Send Us Your Best 💌
Plus, meet Viktoria Mladenovski, illustrator of our surrealist dreams
We’re still open for submissions until May 5! And lord do we want to read your poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and everything in between. This cycle, we’re especially hoping to hear more from our fellow non-fiction sluts (pitches and full).
If that’s you, scroll for some wisdom from Bloodletter meme master (and director of marketing), Ashley Linkletter, in her Prompt, Trope, Tip column. Then, stay tuned for a legendary LIFEBLOOD column from Gothic it-girl Claire Orrange about animals in horror films—a masterclass in non-fiction in its own right.
Viktoria Mladenovski is the Illustrator of Our Surrealist Dreams
And we’re proud to announce she’s also the featured artist for Bloodletter Issue Seven: Ruin. Viktoria Mladenovski is a multidisciplinary illustrator, animator, and artist living and working in Berlin.
Her work combines the surreal and retro to create cornucopian illustrations of imagined worlds. And yes, that psychedelic aesthetic is sure to be the ultimate dreamscape foil to our theme.
Prompt, Trope, Tip
Prompt: Tell a true story by…
Trope: The art of a great pitch relies not only on a great topic, but also on…
Tip: When you pitch us non-fiction…
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Get an Editor in Your Ear
Bloodletter offers editorial feedback letters for $65, which you can opt in for when you submit. Here’s how they work:
If your piece is not selected for publication, you will receive a letter of personalized feedback from one member of our editorial team, identifying the strengths of your submissions and detailed suggestions for revision.
Editorial letters will be delivered within one month of the submission window closing.
If your piece is selected for publication, we will refund the $65 fee.
These letters are super meticulous and we spend arguably too much time on them because we love what we do. So…do what you will with that information.
Now to turn things over to Claire Orrange, who has some monkey business to attend to…
LIFEBLOOD
One would think, in this new-age film landscape that purports to be “feminist,” “woke,” and “political,” that animals, those downtrodden creatures of sentience previously collapsed into the pigeon hole of irrationality, chaos, and unfeeling evil (think Jaws), would be incorporated into the fold of horror movie heroes and heroines. But no, animals have yet to truly have their day in the cinematic sun. For this edition of Lifeblood, I surveyed three horror films featuring crazy killer monkeys: Primate (dir. Johannes Roberts, 2025), The Monkey (dir. Osgood Perkins, 2025, based on the 1980 Stephen King short story of the same name), and NOPE (dir. Jordan Peele, 2022). I’ve come out of the other side of this descent into human-centric hubris a radical PR representative for scorned apes and chimps everywhere. Beware: spoilers for all three films lie ahead.
