From the Richard Hugo House, a writing center in Seattle:
"Hauntings"
From “The Egyptian Book of the Dead” to the ghost of Hamlet's father to the movie “Poltergeist,” popular culture—of every era and in every corner of the world—has a preoccupation with hauntings. Whether communicating through static on a TV screen or encouraging Hamlet to investigate a “murder most foul,” the supernatural has a grip on our imagination in very real ways. Yet hauntings aren't supernatural by definition. In Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the hallucination of an eye drives a man to murder, and in “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” it is the inner demons that haunt the protagonist most. Lingering terror can be found in an ominous past, present or future; at a crossroads; near woods; or inside our own fears.
For this installment of the Hugo Genre Competitions, we are looking for stories reflecting the theme “Hauntings,” using one of the three prompts below as a starting point:
Time: The present is haunted by the aura of our pasts, our futures, and the looming presence of experiences, memories and fantasies that may not even be our own. In Shirley Jackson's “The Haunting of Hill House,” Eleanor falls so hard for Hill House and its history of violence and insanity that when she's forced to leave, she kills herself. In Ambrose Bierce's “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” the story of a doomed soldier relies upon a structural pastiche of time to haunt us with the question of what is real. How can time, from the murky depths of the past to the impending doom of the future, haunt us?
Space: Places, such as the Overlook Hotel in “The Shining,” the Lutz's house in Amityville, or even Richard Hugo House's basement, stir sensations that drive us to the borders of rational understanding. We are especially drawn to isolated locales, where terrible things happen that we can merely record, powerless to do much more. Think Flannery O'Connor's short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the original serial killer tale, which takes place along the edge of a rural road, or the terrifying experiment that was H.G. Wells' “The Island of Dr. Moreau.” What is it about a space that conjures dread and doubt? Is it our helplessness against chaos? The randomness of violence? Our inability to control our own landscapes?
Mind: Consciously and unconsciously, we are haunted by our fears and desires. In L. Ron Hubbard's “Fear,” the story of a professor searching for an hour of life he can't recall horrifies the reader with the demons his search reveals—or is the main character simply haunted by demons from his own mind? H.P. Lovecraft, whose characters struggled as much with their own sanity as with any external threat, writes, “The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones or a sheeted form clanking chains…A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with seriousness and portentousness…of that more terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature, which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos.” What is it about our fears and desires that haunts us? Which ones are so powerful they push us over the edge?
Submissions must be received by October 15. Winner receives a $250 prize and the opportunity to read at the Hugo Genre Reading on October 31 at 7 p.m. at Richard Hugo House. Two runners-up will be asked to read an excerpt from their stories as well.
By submitting, entrants agree to be present for the reading if selected as a winner or runner-up.
Winner and runners-up will be announced October 23, 2007.
Manuscript Requirements:
Please send a $5 entry fee. We can accept cash or a check/money order to Richard Hugo House. You may enter as many times as you'd like as long as you pay an entry fee for each story.
Manuscripts must be under 5,000 words and should be double-spaced with one-inch margins and in 12-point type. The author's name should not appear on the manuscript. Include one cover sheet with story title, author's name, address, phone number and e-mail address. The story title should appear on the first page of the manuscript. Please number your pages.
Send a total of three copies of your manuscript and one copy of your cover sheet to:
"Hauntings"
c/o Chris Leasure
Richard Hugo House
1634 11th Ave
Seattle, WA 98122
We cannot return manuscripts, so please keep a copy!
You must live in WA, OR, MT or ID.
Questions? Contact Chris Leasure: development@hugohouse.org
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