The First Page Challenge 2025—1st place
Congrats to Mark Daniel Taylor for winning first place in the First Page Challenge 2025! Here's what our judge (Michelle Barker) had to say:
"First place goes to Infinity Land. This opening gripped me with its convincing voice, unusual structure, and promise of a fabulous story. One of the best indications of a strong opening is my level of disappointment at only being given one page. I was sad to come to the end of this one. Fantastic work."
Infinity Land
u/mustangbarry - 3 hr. ago
Hey! Long time lurker, first time poster. I was wondering if any of you remember a video that went viral about ten years ago? I first saw it posted on a UK movie forum back in the day but now all the links are dead. It opened with a boy (18? 19?) being brought out onto a plastic sheet by two men. They have masks and one of them starts holding up cue cards like the type they use for telling studio audiences when to laugh. The cue cards talk about sex orgies and satanic global elites and how the boy’s father is a part of it. Real sicko stuff. Then one of the men in the mask brings out a knife and shows it to the camera. I remember everyone used to say it was fake, though it was so well made and looked like an actual movie, but then the stabbing also looked really real. My brother and I used to watch it all the time even though we must have only been ten and eleven at the time lol
Mark Daniel Taylor is a writer from Plymouth, England. His short fiction has appeared in The Hooghly Review, Weird Lit Magazine, Blood + Honey Lit, and Hobart Pulp. He is an alumnus of the 2020 New Orleans Writers’ Residency and the Curtis Brown Creative ‘Write Your Novel’ course. He was a finalist in the Killer Nashville 2023 Claymore Award and the Adventures in Fiction New Voices Award. He now lives in London, where he works for SET, an arts charity that provides studio space for underrepresented artists, and where he is working on his debut novel, Infinity Land.
You can find Mark on most social media platforms as @katamazov.
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The First Page Challenge 2025—2nd place
