Why We Exist for the In-Between

Every magazine has its lane. Some publish horror that bites. Others prefer fiction that aches quietly in the corners of the human heart. The literary ones say they want realism; the genre ones want monsters.

But what about the stories that blur the line?

The ones that live somewhere between the real and the imagined—between faith and fear, grief and transformation?

Those are the stories we love.

Neon & Smoke was built for the in-between.

For the stories that don’t quite belong anywhere else.

For work that uses the language of horror to talk about love, or the tools of the fantastical to reveal something painfully human.

We call it half-genre, always lit.

And by lit, we don’t just mean literary.

We mean stories that burn—language that sparks, characters that smolder, endings that leave a quiet heat on your fingertips when you close the tab.

Stories that risk honesty, that follow a feeling to the edge of its logic, that illuminate what it means to be human when the world tilts strange.

When we read, we’re looking for that fire: atmosphere, emotional precision, and the strange tenderness that can live inside horror, grief, or wonder.

If your work doesn’t quite fit anywhere else—if editors have told you it’s too weird, too soft, too dark, too lyrical, too something—you might be exactly what we’re looking for.

Because the best stories don’t sit in boxes.

They flicker. They smolder.

They burn on the page.

That’s why we exist. And we believe you do too.

Join us in the haze.

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