Announcing Winners for LA S11 | Round 2 | Horror

Garen has chosen

Apr 26, 2026

Announcing the Winner and Runners up for Round 2 of the Lunar Awards: Horror

I’m your Lunar Awards horror ambassador, Shaina Read (writer of Kindling and admin over at Macabre Monday), and I have the pleasure of announcing our winning horror writers for Season 11! Our judge this season was the ultra talented Garen Glazier of Only Child Originals.

Thank you to everyone who submitted. Writing is hard, and it means a lot that so many of you took the time to craft something and share it. Keep writing, keep pushing, because the work shows.

Drum roll please….

Here are your winners!

Lunar Awards Winner: The Shadow That Follows by Ian Dunmore

For me, The Shadow That Follows delivered on the promise of the horror genre. It has an immersive setting and a fully developed main character that the reader comes to care about over the course of just a few pages. That element of empathy ratchets up the tension along with our heart rates. There’s also an intriguing touchstone in the form of an illuminated manuscript that adds complexity and depth to the story. But best of all is the story’s monster that’s all the more menacing because it remains mysterious and unknowable right up until the final image that still gives me chills just thinking about it.

Read "The Shadow That Follows"

Runner-Up: Anniversary by Jeanona Dias

Anniversary is another story that sticks with you long after you’ve finished the last word. On the surface it’s quite different from The Shadow That Follows, but here also we have a carefully crafted portrait of a compelling character within a world that feels visceral and immediate. With that kind of storytelling, the struggle against the all-to-real monster and the final gut-wrenching twist carry a real impact that’s both devastating and earned.

Read "Anniversary"

Honorable Mentions: Coverage by The Faraday Room and The Brothers of Boise by Paddy Turner

I’d like to call attention to the following honorable mentions, which are also great examples of the power of horror to move beyond the terror and poke at the dark underbelly of human experience, revealing as much with darkness as others do with light.

Read "Coverage"

Read "The Brothers of Boise"

Closing Remarks

I’m always astounded by the breadth and depth of creativity across fiction on Substack, but I truly feel that the horror community here shines. Writers in this genre are consistently pushing boundaries, breaking through the ordinary and rearranging it into a dark kaleidoscope of words that finds meaning in the macabre.

Not surprisingly, the submissions for this round of the Lunar Awards offered up a veritable phantasmagoria of horror, bringing classic monsters to life, reimagining familiar tropes, and mining the darkest corners of the imagination for new ways to chill the reader.

It was a difficult task to judge these stories and the choice ultimately came down to the power of storytelling. Which ones did I come back to the next day and read again? Which ones felt rich and layered? Which ones made me hold my breath and race along to the end to see what happened next? In short, which of the entries grabbed me by the throat and wouldn’t let go?

~Garen Glazier