Thank you to Net Galley and Michael J. Seidlinger for an ARC of the upcoming release, “On Submission”.

An aspiring author, Alex decides to take his career into his own hands after getting rejected by a top publishing agent he so desperately wants to be represented by. So much so, that when his letter doesn’t get the response he is looking for, he snaps.

He snaps in such a way that he doesn’t go directly after the agent himself but instead goes after the authors he represents. It all becomes a sort of twisted revenge horror game for Alex. He will do whatever it takes to be noticed even if it means going down for murder.

“I will become infamous, both in name and the body of work accumulated over so many kills.”

This is my first Seidlinger read and it did not disappoint. It’s twisty and a little gory with a side of unhinged.

On Submission is such a great and short horror read for those who love horror! It could be a bit too much for those who haven’t read much horror. I loved it! The changing POVs gave great insight into the characters, and the gore was more than enough to push the story forward.

Fast-paced, gory thriller. It's a great concept and I'm sure many people will love this but it didn't quite work for me. Alex and Pendel having different POVs in their chapters was a little disorienting, and I didn't care for the "murder/torture as story editing" bit. Also nitpicky but why didn't Marina recognize Alex/say anything when she walked in on him and Pendel together? She'd just gone on a date with him the night before.

If Yellowface was a slasher then On Submission is it. I loved Yellowface and I am a huge fan of slashers yet something didn’t gel with me. I wasn’t hooked whilst reading and it took quite a while to get through.

The book does get gory and the first murder description came as a shock in comparison to the chapters before it. I’m not complaining though. Alexander’s chapters kept my interest a lot more than Pendels but I do think the book could benefit from trigger warnings. Some chapters border on extreme horror.

There were a lot of characters to get my head around with various roles involved in creating a book (publisher, editor etc). I found it difficult to remember who was who.

Overall 3 stars. I think this would appeal to many people but it just wasn’t for me.

It's an slasher thriller novel that revolves around publishing industry. It's blood soaked, weird and unhinged at lot of the times. If you like thriller with lot of slasher/ murder elements in it, I think you would like this book. It's a solid three ⭐ read for me.
Intriguing: 1
Unsettling: 1
Scariness: 1

Thank you netgalley and the publisher for the arc!

Absolutely unhinged. I wanted more horror however really interesting and I was still quite hooked. I like more twists and turns than this book offered but it was actually quite funny at times but some parts did feel quite forced.

However still recommend to thriller lovers as it’s not like other common thrillers.

Concept is fab, but the execution (pardon the pun) wasn’t for me. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this arc, though.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC!

I perhaps expected something a little bit more extreme horror than what this book offered when I read the blurb on NetGalley. There were certainly lashings of extreme horror within it, but not enough to plant it firmly in the genre.

I think that I didn’t connect with this book because I simply didn’t feel much for the story. It was a sordid look into the publishing industry, sure, and it was certainly interesting. The characters were awful people, which made sense, but I just found that there wasn’t that much to connect with for me.

I did enjoy parts of this book, and there were some interesting elements to the story, but unfortunately it wasn’t as much for me as I would hope. It certainly reeked of the desperation that the author was trying to put across for the main character, and it was written well, but it didn’t quite hit the mark for me.

For such a small number of pages I was pleasantly surprised by how well this had me hooked. My previous experience of short horror books hasn’t been great but the author managed to build a whole convincing world in the space of a few pages!

This story definitely had not only the horror element (if you’re not a fan of gore, look away now!) but also the shock factor. Although the story isn’t as twisty as I usually like (apart from one twist in the middle that made me gasp a bit), I still wanted to keep on reading to figure out just how crazy the ending could be.

Overall great, quick horror read!

Okay. So. On Submission by Michael J. Seidlinger is completely unhinged in the best possible way. Imagine the publishing world as a horror movie—bloody, chaotic, weirdly funny—and then crank it up to eleven. That’s this book.

It follows Alexander Moyer, a struggling author who just wants an agent to believe in him. Relatable, right? But then he gets a super generic rejection from a fancy agent named Henry Pendel, and instead of moving on like a normal person… he snaps. Fully. Starts stalking. Obsessing. And then goes full murder mystery mode. I’m talking actual crime.

