A question for those more knowledgeable that myself...

I've had a request thrown my way to write and submit a story in the Erotic Horror category. No specifics as to what, but having read some of my other works, the person requesting seems to think I'd do a bang-up job in that category.

I went a perused the section, looked at the HoF, etc. It mostly seems to be about vampires and succubi/incubi, and various levels of non-concent with said denizens of the infernal realms.

So I went and read the Submissions Guidelines as a refresher. Went away from them for a few days, came back and read them again, to see if I gleaned anything different from the last reading.

No sex with dead bodies or snuff sex. Check. Vampires seem to be okay.

No bestiality/zoophilia. Check. Not sure about werewolves, but apparently give it a human weenie instead of one of those dog red rocket/Christmas tree light things.

No underage human sex. Check-a-doodle-doo.

But the supernatural/infernal aspect that seems to predominate the category doesn't really strike me as 'erotic horror', per se. If I WERE to publish something in the category, it would either have a cosmic, Lovecraftian wrongness to its horror, or it would plumb the depths of human depravity in terms of horror.

I don't actually know anything about how submitted stories are screened and who makes what must amount to arbitrary calls about what submissions meet or violate the Guidelines.

Does anyone in the know have a quick-and-dirty about the Erotic Horror category? I'm asking questions that the Guidelines don't directly answer, and I'm not terribly interested in writing the story if it's too intense or horrific to go through.

Helpful advice/thoughts?

(I guess the person requesting was reading The Great Khan, because it's the one with the brütal violence and sex in it)

I have found the Erotic Horror category difficult. When it was first added to Literotica I wrote a couple. They were either not erotic or not horror.

Some people have managed it.

I would suggest declining the request unless you are convinced you can cover eroticism and horror.

Here are a couple of my attempts:

Horrible, not erotic:
https://www.literotica.com/s/donna-1

Femdom with horror:
https://www.literotica.com/s/absorbed

Possibly closest to the category:
https://www.literotica.com/s/maids-in-waiting

Erotic horror joins non human as the excuse to break every rule the site has and its okay categories.

Erotic Horror is a good place to put a story when you don't want anyone to read it.

Oscar's Place is my lone attempt at Erotic Horror. Shhh. Don't tell anyone or the secret might get out.

It's a little ghost story from a haunted hotel with sex but no horror to speak of; no succubi, no incubi, no vampires, or other denizens of dark realms.

.....................

Yeah, I defer to what NotWise said here and in your other thread ("I dunno if you've noticed...") where I also shared my EH experience with "The Girl From The Deep". I just read and enjoyed NotWise's "Oscar's Place" -- I think EH is just a problematic category in the sense that it has developed a very narrow focus in regards to what is expected there, and it leaves little room for the kind of ghost story he wrote, or the macabre sailor's lore that mine is.

I continue to believe there's an audience for these submissions though, and it just might require a little more time and effort to connect with them. -- Fortunately, if you post something to EH, you might end up on the new stories list over there for a good month, so with any luck they'll find your submission if you choose to go through with it.

SolarRay said:

I just read and enjoyed NotWise's "Oscar's Place" -- I think EH is just a problematic category in the sense that it has developed a very narrow focus in regards to what is expected there, and it leaves little room for the kind of ghost story he wrote, or the macabre sailor's lore that mine is.

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Hey thanks! Trish would thank you to, if she could.

Where are the guidelines for what can and cannot go into an Erotic Horror story? I've got a story I'm working on and think it might not pass muster, because it's got sex and death. I don't understand how this Site can be overly restrictive about that, because sex and death, or the threat of death, is what erotic horror is all about. I don't quite understand what will pass and what won't.

I've always assume that erotic horror would be, well, more horrifying. Kind of like regular horror except with sex thrown in, but I'm still learning about erotica so I'm probably wrong.

NotWise said:

Erotic Horror is a good place to put a story when you don't want anyone to read it.

Oscar's Place is my lone attempt at Erotic Horror. Shhh. Don't tell anyone or the secret might get out.

It's a little ghost story from a haunted hotel with sex but no horror to speak of; no succubi, no incubi, no vampires, or other denizens of dark realms.

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I had two in the category that I removed and edited and put into print, both were long (20 page range) and one had a 4.87 yet didn't place in the the 2015 contest and the other was around 4.81 I think the vote total on the first was about 115 the other around 150 but I think the fact they were both contest entries helped because often the stories get fewer votes.

