For this contest, we want stories about monsters caught between rule systems.
Monster stories have always been good at registering changes in the world around them. Dracula is not merely a vampire who happens to arrive in Victorian England. He enters a world increasingly organized by train timetables, property transactions, blood transfusions, typewriters, newspapers, and modern bureaucracy. He brings with him an older logic of blood, inheritance, aristocracy, taboo and invitation, and discovers that another kind of world has been assembled around him.
Michael Almereyda’s Nadja does something similar a century later. Dracula’s children have survived into 1990s New York. Nadja wanders downtown bars and explains her means of support simply as family money from Romania. The old aristocratic monster has become something like a trust-fund bohemian, living on wealth whose origins are mysterious because the social world that originally produced it has mostly disappeared.
We are interested in that displacement. What happens when a monster survives the system that once made sense of it?
But there is another half to the contest. New systems produce monsters of their own.
Jurassic Park is perhaps the most literal example. Dinosaurs are ancient creatures, but the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park are modern artifacts: extinct animals reconstructed through biotechnology and turned into the intellectual property and attractions of a commercial theme park. Their bodies, reproduction, movement and enclosure are all supposed to be controlled by technical and corporate systems. The monster is ancient, but it has been made again by a very contemporary apparatus.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is an earlier version of the same move. Frankenstein does not summon a demon. He constructs a living creature through an experimental scientific process. Whatever else the Creature becomes, its existence begins as a consequence of a new technical capacity rather than an old supernatural order.
Ballard is useful here too, although his monsters are usually human. In High-Rise, an apparently rational piece of modern architecture begins producing strange forms of life. Elevators, floor divisions, shared amenities, electrical failures and the social hierarchy of the building gradually reorganize its respectable professional residents into territorial groups with their own rituals and forms of violence. Nothing supernatural has happened. The environment has simply begun to manufacture people adapted to itself.
Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi approaches the question more gently. The House has its own tides, spaces, resources and rhythms, and Piranesi has developed an entire way of living around understanding them. He records the halls, tracks the sea, cares for the dead and organizes his life according to the demands of the place. He is not a monster, but the novel is a useful example of something we care about: a world with sufficiently strong rules begins to produce its own kinds of people.
That is the territory of this contest.
Take an old monster that has survived into a world of new rules. Then imagine a new monster that could only have been produced by those rules. Bring them into contact.
The old monster can be impossible. It can be a vampire, ghost, werewolf, demon, changeling, golem, oracle, zombie, troll, witch, doppelgänger, or something older and stranger. We are not asking you to rationalize folklore or explain vampirism with a virus. Let the old monster remain old.
But simply modernizing it is not enough. Putting a werewolf on Instagram is not, by itself, what we are after. We want to know what happens when an inherited form of monstrosity encounters protocols it was never designed to inhabit. The interesting question is not what apps Dracula would use. It is what becomes of a creature whose powers depend upon property, invitation, secrecy, bloodlines and aristocratic privilege when those categories are reorganized by another system.
The new monster, however, should not arrive through magic.
We are not looking for a new demon summoned by a new spell, or a new species of ghost produced because somebody performed the wrong ritual. The new monster should be an outcome of the rules themselves. It might be produced by a legal category, an administrative procedure, a market incentive, a technical standard, an architecture, an employment regime, a border system, a scientific capability, or an algorithm. Nobody necessarily intended to create it. The system merely made a particular kind of life possible, useful, profitable, inevitable, or impossible to get rid of.
Think less about a monster that breaks the rules and more about a monster that the rules successfully produce.
A sufficiently elaborate bureaucracy might create people whose legal existence diverges from their physical existence. A labor system could produce a worker who is simultaneously indispensable and not recognized as a person. A market could make the continued existence of some pathological creature economically necessary. A border regime might produce someone who belongs simultaneously to two jurisdictions and to neither. A system for preserving identity might produce a person who can no longer become anyone other than the person the archive says they were.
These do not require supernatural explanations. In fact, they become stranger when nobody has violated the system at all.
Then let the two monsters meet.
An old monster may recognize the new one before humans do because it remembers the last time the rules changed. The two might discover that they perform equivalent functions in different worlds. They might find one another disgusting. The new monster might make the old monster obsolete. Or an ancient creature that humans have spent centuries learning how to name and contain might be the only being capable of recognizing that something genuinely new has appeared.
The encounter can be violent, comic, bureaucratic, intimate, political, tragic or completely mundane. We care less about the tone than about the machinery underneath it.
The protocols should matter. Laws, standards, rituals, platforms, contracts, bureaucracies, technical systems, markets, kinship rules, authentication systems, borders, archives, games, institutions and informal codes of behavior do more than restrict what people can do. They create roles, identities, permissions, obligations and categories. They determine what kinds of beings can successfully inhabit a world.
The Interregnum
Gramsci’s interregnum describes a moment in which an old order is dying while a new one cannot yet fully establish itself. For this contest, we are interested in the creatures that occupy that interval.
The old monster comes from a world whose rules are disappearing but has somehow survived them.
The new monster belongs entirely to the world replacing it, although that world may not yet understand what it has produced.
For a little while, both are alive at the same time.
That is where the story begins.
Submission guidelines
- Deadline: 15 November 2026.
- Length: 2,500–3,000 words.
- Prize: $2,000 for the best story.
- Format: a Google Doc, shared so that anyone with the link can edit it. In the doc, open Share, set General access to Anyone with the link, and set the role to Editor. Then copy the link.
Enter
The three anthologies our previous contests produced are the best guide to what we publish: Ghosts in the Machine, Terminological Twists and Building and Burning Bridges.