And the wild part? The publishing industry reacts not with panic or horror but with dollar signs. Moyer’s target, J.D. Church, was a bestselling author with a shady reputation, and once he’s gone, everyone scrambles to cash in on his posthumous work. It’s dark. It’s ridiculous. It’s kinda genius.

I don’t really live in the publishing world, but I peek in from time to time. And reading this felt like I’d stumbled into a party I wasn’t invited to, where everyone’s pretending everything’s fine while the house is on fire. Honestly? Loved every second.

Seidlinger’s writing is sharp, fast, and just the right amount of chaotic. There are no heartwarming moments, no “follow your dreams” speeches. Just a whole lot of ambition, ego, blood, and biting commentary on how messy and heartless the industry can be.

It’s short. It’s wild. It’s weird. And I couldn’t stop reading. If you like books that feel a little unhinged and a lot smart, this one’s for you.

To write is to create, to read is to submit to someone's idea. This book is a meta commentary on the publishing industry, specifically the relationship between author and agent. The main characters are Pendel, the agent, and Alex, the author. Pendel is a greedy person who is cutthroat when it comes to authors; all he cares about is the money. Alex is an author who is willing to do anything to become successful. There are both evils in the industry, and through the book, we see they treat others as pieces in their life but not as a person. Alex is a unique antagonist in the story, of how manipulative he is to others. He always talks so badly about other ideas, writing, and making them weak, but at the same time, he plagiarizes other people's stories. He is, though, kinda a genius as you see this story progress. Gore-wise wise there is some, I think, though some readers might genuinely be bothered by one of them. The horror aspect to me is more of the unsettling, disturbing side, which is my cup of tea, and I would recommend who do you like those unsettling stories. It's not slow when it comes to what you get from the first chapter, and it does it well. I would say at some point it straight goes to madness and chaos, and it is written amazingly through that descent. Overall, a unique horror story that makes you think.

Thank you, Netgally and Clash, for an ARC copy.

I'm not in publishing, but On Submission made me feel like I’d accidentally wandered into its darkest corners—and locked the door behind me. This is blood-soaked, unhinged industry horror with sharp writing and even sharper satire.

It didn’t fully land for me—some parts felt forced, and a lack of content warnings threw me off—but the concept? Absolutely wild and weird in a way I enjoyed. A messy, fascinating takedown of an industry built on rejection and obsession. Overall: 3.5 stars

*Note I received this as an ARC on Netgalley & leaving this review voluntarily.

I found this on Netgalley, and the synopsis had me hooked.
Henry our MC has done as he always does, rejected another new up and coming writers manuscript, its part of his job, and someone has to do it, right ?

Not this time, this time its a little more serious, especially when his successful clients turn up dead.

I enjoyed the idea a lot, but something about the story itself just did not hit for me, and I love thrillers, I read them regularly for fun.

It felt like instead of drawing a picture it was more forced and the story just didn't land like I had hoped.

Some of the details seemed a little pointed but maybe that was meant to be, this is a guy killing people.

What I did enjoy though was this wasn't like other thrillers where everything is wrapped up with a bow and black and white.

It was ugly and messy and real life, and those poor characters really reflected that.

That said this was by no means a bad one, very solid 3 star.

After rejecting the query of hopeful young writer Alexander Moyer, senior literary agent Henry Richmond Pendel finds himself the target of a one-man stalking and harassment campaign. He knows it's Moyer, but he's used to the obsessive behavior of jilted authors. Telling his assistant to not interact with Moyer and contacting his lawyer about getting him a restraining order, then going back to intimidating editors into settling on six-figure deals. And then his top-selling author, J.D. Church, is found murdered in his Manhattan hotel room. Told between Pendel's third-person and Alex's first-person perspectives, 'On Submission' chronicles the relationship between an abrasive jackal of a literary agent and his obsessive and murderous stalker.

I'm not really into the thriller genre, so a lot of my qualms with 'On Submission' resemble Michael Bluth being disappointed that there was, in fact, a dead dove in the thoroughly labeled bag. The murders are gratuitous, but that's par for the course, and it's not really the principle of side characters being killed off graphically every other chapter that's a turnoff for me. What -is- is the very detailed sexual assault of the second and third victims... I guess credit for the equal opportunity of having both a female and male sexual assault victim, but do really need the focus on the dead woman's vagina and how Alex can tell she was sexually assaulted by her brother previously? I get that both of these murders are supposed to reflect the novels that the authors had written, and while Seidlinger's writing doesn't feel overly fetishistic it does add a flavor too serious in what is an almost campy murder spree.

