Announcing the Season 10, Round 5 Lunar Award Winner for Horror
Celebrating the best Horror stories from Round 5
Our final Horror round for 2025 has concluded, and it’s kind of surreal that we’re nearing the end of the year already. Halloween has always been a relatively significant part of my life, mainly because it’s my birthday, so there’s no avoiding it even if I wanted to. I structured the Lunar Awards’ schedule so that this round would fall well within spooky season. The order of the rounds didn’t seem right otherwise.
was the guest judge for Round 5. She’s the creator of Halcyon Horror, where she blends historical fiction and psychological horror in her short stories. Leigh wrote a short story for Distant Reaches called The Curious Matter of the Rat King Papers; her story, Shiki-no-Kami, will be published in the upcoming horror anthology Take a Breath: A Collection of Claustrophobic Horror, and she is also known for her collaborative work across Substack.Leigh read your 27 entries and selected one winner, one runner-up, and an honorable mention. Congratulations to the winners and kudos to the participants for being vulnerable enough to publish and submit your hard work. It’s not easy! I’ll pass it over to Leigh to showcase her top picks and why she enjoyed them so much. ~ WM
Well, I asked you to tell me a good story, and I was not disappointed. Many of the entries I received were as good or better than anything I’ve read in a traditionally published horror anthology. And it wasn’t just the prose or the characters that impressed me. On the whole, your stories were well-written, original, and frightening, just as horror should be.
So, without further ado, here are my picks for this round of the Lunar Awards:
Lunar Award Winner — Tea After the Apocalypse by
“Tea After the Apocalypse” is aptly named. In turn both funny and unsettling, it tells the story of two neighbors who deal with the boredom and loneliness of the end of the world by keeping their daily ritual of teatime. Daisy, whose denial of reality is the main reason for this ritual, makes small talk about the mail and the corner shop’s roof falling in. But it’s her casual reference to seeing their neighbor Margaret that signals a turn towards the macabre. Margaret is likely dead, we learn, and has been for a while now. Not that this stops her from dropping by for some tea.
While I loved both the dry humor and horror of this piece, it was the poignancy of the ending that really sold it to me. We see a woman coming to terms with the reality of her situation after months of pretending that everything is just fine. This change in attitude is reflected in a simple but material choice to do things differently.
Runner-Up — Child Game Hunts by
This is a deeply disturbing story, especially because the only monsters here are all too human. The storytelling has a mad, circular quality that always comes back to the same mantra:
“Seven-year-olds do not make up stories like that.”
Again and again, the narrator returns to this point in all of its variations. This obsessiveness shows just how disturbed they are; how broken by the events that happened forty years earlier. We see glimpses of the school where this all took place and suspect that it was really a front for something much darker, but we never really know the full extent of what happened there. It’s this uncertainty that makes the story so chilling. Powerful people are clearly involved. Those who should protect these children are complacent at best. But beyond that, we simply don’t know. There’s an art in knowing what to show and what to imply, and Evelyn walks this line beautifully.
Honorable Mentions — Flickerbeast Cantos by
I’d be remiss to end my comments without mentioning this excellent story. It’s about a cursed poetry manuscript and the editors who are infected by the deceased author’s madness as they ready it for publication. I especially love the fragments of poetry interwoven into this piece.
Thanks to Winston for giving me the opportunity to judge this round of stories, and to everyone who submitted an entry. I’m honored to have had the chance to read everyone’s work!
~Leigh
Winston’s Closing Remarks
You may have seen a semi-frantic email go out Friday night asking who wrote “Tea After the Apocalypse.” At first, when I realized that the user who submitted their winning entry had vanished, I figured it was a lost cause because I hadn't taken everyone’s names at the start of the round. In a last-ditch effort, I emailed the Lunar Awards’ distro in the hopes that the writer was still subscribed or that someone else might know them. This community really came through, with several of you responding within hours, directing me to Luna Asli Kolcu. Leigh and I were happy to give Luna the honors she deserved, so thank you for helping!
Our next Horror round will return for Season 11 (2026). Round 6, Science Fiction, will open on November 15th.
Special thanks to
for hosting. This round was only possible because of our volunteer judge, so I’m very thankful for her time. If you’d like to follow her work, subscribe to Leigh’s newsletter below:
List of participating stories and authors
In The Dark by
Hoard by
Black Flag by
Claude 4 Gets a Tarot Reading by
Dear Deer, by
THE BLACK DOT IN THE SKY FOLLOWS by
Mrs. Marvel’s Book of Manners by
Widow’s Web by
The Ennead by
The Old House Beside the Cemetery by
Witch Hunt by
Round 5 Banner Design by Winston Malone.
Badge Award and Lunar Award Logo by Brian Reindel.
Author names added post review by Winston Malone. All stories were read and judged without attribution.
 | A guest post by
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I am so happy that you found me! And very happy for winning. Sometimes these things come at the most needed times.
Thank you to the community for remembering the story too 🥹
Thanks to Winston for organizing and above all to Leigh for reading and judging. Very pleased to sneak a crafty honourable mention among such distinguished company.
Just going to crack a sparkling water to celebrate, cheers 🥂