Horror Authors Editing and Proofreading Services

The thing in the corridor is at its most frightening in the sentence before you describe it. Once it has a shape, a number of limbs and a smell, the reader's own imagination — which had been doing your work for you, for free, and better — steps back and lets you take over. Almost every horror manuscript that fails, fails at that handover.

We work on what horror writers produce — novels and novellas, short stories and collections, opening chapters and submission material, synopses that have to convey dread without spoiling it, cosmic, folk, quiet and body horror in their different registers, screenplays and audio drama scripts, anthology submissions, and the covering material that goes to agents and small presses. Our editors work on the moment of revelation and everything you put in front of it.

The reveal is where horror is made or spent, and the failure is nearly always giving too much, too clearly, too early. Dread is a debt the reader takes on willingly and the reveal is when you pay it; pay too generously and the story is over, pay too little and they feel cheated. We work through manuscripts so the approach to the reveal narrows the reader's attention rather than widening it, since a paragraph describing the whole room dissipates what a paragraph describing one sound concentrates; so the reveal is partial where the story can bear it, giving one wrong detail that the reader cannot fit anywhere; so what happens immediately afterwards is written with as much care as the reveal itself, because a character reacting proportionately is what makes the thing real and a character narrating calmly unmakes it; so the ordinary is established well enough beforehand to be violated, given that horror is a genre about ordinariness and manuscripts that begin frightening have nowhere to go; so repeated exposure is managed deliberately, as the second appearance of anything is less frightening unless something has changed; and so the prose stays plain at the worst moment, because that is when adjectives do the most damage. Manuscripts edited this way frighten people on a second reading.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including unpublished manuscripts, submissions and works in progress. We are editors rather than agents or publishers, and we offer no view on your story's prospects or its market. What we can do is protect the moment your reader has been waiting for.