Stitched Smile Is Back

Horror author and editor Lisa Vasquez founded Stitched Smile because she wanted to publish the kind of fiction she loved and give more writers a chance to get good at writing it. In a 2017 interview with Dread Central, Lisa talked about what she'd learned from her father about building something from scratch and why investing in writers mattered to her. She also talked about watching our authors steady each other when things got rough. That was the House of Stitched at its best. Someone would get a foothold and reach back for the next person.

Later that year, after Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, writers donated twenty-five stories to Hydrophobia, a charity anthology created to help people affected by the storm. We also found excuses to put horror in the mail. The Stitched Box paired indie books with art and surprises, because half the fun of getting a box from a horror press is wondering what on earth we put in it.

House of Stitched Magazine grew out of the press and gave us room for fiction, poetry, art, reviews, and the long conversations horror fans have when somebody asks one good question. In our October 2020 issue, Josh Malerman sat down for an interview, and Wrath James White took readers through the origins and rebirth of KillerCon.

In 2024, House of Stitched became Memento Mori Ink Magazine through a collaboration between Lisa and Crystal Lake Entertainment. The magazine widened its reach across the arts and kept asking the question that had drawn us to those conversations in the first place. What brings people to the dark, and what do they make when they get there?

Our Vixens of Horror anthology series gives women in horror room to get angry, get weird, and follow a bad idea all the way to its very good ending. In Vintage Edition, debut writers and established authors took us into the lives of women in the 1950s who had plenty of reasons to be furious and were running out of reasons to keep it to themselves.

Then came the award-winning Vixens of Horror: It's Just a Toy. We've always liked a title that sounds like somebody's last words.

We're bringing Stitched Smile back for the writers whose stories keep getting called strange and the readers who take that as a recommendation. We want the ghost story that makes you miss somebody. The book you finish at two in the morning and immediately text a friend about. The anthology you buy for one author and come away from with three new names to look up.

To every writer, editor, artist, and reader who helped build this House, thank you. We get to open these doors again because you gave the place a life of its own. And if this is your first time here, come on in. We saved you a seat.