“If your laws don't include me, well then, they don't apply to me either.” - Anita Crown, Bad Girls (1994)

I've spent years in the publishing world—as an author, an editor, and above all, someone who loves the craft of storytelling. For most of that time, I told myself the industry's problems weren't as bad as they seemed. Good work still found its way through. That if you just wrote something compelling enough, readers would find it.

That’s the power of social media, right?

Not really. I was wrong.

Not about the readers; they're still out there, desperately looking for stories that keep them up until 2 a.m., even though they have work in the morning and they know—they know—they should put the damn book down.

It was the system I was wrong about.

If you had told me ten years ago that there would be popular novels with disclaimers on the first page, I’d have called you insane. “Warning, this book includes shit that’s perfectly normal in a thriller. Your mental health matters! Check the trigger warnings! They’re on the author's website!”

Or my personal favorite, “If a character says or does something, that doesn’t mean the author is endorsing it!”

Really?

The result of this flood of silliness is a landscape of sanitized narratives and moral simplicity. 

And readers are bored. As well they should be. When was the last time you heard about a writer (or collection of writers) who was transgressive? Or, dare I say, cool?

Maybe since the early aughts? Yeah that sounds right. Somehow, we allowed the art of rebellion–because that is what literature has always been–to be part of the mainstream establishment. And it's sucked ever since.

I grew up in the underground.

Not literally, of course. I was raised on military bases and then, the suburbs. But culturally, I came of age in spaces that existed because the mainstream wasn't serving us. We had punk shows in abandoned barns. House parties in base housing when that one girl's dad was deployed. Raves in warehouses where you had to know someone who knew someone to get the address. Zines photocopied at Kinko's after midnight, stapled by hand, passed around like samizdat. Entry stamps that could only be seen under a black light so your parents didn’t notice the next morning.

Acetone in the cupholder of your car to remove the black nail polish before formation tomorrow morning.

The underground exists for a reason. It emerges when official channels fail to provide what people actually need. When the legitimate options become inadequate or absurd, people find another way.

That's what Black Market Fiction is. The other way.

The name isn't an accident. Every story in this magazine features a protagonist who operates outside the system—characters who choose the harder path over compliance. Psychological thrillers where the hero's methods are as questionable as the villain's. Dystopian fiction where survival requires becoming something uncomfortable.

These are rebellion narratives. Not because rebellion is cool (though the scene kid in me still thinks it is), but because rebellion is honest. We live in an age of increasing pressure to conform—to think the approved thoughts, to perform the approved emotions, to pretend complexity doesn't exist. And to just agree with the group, damnit! You don’t want to ruin the vibe, do you??

Think of this as the literary equivalent of a warehouse show. The days of waiting for a venue to book us are over. We're just doing it, permission neither required nor desired.

The Format

Black Market Fiction publishes weekly episodes: Nonfiction on Tuesdays, Fiction installments on Thursdays. These episodes will be 1,500-2,500 words that you can read on your lunch break, on the train, in the fifteen minutes before your next meeting.

We don’t do the thing where we shame you for not having hours to sit in silence and read the latest romantasy doorstopper novel. We understand this is how life works now. 

What serial fiction offers is something different: an ongoing relationship with a story. The anticipation between episodes. The "wait, WHAT?" at the end of a chapter that lives in your head all week. Kind of like how streaming shows stopped dumping the entire season at once. Weekly episodes just work better. It's science... or something.

This is how Dickens and Dostoyevsky published, if you want to attach some gravitas to what we're doing.

And if you do like binging, I have good news: each month’s episodes are packaged into a pretty digital magazine file. It'll be sent automatically to paid subscribers and is available for one-time purchase for free readers in the shop.

THIS MONTH

December is our soft launch, a full issue that comes out before our official launch in January. So tell your friends. For our early fans, we're launching with work that embodies everything Black Market Fiction stands for.

Night of the Pillow is a dystopian short story about the coordinated elimination of every American over fifty. It's dark, it's uncomfortable, and it asks questions about generational conflict that most fiction is too polite to raise. This is fiction that trusts you to handle it.

We're also publishing two essays that dig into why these themes resonate right now. "Neal Shusterman's Unwind and The Old Cannibalizing the Young" examines how one of the most disturbing YA series ever written predicted our current moment. "The Appeal of Rebellion" explores why fiction about people who refuse to comply hits different in 2025 than it did ten years ago.

And our feature article—"Stephen King's Boomer Horror: What The Stand and Under the Dome Tell Us About Generational Apocalypse"—analyzes how King's apocalyptic fiction reveals anxieties about aging, obsolescence, and what happens when generations stop understanding each other.

Heavy stuff? Sure. But that’s what we do here.  

I'm also not going to promise you'll love everything we publish. You won't. Neither will I—that's how you know we're taking risks. What I can promise is that everything in this magazine will be here because I genuinely believe it deserves to exist. Not because it fits a demographic or checks a box. Because it's good.

And I'm not going to lecture you about the state of the world. You have the internet. You know what's going on. What you need from fiction isn't more information about how broken things are—it's stories that help you feel less alone in the brokenness. 

Fiction has power. Real power. For most of human history, stories were how we transmitted values, explored moral complexity, and processed difficult emotions safely.

That hasn't changed. What's changed is that the institutions we trusted to deliver those stories have started failing at the job.

So we do it ourselves. The way we always have, those of us who grew up knowing that the best stuff never came from the mainstream. The underground exists for a reason. It's where the interesting people have always found each other.

Black Market Fiction is for readers who know good fiction when they read it and want more of it.

This is me stepping off the path. This is the other way.

Welcome to the black market.

— Kristin McTiernan, Editor in Chief

December 2025

Black Market Fiction publishes new content weekly. Free subscribers get some essays and reviews, plus any editorial statements like this one. Contact members ($5.99/month) receive full access to all serial fiction, essays, and our monthly digital magazine. Insider members ($11.99/month) also receive quarterly print editions—premium paper, professional design, something worth keeping.

Subscribe today and join us from the beginning.