual. Read it here:

At night, the deer at the window of the cottage. Her eyes share death with you; the child back in the woods, fetching water and blood. You bathe in mud, logs sequenced to burn - for summer may be too far. What can you lay out for her to feed on but mahogany, miry figs, catamenia? Rituals, anarchism,...

26/04/2021

"Inside Your Mind" by Helena Pantsis is a piece of psychological surrealism that you should check out if you're in the mood to be unsettled:

CW: gore, death, violence Abbey pulled the sheets tight around the mattress. Not a crease marred the sleek flat plains of the freshly made bed. It was white, dry, folded deliberately so each corner tucked itself, smooth, over every rounded edge of bed. She drew back the curtains; light fell in beams...

23/04/2021

There's nothing quite like a(n) (un)dead deer story. Much love to Arah McManamna for gifting us with "Cervidae":

You don’t know it yet, but early in the morning, the dead deer will lift their broken bodies from where they’ve fallen. It won’t matter if they’ve been bounced off a car or littered with arrows. Their vast eyes, if they have any left, will blink, and they will rise. Tomorrow, if you pay any ...

22/04/2021

Another visceral poem by Ariel Moniz. Read 'Lusus Naturae" here:

Also appears in Voyager Magazine Is it in jest that we are secured by the mortal coil to the insidious machine of the heart, that beats and eats us away, even there beneath the creaking floorboards and in the sacred hall of dreams? We are a rather frightful thing, humanity. What can one say to artic...

21/04/2021

"Goddess" by Ariel Moniz was published on our site yesterday and "A Lexicon for Apocalypse" went up today. Both are visceral pieces of poetry that you'd hate to miss:

You once waxed fat with hallowed prophecies, have you grown weary from the search and blasphemy? If I had known the taste of God, and the terrible stain I never would have whispered his name. If I had known it was you there in the night I would have kept the doors unlocked and doused the lights. You...

19/04/2021

Return to the earth and become mountains in Briana Gonzalez' "Return":

CW: gore, blood/body horror Mangle open the cavern of my chest and weave my entrails along the tree branches. Let them photosynthesize. Dump whatever is pumping through my veins back into the river’s gush. Slice off my ears, they should go to the crickets, whose chorus should always be appreciated...

19/04/2021

Joe Howsin's "Eaten" is a short fiction piece about folk magic and dirt. Read it here:

I met him at a party. He was older than me, mysterious. He stood at the back, always talking to someone but never looking at them, like he had somewhere else to be. But when he moved, he was slow, careful, like he was absolutely certain everything and everyone would wait for him for as long as he to...

19/04/2021

Christina Ciufo's "The Beast of Dean" is a moss little poem about an English cryptid. Enjoy!

Over the white, wooden gate, on the steel train tracks of Parkend railway station, and beyond the evergreen hills of Gloucestershire lays Dean Forest, reticent and inauspicious, like Berkeley Castle, concealing something irreligious, something ravenous. Lawson cypress and silver birches whisper of t...

16/04/2021

Leonie Rowland's "The Woods are Wondrous Here, but Strange" is an excellent work of hazy surrealism:

CW: blood This town bares its corners for me, turns its people inside out. There is always rain, but the puddles catch my reflection, and I see somewhere I could stay. I have coffee to drink, a place to sleep. & when the shadows converge, you will blossom, & the two of you will sing There is blood o...

16/04/2021

Rowan wrote about another cryptid! Here's her piece on Mothman:

The second installment in the Strange Happening Blog Series Most people I know love Mothman, there’s just something about him that’s just so damn compelling. For me, it’s because he only seems interested in scaring couples making out in their cars and possibly collapsing a bridge, but I don’...

16/04/2021

"The Things We Offer" by Shelly Jones is reminiscent of traditional European folklore with an unsettling twist:

I carry the wood, frozen and splintered, into the cabin, sap oozing onto my sleeves. Wiping my hands on my skirt, something stirs and skitters in the shadows. I pluck an acorn from my pocket and place it on the hearth for the house elves to marvel in. ***** She tells me to knead the dough with rosem...

14/04/2021

Karlo Sevilla's micro poem "in the garden of the dead" is out now!

with invisible butterfly net i catch a spirit lemniscate an amperian loop of wraith iron fillings that keeps slipping through the mesh and flutters away to pollinate a ghost marigold Karlo Sevilla of Quezon City, Philippines authored a full-length poetry collection, “Metro Manila Mammal” (Soma P...

14/04/2021

"Nophobia" is the third and final poem in Ellen Huang's dark fairytale series:

One night in the belltower haunted walls and infested spirits will let you learn to shudder, they said But what horrid phantoms they make, telltale hearts and sweat through sheets fumbling down the stairs, out of practice. One night in the graven forest dead men and hallowed mist will help you learn...

13/04/2021

"The Robber Bridegroom's Widow" is the second of Ellen Huang's dark fairytale poems:

CW: blood, violence What to do with the corpses Once the warlock himself is stew? These are the preserved remains Of other brides like you. The bride recoiled at blood and guts Twisted the golden ring Upon not her own wedded finger But the dismembered poor thing. For a second, though, she held it Ho...

12/04/2021

"Sing, As Birds Will" is the first of three in Ellen Huang's series of poems inspired by fairytales. Based on The Juniper Tree, this poem takes a dark turn:

They parried with sticks and ate apples in the wood. A forbidden friendship formed without so much as blood between stepbrother and sister. I sing, as birds must, for the one who sent me. A wicked stepmother set up dusty trunk and placed her hand on the lid. A homemade guillotine for twittering, med...