The EH trope is Succubi and usually written by people with no real clue what one actually is and does.

SimonDoom said:

Where are the guidelines for what can and cannot go into an Erotic Horror story? I've got a story I'm working on and think it might not pass muster, because it's got sex and death. I don't understand how this Site can be overly restrictive about that, because sex and death, or the threat of death, is what erotic horror is all about. I don't quite understand what will pass and what won't.

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Same guidelines as every other category. Focus on the "no snuff" rule if your content contemplates death.

I don't know why folk keep saying EH is a no reader zone, though. It's not I&T volumes, sure (but what is?), but Chap 1 of my shaggy dog EH yarn pulled 30k views, 42 faves (mostly bookmarks, I suspect), a score of 4.40/126. The last chapter tells me that around 5k readers stayed through to the end. As usual for a long series, scores pick up as the story goes along - nearly every chapter is solid Red H. Expect some fan loyalty.

Readers are as tribal as anywhere else - they expect chapters may include multi-category content and are fairly tolerant. Except GM. Like everywhere else on Lit, put the slightest sniff of man-on-man action, and the homophobes will come out of the woodwork. Seems they can handle gore in the basement, but not a man's hand near their cock.

SimonDoom said:

Where are the guidelines for what can and cannot go into an Erotic Horror story? I've got a story I'm working on and think it might not pass muster, because it's got sex and death. I don't understand how this Site can be overly restrictive about that, because sex and death, or the threat of death, is what erotic horror is all about. I don't quite understand what will pass and what won't.

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I'm not really sure. I went at it in Welcome to Nockatunga Station, with aliens, egg insertion sex and my heroine ending up being eaten alive from the inside out and that was accepted. I put it in SF but it could equally have been Erotic Horror I think.

So you can definitely do sex and death. I think it;s in how the death is handled.

electricblue66 said:

I don't know why folk keep saying EH is a no reader zone, though. It's not I&T volumes, sure (but what is?), but Chap 1 of my shaggy dog EH yarn pulled 30k views, 42 faves (mostly bookmarks, I suspect), a score of 4.40/126.

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"Oscar's Place" has been up for a year and a half and remains my third least-viewed story. The only stories that have less views are late chapters of a story I intend to take down.

EH has <4000 stories posted and when I was keeping track of new stories it wasn't unusual to see no posts to EH for days at a time with droughts up to a week.

I have the impression that there is no actual community of regular EH readers and that a good story reception probably means that you got favorable results from readers on the New list.

"Oscar's Place" might have had the best opening of any story or chapter I've written. The score slipped down, but it would still sit in the middle of the EH all-time toplist if it just had three times as many votes as it actually has.

NotWise said:

I have the impression that there is no actual community of regular EH readers and that a good story reception probably means that you got favorable results from readers on the New list.

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Could be, yes. My story still gets the occasional fave, and its overall number of reads is still slowly climbing, more than just bots and crawlers, I reckon. Mostly folk wandering through my back-list, I'm guessing.

SimonDoom said:

Where are the guidelines for what can and cannot go into an Erotic Horror story? I've got a story I'm working on and think it might not pass muster, because it's got sex and death. I don't understand how this Site can be overly restrictive about that, because sex and death, or the threat of death, is what erotic horror is all about. I don't quite understand what will pass and what won't.

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IME, the rules as applied in that category are a bit more lenient than a literal reading of the guidelines might suggest, so your best bet may just be to skim the category to get a feel for how it works.

I wrote one story where the protagonist gets flayed and dismembered during sex; it's in Text With Audio because I had a guest narrator, but would otherwise have been in EH. It went through moderation without any hitches.

Bramblethorn said:

IME, the rules as applied in that category are a bit more lenient than a literal reading of the guidelines might suggest, so your best bet may just be to skim the category to get a feel for how it works.

I wrote one story where the protagonist gets flayed and dismembered during sex; it's in Text With Audio because I had a guest narrator, but would otherwise have been in EH. It went through moderation without any hitches.

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This is good to know!

The dividing line on this has more to do with the setting than it does with the acts. The farther away from reality the setting is, the more violent things can be. The closer you come to something you might see in a newspaper, the less you're going to be able to get away with.

Still, the closer you are to gothic horror as opposed to slasher horror, the more likely it is to pass.