Who we are

From Dark Places

Darkling Press

Some stories don’t belong in the light.

They belong in the holler after the last lantern goes out. In the rot beneath the porch boards. In the sound the woods make when the woods shouldn’t be making any sound at all. They belong in the places your grandmother warned you about and your grandfather pretended not to know — the places Appalachia has always kept, quiet and patient, waiting for someone with the nerve to write them down.

That is what Darkling Press is here for.

We publish from the dark corners. The damp places. The moonless stretches of ridge where something is always watching and you will never quite see what it is. We are not interested in the mainstream and the mainstream is not what we are. We are the other thing — the literary vein that runs beneath the surface of the familiar, older than genre, more honest than comfort.

Our work is rooted in place. In the specific and irreplaceable weight of Appalachian land — its beauty, its violence, its long memory, and its refusal to let the dead entirely go. We publish fiction and prose that understands that the paranormal is not a departure from reality but an extension of it. That the ghost is not the story. The story is what made the ghost.

We began, as most true things do, with a single voice. HA Hutson’s Autumn Chills — quiet dread accumulating like woodsmoke. Haunting Vengeance — where the darkness has a name and a reason. Watcher on the Mountain — because something has always been watching, long before we arrived, and will be watching long after.

These are the kinds of stories we exist to tell.

And we are looking for more of them.

If you write from the margins — from the forgotten hollows, the uneasy silences, the places the popular publishers don’t know how to hold — Darkling Press may be where your work belongs. We are small. We are deliberate. We are building something with a spine and a shadow.

We are not for everyone.

We are for exactly the right ones.

— Darkling Press