From The Editor

Dear Degenerates, Perverts, and People We’d Let House-Sit Our Lust-Fueled Apocalypse,

 

It’s with a mixture of awe, arousal, and mild mercury poisoning that we announce the winner of the Anxious Nihilist Prize for Fiction 2025:

À Rielle by Felix Anker.

We dragged our eyes across story after story, looking for the one that made us feel less alone in the filth. Tales of grief, grit, loneliness, lust, and the occasional self-immolation, but nothing prepared us for Anker’s story: a love letter to decay, desire, and the divine absurdity of being alive and horny in the Anthropocene. It is the only story we’ve ever read where the phrase “being cucked by fish” lands like a holy benediction.

What begins as an oiled-up domestic kink spirals into an operatic, mythic, disturbingly tender meditation on transformation, devotion, and the unnameable spaces between species. It’s obscene in all the best ways, funny in all the wrong places, and exactly the kind of story this prize was meant to unearth: fearless, feral, and utterly unpublishable anywhere else.

To everyone who submitted: thank you. Your depravity gives us hope. And to Felix Anker: congratulations. You’ve ruined salmon for us forever.

Sincerely,

Cody Sexton

Founder/ Editor/Part-time Fish Wrangler