Moyer's MO reflects the rise of generative AI--he gets an author's manuscript, makes gratuitous cuts to both the author and the art, then publishes the shortened massacre of their writing under his own name. Maybe it says a lot about me that I found his plagiarism to be a much worse crime than the murders, and one that didn't get addressed much (since apparently his actual writing was decent?). I was sort of hoping, with how much Seidlinger draws from internet fan culture, that Moyer would get James Somerton'd.

Overall, not a bad novel, but definitely not for me.

I have read many books about murderous authors and I have yet to find one that I really enjoyed. On Submission by Michael J. Seidlinger follows an aspiring author who, after being rejected by a publisher, decides to murder all of his big authors. Once I finished, I felt hollow, as if my brain deleted all knowledge of the book once I closed the last page. A murder workshop won’t be necessary, but some cuts can be made.

Full review at fanfiaddict.com : https://fanfiaddict.com/review-on-submission-by-michael-j-seidlinger/

"If I were to sum up Michael J Seidlinger “On Submission,” in a word, it would be unhinged. Full-blown, blood-in-the-margins, unhinged industry horror. A breakdown in book form. If I were to expand upon that I would say that “On Submission,” is a novel that revolves around the most unlikable, moral-lacking, ambitious and thus dangerous characters I’ve read in a while, and for those who work in publishing, they’re perhaps familiar ones. I am lucky enough to work with authors and publishers on occasion, but by every conceivable notion I am absolutely winging it. I’m really quite unfamiliar with the world of agents and editors and publisher’s marketplace. Let me tell you, “On Submission,” is a baptism by fire and ink. Were it not for Seidlinger’s stellar writing and insane plot mechanics, I’d perhaps wonder if this one was sold, edited and published under duress… Lane Heymont, blink twice if you need help. Short, sharp, bizarre and brilliant, “On Submission,” is a scathing autopsy of the publishing industry, and I delighted in it. It’s coming from Clash Books October 7th."

First I wish to thank Netgalley and Author Michael J. Seidlinger for providing me with an advanced e-copy of On Submission.

Initially, I was excited to read this, as I am a fan of Yellowface and stories surrounding the publishing world. I appreciate the way the author beings forward the struggle of the industry, but also gives life to the characters and how their life actually is.

However, this was not a hit for me, and I believe that the book need to have a page for trigger warnings, especially for the scenes in section two. This is what threw me off the most, leaving me to give the rating I did.

On Submission by Michael J. Seidlinger absolutely floored me. As someone who writes, creates, or just grapples with the anxiety of putting anything out into the world, this book hits like a gut punch—but in the best, most cathartic way.

It’s raw, vulnerable, and almost painfully honest. Seidlinger doesn’t just explore the process of writing—he exposes the mental minefield of doubt, obsession, validation, and rejection that comes with it. The narrative is fragmented in a way that mirrors the creative mind at its most restless and self-critical, and that structure really worked for me. It felt like I was reading someone’s unfiltered internal monologue, and at times, I saw too much of myself in it.

What makes this book so powerful is how it refuses to romanticize the struggle. There’s no neat arc or inspirational takeaway here. It’s just the truth: writing is submission—not just to editors, but to fear, failure, and the hope that someone, somewhere, might see you in what you’ve made.

And yet, despite the darkness, I found it oddly affirming. There’s a strange comfort in realizing you’re not alone in the madness, that the doubt and the waiting and the endless revisions are all part of the deal.

On Submission is not a how-to guide. It’s a mirror. It’s a scream in the void that somehow sounds like your own. And for that, it deserves every star. I’ll be thinking about this one for a long time.

Michael Seidlinger really hit this book out of the park. Revenge, obsession, fucked up relationships with extensive dashes of sadism all centered within the book world. What is not to love? There was one specific scene for me that absolutely made my skin crawl!

This book was a damning parody of the book industry while being an extremely tense and disturbing horror novel. The way that the killer hunts, plans, and carries out the murders, all while truly believing he is helping them do their best work while furthering his own aspirations to be a published author is terrifying but all too believable. This is a ride!