Cthulhu Sex was one of the rare non-paying markets that had a reasonably good reputation, as kind of skeezy, but also fun (they even upgraded to paying before they shut down). They could be a good market to make an editor curious about your work, particularly if you had a more respectable credit to contrast them to. I got at least one solicitation off my own Cthulhu Sex credit (lesbian vampires, the less said the better).

But yes, even with that said, you’d want to dump Cthulhu Sex from your cover letter as soon as you had better credits.

With Cthulhu Sex closed, there’s no market that I’m aware of that fills their fun, slutty sfnal niche. The closest “watch your mother’s head explode” market seems to be Fishnet, but they have an abusively long response time.

Cover letters for non-genre shorts are the same as cover letters for genre shorts, but if you’re sending out literary short stories, I urge you to remember that a large number of prestigious literary short story markets accept simultaneous submissions. You can send a story out to 35 or so lit markets at the same time, and then wait for the next 6-9 months as the rejections trickle in.

Meanwhile, sigh. I have science fiction; I have fantasy; I have short stories. I do not have any fantasy or science fiction short stories. All my serious flights of fancy come in novel length.