Editorial Policy

11/15/2007

Necropsy is always looking for new material to review including collections of short stories, novels, novellas and films available on DVD that can be defined as horror in some way. We will consider both works of fiction containing the supernatural (i.e. ghost stories, vampire literature, tales of the old gods) as well as psychological horror (i.e. gothic fiction, stories about serial killers, splatterpunk). We will also review non-fiction about horror, such as scholarly books on the subject or guides to the genre or biographies of the genre's authors.

Works considered for evaluation must meet all of the following criteria:

• Books must be published in 2007 or 2008.  We are willing to consider older works too, providing they were published in a new edition in 2007 or 2008.
• They must be either written or translated into English.
• Books must have an ISBN
• Books must be easily available to the reading public.  We must be able to either find the book listed in Books In Print or the WorldCat Database, or it must be listed on either amazon.com or amazon.co.uk (this is not an ad for amazon.com, by the way. Rather, we have found that amazon has one of the most comprehensive listings of books for sale anywhere. They even list books offered by other sources). If we cannot find the book in any of these sources, then it is not easily available to the reading public, and we cannot review it. In rare instances, we will accept for review books that are for sale through the publisher's website.
• Films available on VHS or DVD must likewise be reasonably available to the viewing public either by direct sale or through services such as Netflix or Blockbuster on-line.
• We do not review chapbooks or e-books. Yes, we understand the seeming hypocrisy of an electronic publication refusing to review e-books. However, we want to avoid reviewing epherma, works that cannot be easily found years after the publication date. Certainly print books come and go out of print, but it is nearly always possible to get copies of these books later on either through used book sellers such as half.com or abe.books or through interlibrary loan services in any university or public library. At present, e-books cannot be borrowed through interlibrary loan, nor are they for sale by used book sellers, and so we classify them as epherma.
• We will consider for review manuscripts in book form only: it is inconvenient for our reviewers to have to deal with unbound or spiral bound manuscripts, or PDFs or other sort of electronic files. They get mad and don't want to work for us anymore. You see the problem here.
• We have a strict policy of not reviewing science fiction and fantasy, not due to any mistaken belief that these are inferior genres, but because we are dedicated to the review of horror. Only works of science fiction and fantasy with pronounced elements of horror in them will be accepted for review.

If your book meets the above criteria, you may contact the editor at jpullia@lsu.edu and send a review copy to the following address:

Necropsy: The Review of Horror Fiction
June Pulliam
Dept. of English, Allen Hall
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, LA  70803
U. S. A.